When the cab driver shook his head as he dropped us at our hotel, we knew we were in trouble.
It had been difficult to book a room in Melbourne from the pay phones in Cairns; all the hotels were full, considerably more expensive than our guidebooks indicated, or -- in one case -- staffed by a peculiar woman with a loud braying voice and only the vaguest description of her rooms. So we had been happy to find a room in the Kingsgate Hotel on Spence St., which came recommended by both our guidebooks and rented its budget doubles for the bargain price of $A40/night.
The floors in the Kingsgate were huge, with mazes of hallways and steel-grated windows looking into dusty air shafts. The walls were covered in chipped gray paint on the bottom with lighter gray paint above. Piping and ducting ran exposed along the tall remote ceilings. Large fire extingushers, securely padlocked against emergency use, were bolted to the walls and here and there little piles of fallen plaster were mounded on the thin carpet. There were six corridors and four directional signs between our room and the toilet. Sometimes the corridors ended at disused balconies, locked up and littered with bird droppings and cigarette butts. Other corridors seemed to circle around forever, and I sometimes passed the same lift or utility room two or three times before getting my bearings.
Padding along the dreary gray hallways with my towel around my neck, I never met anyone except a young Indian man. I seemed to see him wherever I went in the Kingsgate. He always looked lost and wore a black leather jacket everywhere, even to the shower. The other guests might have been ghosts or locked in their rooms, for all I ever saw of them.
Our dismal room had a single dim lightbulb hanging high overhead, obscured by a gray ceiling joist, a dirty window of wire-reinforced glass, and a deeply sagging bed. There was no chair and water ran brown into the tiny sink. At night diesel trucks roared by every few minutes, shaking the worn headboard. I met an old woman who had worked at the Kingsgate many years ago, when it had been the "People's Palace", a Salvation Army homeless shelter. The only tenants today were paying ones, but the Kingsgate still had the all the ambience of a mental institution. At night, laying on our hammocky bed, staring up at the grey pipes and electrical conduits, we felt like inmates waiting for our lobotomies. We were relieved to check out the next morning, minds intact, and go looking for more pleasing lodging.
We were much happier in the Victoria Vista Hotel, a busy, cheery place on a small street in the center of downtown Melbourne. The lobby was always full of travelers arriving, leaving, talking excitedly, or coming and going from the cocktail bar and restaurant. Our budget room was spacious, with two beds and a deep sink flanked by two large windows, and a direct dial telephone in our room made email easy.
The Victoria Vista was a fine base from which to explore Melbourne. Unfortunately we hardly had a chance to see the city, as the hotel was booked full on the upcoming weekend and could fit us in for only two nights. We also got the very last rental car at the company we used. It was the high season for tourists in Melbourne and the rainy weather elsewhere in Australia was sending many people to the south for holiday, but the real reason for the crowds, we were told, was the upcoming Valentine's Day weekend. Valentine's Day had recently become popular in Australia and sunny Melbourne was apparently a favorite place to celebrate it.
Melbourne quickly became one of our favorite places as well. Downtown was inviting and bustling, with broad treelined main boulevards, pedestrian streets, and narrow side streets lined with smart shops and little cafes. Down every side street there seemed to be an arcade or hidden courtyard with more small storefronts. It seemed anything could be easily found in central Melbourne: food and drink of all kinds, progressive booksellers, sophisticated clothes and expensive jewelry, music, brightly-colored smoking accessories, big department stores and trendy little boutiques. I browsed through the numerous camera shops on Elizabeth Street and Mary finally found her long-sought spinach salad at the Hard Rock Cafe. (Spinach is not popular in Australia, and we seldom saw it on menus or grocery stores.)
Traffic in central Melbourne was dominated by the green and red trolleycars that trundled along every major street. On account of the trolleys, cars and trucks are excluded from the center lanes, and thus even when traffic was heavy, the streets looked open and serene. Actual driving on those streets was not as serene as appearances suggested. The center trolley lanes necessitate some peculiar driving rules in downtown Melbourne, such as the "hook turn" (to turn right at certain intersections, you go to the left lane, pull far out into the intersection, and stop, then complete your turn after the light has turned red), which often disoriented me, and whenever I heard the clatter of steel wheels on rails I found myself looking wildly around for the ten-ton trolley car that was, I was convinced, about to obliterate my tiny rental car. "Tourist Pulverized; Commuters Jeer".
