Rosy memories of Melbourne, or maybe it was the wine

I prom­ised to write a little more thought­fully about my trip down in Mel­bourne, but I’ve been a little lazy and it’s been over a week. Appar­ently, the longer you leave it, the rosier your memor­ies become, so I may very well be extolling non-​​existent vir­tues of Melbourne.

So, the hard ques­tion first up: is Mel­bourne bet­ter than Sydney? In some respects, yes. Just like this Heck­ler heckles, Sydney’s CBD is becom­ing increas­ingly hol­lowed out by the dearth of things to do in the heart of the busi­ness dis­trict — this is none more evid­ent than in the area just south of Cir­cu­lar Quay. (For those of you who don’t know me well, the ample abund­ance of club­bing does not count.) Mel­bourne, on the other hand, lives up to its repu­ta­tion as being a “net­work of vil­lages” — pock­ets of life are sewn together by a car­pet of res­taur­ants and cafés that spill out into the street, odd pieces of street fur­niture, often slightly eccent­ric, and the well-​​designed pub­lic spaces that make you want to appre­ci­ate the city’s beauty at night. Clearly, it hasn’t worked every­where though; the Dock­lands was some­thing I was look­ing for­ward to see, but although the sleek, mod­ern build­ings com­ple­men­ted the smooth tran­quil­ity of the water­front, it was devoid of life — but per­haps it was just the wrong night for that. Dur­ing the day, Melbourne’s full of the hustle and bustle that you’d expect to find in a city that’s con­fid­ent of itself and how it can make its own way without blandly copy­ing what oth­ers have done before — it’s easy to get lost just wan­der­ing around the shop­ping centres (Mel­bourne makes shop­ping centres sexy) and the alley­ways that the city is fam­ous for.

The other thing that I’ll com­ment on is the trans­port, and for this I’ll drop the rosy lan­guage and get a little more object­ive. Trams are a fant­astic idea, but I can see why it might not work so well in Sydney. Trams steam ahead without being forced to start and stop and start and stop by the rest of the traffic on the road (buses in Sydney make me think of pri­or­ity inver­sion), but in order to achieve this, you need ded­ic­ated tram lanes — Melbourne’s main streets are notice­ably wider than than those in Sydney (say, com­pared with George, Pitt and Cast­lereigh Streets) and thus you can afford to give an entire lane to trams. If you’re hop­ping around the CBD, you don’t really have to walk a lot because of how the lines are set up — which is how pub­lic trans­port should be — hop on, hop off at will. Trains were bewil­der­ing though. I don’t under­stand how you can run a train sys­tem where you can get from A to B by train, but there’s no way to get from B to A without tak­ing a tor­tu­ous route (the sta­tion staff just told us to catch a tram instead). Seem­ingly obvi­ous (to tour­ists at least) routes between pop­u­lar sta­tions just don’t exist, and if you’re just hop­ping around the CBD, you’re best off pre­tend­ing the trains don’t exist. South­ern Cross sta­tion, how­ever, is one impress­ive piece of archi­tec­ture, and it just shows how Sydney has fallen too far in favour­ing util­it­arian func­tion over form.

Will I be vis­it­ing again? Yes, def­in­itely, if I’m after a break in civil­isa­tion (as opposed to a break with rocks and trees and things), Mel­bourne is the place to be. As you prob­ably noticed, we spent the entire trip basic­ally in the CBD — next time, I’d be sure to have a look a little fur­ther out, and see what gems lie out­side the (attract­ive) stain­less steel and glass jungle.

Lots of pho­tos: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3

P.S. Wikitravel is quite use­ful and clearly con­tains tips from every­day loc­als who know best: see, for example, the Mel­bourne entry.

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