Thursday 19th February – sea day
We finally got a picture of some dolphins!!
Friday 20th February
Melbourne, one of our favourite places.
We must have been giddy because we were up early enough to watch the sunrise, and were well rewarded
Again, we wouldn’t pay £5 each way for the P&O shuttle bus but having been to Melbourne before, and knowing the score, we knew we needed a ‘MyKi’ card. We walked off the ship and onto the shore. The nearest tram stop had a MyKi machine and a three mile queue … the tram driver got fed up and shouted ‘just get on, get a ticket when you get to the other end!’ – yeah, like that was ever going to happen! So we got a free ride into town, the last bit was free anyway because all trams within a specific radius of the city centre are free.
We actually needed to get off after three stops though to feed Chris’s addiction for motorcycles and his friend’s addiction to Ducati t-shirts from as many different countries as possible!
We got back on the tram and made our way to Victoria Market. Again, we’ve been before but it’s such an experience we needed to do it again. There are three or four different markets … a fruit and vegetable market, a clothes market, a fish market and a ‘lunch’ market where you can buy all sorts of interesting things for lunch, we chose a mince and onion borek and a chicken and mushroom borek, they’re kind of like tubes of pastry-cum-pancake things but are bloody delicious!
We were very tempted with the prawn boats or crayfish boats.
Chris got his hair cut and I indulged in my new favourite Australian craft shop, Lincraft. Only useful to the initiated but all their patterns were down to $5AUD which is about £2.80 so five fell into my basket, as well as a couple of yards (well 11 actually) of three different fabrics.
As we pulled on to pier dock this morning we could see that there was a beach very close by so as we made our way back to the ship, we made a detour.
We were very naughty and got the tram back to the ship again … and didn’t pay! Most of the journey would have been free (around town) anyway so we only ‘stole’ about 6 stops.
We got back to the ship mid-afternoon and cooled off in the pool again … it was 27 degrees today.
Not a bad view from your cruise ship pool deck … this could pass for a New York skyline 😊
We were chased by two jet skiers as we left Melbourne … they may well have been saying goodbye to family or friends, but we waved anyway!
And to bookend the day, we saw a wonderful sunset with the moon peeking through.
