Melbourne, the MCG and St Kilda.
Photographs from three days I spent in Melbourne in April 2006. One of the worlds best cities, in my humble opinion.
In April 2006, my mate Pete Clements and I flew to Australia to run the Canberra marathon, as part of my quest to run a marathon on all 7 continents, I have created a separate page of the marathon (click here).

After leaving the Rice family in Canberra, we took a Virgin Blue flight for the just over 1 hour to Melbourne. I had seen Melbourne on television quite a lot during the preceding month, because it had been hosting the 18th Commonwealth games. I had been making my final training preparations for my marathon and watching the games on the weekend and evenings, and at one point in the pub, during my mate's circle line challenge (click here).

I had watched the marathon event along St Kilda beachfront, and the very emotional finish of Australian, Kerryn McCann at the age 38 win the marathon by 2 seconds against a Kenyan athlete, I was almost in tears myself watching her race around the final 300 metre's of the track in the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) it really inspired me.

What stuck me about Melbourne was how very european it seemed even in comparison to Sydney, and I was instantly fond of the city. Many of the road's and bridge's are named after British monarchs, and Victorian era housing was commonplace. After walking through Federation square we headed to the MCG for a tour.
The MCG had only just been handed back from the commonwealth games committee, and they were still removing the 400m track and putting seats in for the next season of games. During half of the year the ground is set up for Austrlian rules football, and the other half of the year for cricket.

The tour whilst interesting, and quite exciting for me to see, having watched the events on television was rather long, and Pete and I were dehydrated and hung over from the previous nights drinking in St Kilda, and were rather pleased to cut away by the end.

We followed a self guided walking tour from my lonely planet guidebook, which led us through a series of narrow walkways and arcades. We stopped along the way at a local famous coffee shop, Degraves Espresso bar, and the royal arcade, and finally block place.

We took a cab back to St Kilda and I'd read that the pier was a decent walk and we headed down there for a bite to eat.

I soon decided that this was one of the best cities I had ever visited, and it's hardly surprising that Melbourne has been voted one of the most liveable cities multiple times (click here). The city I had seen was beautiful, uncrowded and unstressed, a world away from my home city of London, literally. The next day we collected a hire car and set off towards Weribee and the start of the Great Ocean Road.

 

Authors: Page created by: James Bartosik
Date of event: April 12th 2006.
Page History: First created: 29/01/07. Last Revision: n/a. Revision version: 1.0.
Camera and Lenses: Canon 350D, EF-S 17-85mm IS, F4-5.6 USM.
Locations: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Click for Google Earth Images: Close / Medium / Continent.
Wikipedia links: Melbourne.
Copyright: © Copyright material, all rights reserved.