It is unclear if James Cook ever lived in Cooks Cottage. It was build in England by his parents when James Cook was already an adult. The house was dismantled in the brought to Australia, and rebuilt in a park in Melbourne.
We travelled also before we joined TravelBlog. We have started to digitalise photos from those trips and we are planning to write about some of them. Now the turn to a trip Ake made in Australia in 1995. It was a three month long journey and there will be three blog posts from it. This is the first of those.
I started this journey in Melbourne because I knew people who lived there. With about 5 million people living in Melbourne it is the second largest city in Australia.
Since I knew people in town I could stay in their home. They lived in a house in one of Melbournes seemingly never ending suburbs. Someone told me that a house in a suburb of a large city is the kind of in Australia. I havent seen any statistics on this but I have no reason to doubt it. The suburbs of the major cities, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane, just goes on an on and clearly lots of people live there. If you add to the equation
that most of Australia is more or less unpopulated it makes sense that it is in the suburbs the majority of all people live.
I spent several days in Melbourne and I visited a few interesting places. Ill make a short introduction of a few of them.
=> Cooks Cottage: James Cook was a British explorer who among other things was the first European to discover Australia. It is unclear if James Cook ever lived in Cooks cottage. It was build in England by his parents when James Cook was already an adult. The house was dismantled in the brought to Australia, and rebuilt in a park in Melbourne. Is it a silly tourist trap? Or should we thank the Australians for taking care of an historical house which otherwise might have succumbed to the English weather? Its your call.
=> Sovereign Hill: Sovereign Hill is an museum/theme park one and a half hours drive (in Australia, thats almost outside Melbourne. They have recreated a mid 19th century gold mining town there. Actually, some of the buildings in the theme park might be preserved historical buildings since this was once the location of a real gold
mine, the Red Hill Mine. The tunnels of the mine is part of the museum and can be visited. In Red Hill Mine they in 1858 dug up the second largest gold nugget ever found. A chunk of almost pure gold weighing 69 kilos.
=> Old Melbourne Gaol: I took a walking tour of Old Melbourne Gaol. It is an old prison which as an attraction is more famous among Australians than among foreigners because the outlaw Ned Kelly was executed there. Some people see Ned Kelly as an Australian Robin Hood. It is probably closer to the truth to say that he was an Aussie equivalent to Jesse James or Billy the Kid.
=> Great Ocean Road/The Twelve Apostles: From Melbourne I went on a group tour to Great Ocean Road . It is a spectacular stretch of road that follows the south coast of the state Victoria. One of the highlights of this tour is the Twelve Apostles, a group of limestone pillars, so called stacks, that have been formed by the ocean. The ocean still slowly eats away the coastline. Changes mostly take hundreds of years. But sometimes it can go faster than that. In 1990 an arch of a structure named London Arch collapsed without
Sovereign Hill is an museum/theme park in which they have recreated a mid 19th century gold mining town.
prior warning. Two tourists were actually trapped on the remaining structure and had to be rescued by helicopter. On this tour I also got to see Bells Beach, a popular place for surfing that was made famous by the movie Point Break. A movie that I guess is largely forgotten today. And hardly anyone is sad about that.
=> Old and new architecture: One thing I really liked about Melbourne was the mix of old and new architecture.
