Day 6 - Sanctuary! Shop! Real home food!

Let me brief on where we were going to go. First it was off to some animal sanctuary, then shopping at a mall and finally to Flinders where we sample some real wind chill but we were able to sample meal that was cooked like home. So it was all good.




Why another animal sanctuary you ask? Well, it seems we can't enough of kangaroos and evil winged spawn of satan. However, this sanctuary was the only one in Southern Australia that had a platypus. Amazingly even Australia Zoo (Steve Irwin's zoo) didn't have one. So that was cool. For those of you who don't read or don't have kids who like animals, platypus is a real freak of nature. It looks as if when God made the platypus, he was either drunk or high on some psychedelic drug.



It's animal that looks like a beaver but has a bill of a duck. It has webbed feet, lays eggs but is a mammal. Go figure! Lives in the water but breathes air. Needless to say we can't take flash photography else we may blind this poor creature. So we drove across the vast plain of the Australian outskirt for this baby! There was also an animal hospital which was really cool.






After that, in a thunderstorm we drove back to the city and stopped by a shopping mall. Notice I say "a" mall and "a" sanctuary as I can't remember the names. The mall was like any mall but since it's Australia, it was just bigger.

At night we drove to St. Kilda which was by the harbour and found a Malaysian restaurant that was run by a lady from Taman Megah! That is like 3 mins drive from home. So it's like eating at home. The food was a lot better than that we had the previous day. Mandy has fishball noodle soup, Mike had prawn mee, Melissa tried the Hokkien mee and I had beef noodle. It was not too bad but by Oz standard and after almost retching seeing another plate full of fries, it was near heaven.





I didn't take too many pics and I don't remember much happened this day except ducking as a large eagle vulture the size of a B-52 flew by and created a sandstorm at the sanctuary. I do remember watching a nurse treat a sick echidna and buying mini speakers for my daughter and using my iPhone to test it but instead of playing Def Leppard or Journey or even Bryan Adams, I used Westlife. The sales girls thought it was cute that I have songs my daughter likes on my phone. So alls well ends well.

Pls excuse me, N'Sync and Backstreet Boys are on MTV.

Back to Melbourne

After travelling for 3 days, we are back in Melbourne where we will spend the rest of our holidays. No more packing and no more "nomading". It was a welcome sight of the city and our apartment was really cozy and comfortable. We stayed at Darling Towers at South Yarra which we were told was a very posh affluent community. We just wanted to rest. Take a look.

More pics from Day 3

Some more on the scenery and waterfall.

Day 2 of Oz

Day 2 began very lazily. We stayed at a nice motel where we just dropped into a deep sleep the moment we touched our pillows. Today we were driving up to the Grampiens National Park to a small village called Halls Gap. So after a quick breakfast, we drove up to Warnambool to see what a small quaint Australian looks like. The answer compared to a Malaysian town? A LOT CLEANER! Though the people were not exactly very friendly towards foreigners.




The quaint town has some small roundabouts that were decorated with very colourful flowers. So naturally the 2 ladies got all "flower-crazy" and made us stop the van right there in the middle of the street so that they can jump out of the van "Starsky and Hutch" style to take a few pictures of the flowers. Coz goodness knows we can find flowers back home! I find that endearing but somehow the Aussies didn't think that stopping in the middle of the street to snap pics of their beautiful town was. I wonder.








Thank goodness they didn't have Jackie Chan type of husbands, so we parked our car by the side and then we got out to stop traffic to get the pics. They were lovely and was worth the embarrassment. We drove past some really nice coastal towns and came to a place called Cape Bridgewater. There was supposed to be a seal colony offshore and we were to take this speed boat that looked like it the puke machine from hell for 45mins to this colony. Of course we HAD to see it but when we got there, the boat had left and we were would have been late getting to Halls Gap. (soft YEAH)





So we had stopped by Cape Bridgewater and decided to have lunch here. The burger WAS EXCELLENT!! It was called "The Lot" which meant it had EVERYTHING! Juicy beef patties, crispy bacon, soft sliced ham and salad on it. Let's not forget this is Australia so definitely there are FRIES! Enough to feed a small village in Rwanda.




The trip to Halls Gap was extremely boring. Being a flat country, the country side was nothing but flatness and miles and miles of sheep grazing grass. It's like God came down with a giant lawn mower and just mowed the whole damn country side. So we slept a lot and nothing much happened until Grampiens except for a slight detour to a Lavender Farm. It was Lavender everything. Lavender flowers, lavender scent, lavender perfume, lavender grass, lavender tea and we had to pay AUD2 to get in, take pics and use the bathroom.






When we finally got into Grampiens, we saw wild kangaroos and wallabies by the side and OF COURSE we HAD to stop and take pics. Truth be told, it was a pretty cool experience. Halls Gap was a really nice and tourisy (read expensive) village. At least things weren't cheap. But we got here before dark seeing that the country side of Australia is devoid of streetlights so best to get anywhere before dark.




When night came, we could see billions of stars from our motel and had wild kangaroos grazing by our motel lawn. So another tiring but fun filled day. Today we learnt about the "The Lot" which was going to be KLY's and my diet for the many days in Australia.