When our too-short stay in Melbourne was over, we drove our little rental car out of town and down to the start of the Great Ocean Road which winds along Victoria's spectacular coastline. The drive west on the Great Ocean Road felt much like taking California's Pacific Coast Highway from Los Angeles north. The road from Melbourne to Geelong was hot, flanked by open brown fields dry and dusty in the sun, flecked with small clusters of black cows clustered around the few trees or dips in the ground. From faraway they looked like fleas on a white dog. After Geelong the road turned curvy and the air became cool. Someone here had meticulously painted the paved shoulders red-brown for a tidy look. After Torquay the road climbed and twisted in the coastal hills and dipped down to run along broad white beaches. The sand was fine and dry like baker's flour, and the swells marched in smooth, regular rows into the shore where they burst into great lines of surf. It was clear why this stretch of coast was called the Surfcoast Shire.
Later the Great Ocean Road led us inland through hilly slopes, tall forests and scattered cow pasture. Coming onto one pasture tucked under the branches, we saw cows with a unique marking, all black with a single broad band of white encircling their midsections like a girdle. We readied our cameras for the next banded cows, but although we were to see thousands and thousands of cows along the Great Ocean Road and later in New Zealand, we never saw any banded cows again, and the little pasture seemed to have disappeared when we drove slowly through on our return journey.
Our goal was to reach the Twelve Apostles, a famous set of rock formations in the Port Campbell National Park at the western end of the Great Ocean Road. As we approached Port Campbell the terrain changed to high plateau land, flat and brown with scrub and bush, dropping abruptly in jagged cliffs to the sea. The Apostles were marked by a tiny road sign pointing down a pitted side road leading through the scrub to a small parking area. We walked out along the dirt path to the observation point on a section of cliff jutting out amidst the Twelve Apostles. They were jagged spears of rock, set out from the cliffs and towering in the surf, stretching far down the coast past the furthest point we could see. They looked ageless and forbidding, and we could imagine them as eternal sentries patrolling lonely battlements.
In reality, the Twelve Apostles are fragile and short-lived monuments. The forces of surf and erosion created them from the surrounding cliffs and is steadily tearing them down. There are only ten apostles left now and the collapsed remains of a succumbed apostle could be seen from the observation platform. Even their evocative name is fairly recent. Until this century the Apostles and neighboring Muttonbird Island, further down the coast, were known by the rather less impressive name of "Sow and Piglets." Their isolation also may not last long. The Park Service is planning to build a $A12 million tourist center on the empty plateau that the Apostles now guard.
The Twelve Apostles were only the first of several astonishing rock formations along the coast by Port Campbell. London Bridge, a huge flat-topped rock arch standing in the surf, was another reminder of the impermanence of the cliff formations; it had been a long double-arched bridge extending out from the coast, until a few years ago when the nearest arch had collapsed, leaving the remaining arch (and some terrified tourists) stranded out in the ocean.
Mary's favorite area was the Loch Ard Gorge, an intricate set of sea caves, tunnels, and deep gorges where the trapped ocean swells turned on each other, crashing and foaming through the channels before finally expiring on small, mostly inaccessible beaches. The gorges are named after the Loch Ard, a sailing ship that wrecked just outside the western gorge. As the surf smashed the clipper into the rocks, her tall masts dislodged boulders and chunks of cliff which crashed down on the decks, creating chaos. The only survivors were a young Englishman who washed up on the shore and swam back out to the wreckage to rescue the other survivor, a young Irish woman. Their familes all dead, the two returned to their native countries where the young man eventually became a master of steamships. Although it would have had the makings of a wonderful story, the two never did become romantically linked. There is a small graveyard for the dead of the Loch Ard on the bluffs above the gorge. There are very few graves; most of the bodies were never recovered.
