The Travel Sage
A Week in Melbourne, Australia
Mark and I stayed in Melbourne for 7 nights (6 days), and I arranged for us to spend every other day in the city with day tours out of the city on the days in between. Our day trips included a 15 hour excursion to the Grampian Mountains, a tour of the Great Ocean Road, and a full day of birding with a professional birding guide. Check out the trip reports for those day tours in the links above. In this article I’m just going to focus on the city of Melbourne.
We rented an apartment through Airbnb that was in a great location for us, within a 5 minute walk to the airport’s shuttle bus terminal, two tram stops, a supermarket and a ton of restaurants. Melbourne has a great transportation system and their trams are free within the CBD (Central Business District). This photo is the view from our apartment balcony at sunset.
Our first activity in the city was a 3 hour guided walking tour of Melbourne with “I’m Free Walking Tours“. The idea behind this company and others like it is that at the end of the tour you pay the guide whatever you think it was worth. You meet at a designated time and place, but they ask you to sign up in advance so they know how many guides to send out that day. Our guide was a local hipster grad student with a wonderful Aussie accent. He pointed out historical landmarks and places to visit while he talked about the history and culture of the city. We ended the tour at a spot with great views of the city’s skyline.
During the tour our guide repeatedly told us that we should explore alleys and explained that many things like trendy bars were somewhat hidden and required research to find. The entrance to this historic, upscale shopping “arcade” is the archway squeezed between the 2 buildings on the left of the second photo.
Melbourne is big on street art, much of which is commissioned by the city. The women’s face in the top left of the image below is one of these commissioned works. Apparently, it is of a local woman from the neighborhood.
According to our guide, although you can find Kangaroo on some menus, it isn’t really a local Melbourne favorite. Locals tend to go more for the multi-cultural cuisine.
Our guide pointed out Federation Square which is a gathering point for locals during various events. This day a handful of people were watching a large TV screen that was displaying the Australian Open (tennis) which was being held in Melbourne while we were there.
The walking tour gave us a good overview of the city, which we then had 2 1/2 days to explore on our own. That afternoon we spent some more time walking along the Yarra River and discovered a zip line which, of course we didn’t do because we are wimps. But if I ever do a zip line, I think over a river might be a little less scary than over a mountain! You can see the landing platform for the zip line in the bottom center of the image below.
For dinner that night we wandered down an alley and found a nice Italian restaurant called Il Solito Posto.
We took it pretty easy during our second free day in the city. We started with a self-guided tour of the State Library which was interesting on the outside and pretty impressive inside.
The outside of the library seemed like a popular place to hang out. The library was located just down the street from one of Melbourne’s 2 Universities – RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) and the Melbourne University.
After leaving the library we went to the Queen Victoria Market which has been around since 1878. We didn’t stay long, it was a bit overwhelming. But we did stay long enough to have some very unhealthy street food. Apparently, Canadians are known for their hot dogs because the “Canadian Hot Dog” place was popular!
On our last free day in the city we visited the Melbourne Museum and found this cute Kangaroo statue in the park outside the museum. The museum had several sections including one on natural history, an educational garden, and a section for Melbourne’s history. I found it funny that the Museum seemed to be most proud of its 85% complete Triceratops which was found in Montana!
That evening we attended a play at the historic Princess Theatre where we saw Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The play is only showing in 6 theaters in the World (in the U.S. it’s on Broadway). We didn’t know what to expect but we ended up really enjoying it. The best part of it was the special effects – they were incredible! If you have a chance to see it somewhere, be sure to bring binoculars so that you can watch the effects up close.
Throughout our stay in Melbourne, we enjoyed taking in the unique architecture found throughout the city.
Fun Fact: Melbourne’s original name was “Batmania”! It was named after John Batman who tricked the local aboriginal people into signing a contract to sell him the land that Melbourne now sits on. Thankfully, when it officially became a city in 1837, it was renamed “Melbourne” after Lord Melbourne who was the British Prime Minister at that time.
Melbourne is a somewhat unique city that grew up very quickly due to the discovery of a massive amount of gold in the 1850’s. This brought in people from all over the world and the city continues to house people of all ethnicities. It’s also a city of young people – the median age of its residents is only 31. This is considerably younger that U.S. cities such as New York (37), L.A. (36), and Chicago (35). Despite feeling like old folks, we really enjoyed our visit there. And we’re looking forward to our visit to Sydney to see how it compares. But, we have one more stop before Sydney – Kangaroo Island here we come!
2 thoughts on “A Week in Melbourne, Australia”
WOW ‘ini, Melbourne is quite an impressive city! Bright and visually interesting. Great view that you and Mark had from your hotel.
My second favorite trip report- you know that I’m a city girl. But Kangaroo Island still # 1.
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