| We took Air New Zealand from LAX, via Auckland, to Melbourne. ANZ has a very interesting and funny safety video. It is based on Lord of the Rings and includes Peter Jackson and some of the stars. Chuck was hoping to get a picture of the driver meeting us with our name on a board, because we have never had that service before, but he was late so he had to wait until Sydney for that. |
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| Quaint street near Flinders Station. Chuck had his first kangaroo burger here. It tasted like - well, kangaroo. Actually, beef like. |
St. Paul's Cathedral. We were there in the late afternoon and so dropped in for a choral Evensong service. |
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| Pat thought Melbourne a city of strange architecture. Many of the buildings sport odd angles. |
Bright colors everywhere but applied in rather unusual ways. |
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This is Exhibition Square (visitors center, etc.) |
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| Eureka tower represents a rebellion of miners against the colonial government in 1854. The top is gold and the red stripe represents the lives lost. It is one of the world's tallest apartment buildings. |
Hoosier Lane is known for graffiti, which is allowed by the City, probably because it is a major tourist draw ( no pun intended). |
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| Much of the work is very colorful and a lot of it is high-quality. |
Even the trash cans are covered. |
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| Chuck liked this saying. |
After a day in the city we headed out for a day in the country, ending with the "Penguin Parade" in the evening. The coastline was amazing. |
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| Our first stop was a koala sanctuary. They may be cute but are quite endangered. |
They spread out in large territories and thus development has cut them off from each other. |
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| A wallaby eyed us warily near visitor center. |
This is Nobbies area, where Little Blue Penguins (aka Fairy Penguins) nest. |
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| Most of the coast is very rugged but penguins need beaches to be able to enter and exit the ocean to feed. |
A couple of alert raptors; we don't know if they eat penguin chicks or not. |
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| Because of development there is a shortage of good nesting areas for penguins, so the local authorities have built "penguin condos" for them. |
Little Blue Penguins are shy and hard to photograph, but here is one at Nobbies. At the Penguin Parade later that night we saw hundreds of them leaving the water and marching up trails to their nests but no photography was allowed, because flash might scare them. We still do not understand how it is that so many people don't know how to turn the flash off on their cameras. |