We stayed in the campground in the town of Port Campbell. The town was tiny; basically a narrow sheltered harbor, a small beach, three or four motels and a like number of eateries clustered on a two block-long main street, a general store, and a post office. Interesting people lived in this tiny town, drawn by the ocean and beauty. In one little group of parents and their little children, eating dinner on the grass outside the town bistro, we met an environmental scientist, a teacher of Indonesian languages, a political activist, and a psychotherapist.
One day we drove inland, following a dirt road into the mountains in search of a fishable stream, and met Henry Neimeyer, a former dairyman turned emu rancher. Actually, we first met his little boy, who found Mary looking at some emus gathered at the corner of their pen, and asked "do you want to pet an emu?" Henry ran a flock of 170 emus on a beautiful piece of land nestled in a bend of the Lower Gellibrand River. They were tall dark birds, a bit shorter than ostriches. Their red eyes and the turned-down corners of their beaks give an emu the look of a pugnacious drunk, but these birds were docile as Mary accompanied Henry and his feeding bucket. He went into his house and brought out an emu egg. It was deep green and lightly pebbled, about six inches long. Producing a baby emu from an egg this size was quite a production. It took 12 hours for the female to lay the egg, and the male then incubated it for fifty-six days. He would go without food or drink, and never rising from the egg, except to turn it over, first one way and then the other, every six hours. This devotion resulted in a hatch rate of about 95 percent. Modern mechanical incubators did much worse.
Emus were raised for their oil and meat. The oil, which has the consistency of lard and is sold in little jars, has powerful healing properties when rubbed on wounds. Emu flesh has twice the iron of beef and less cholesterol than any other meat. Despite these The emu ranching industry in Australia was going through a difficult phase. The birds had dropped in price from several thousand dollars to about five hundred dollars. At one time they had been selling for thirty thousand dollars a bird. The industry was going through a change from breeder's prices to slaughter prices, and the demand for slaughter birds had not yet really developed. Such buyers as there were often found it easier to fill their orders from the United States, Texas mostly, where far more birds where available. Many Australian emu ranchers were getting out of the business, some were even giving away their birds. Henry's flock cost $A2,000 a month for feed alone. They would not thrive on grass and pasture alone. Wild emus needed the nourishment of fruits and berries in the forest, and Henry had to replace that with commercial feed. He pastured a few dairy cows on the lower stretches of his property, but not enough to support a non-producing emu flock. He was planning to wait another few months to see how the market developed before deciding whether to stay in emu ranching. It would be a difficult decision for him; to take the opportunity to expand his flock at liquidation prices, or to cut his losses and find another use for his land.
Emu eggs are decorative, and are sometimes laquered or carved. Henry gave us the emu egg he had taken out to show us. When we were back in Melbourne, I carefully drilled a small hole in one end and shook out the egg innards, then rinsed out the shell, packed it in several layers of bubble wrap and mailed it home. I hope it arrives intact and that, several months from now, the sight of Henry's egg will remind us to write him and find out if he remained an emu rancher after all.
Traveling On A Budget:
Inexpensive hotels seemed a bit scarcer, and a bit less inexpensive, in Melbourne than the other cities we had visited. Even the Victoria Vista was in the process of upgrading its rooms and, when redecorated, they will probably come with higher tariffs. When we visited, their budget doubles rented for $A55; no bargain elsewhere, but pretty good value in Melbourne.
Staying Connected:
Melbourne has a local Compuserve node, so getting online was no problem. From a payphone on the Great Ocean Road, though, Melbourne was a long distance call and the credits dissolved off our calling cards at a surprising clip. It is very helpful to have an automated online program, which automatically logs on, sends the messages you have written, retrieves and files the ones waiting for you, and logs off right away, all much faster that you could do manually. We used acCIS, an automated Compuserve access program written for the HP100/200LX series palmtop computers. Under ideal conditions with our 14.4K modem, acCIS could, for example, log on, upload five emails, retrieve ten, and log off in less than half a minute.
Back to the Travel Page Index.