Victoria

We arrived in Victoria in Sept 2010, in the midst of some of the heaviest rains on record. While we did not see any of the flooding, were plagued by rain and cloudy sky about 70% of the time although we did see several mudslides on the Great Ocean Highway.

We started in Melbourne and strolled through the city for several days visiting Federation Square, the Botanical Gardens, Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne Museum as well as Little Italy, Chinatown and St Kinta. We saw the penguins, Koalas, and Kangaroo on Phillips Island as well as drove the Great Ocean Highway to the Twelve Apostles and Otway Forest by Port Campbell. We stayed in Apollo Bay and saw lots of wild Koalas in the trees during our drive.

Melbourne has some of the best architecture of any city we visited in Australia. Much more interesting than Sydney. The flying foxes along the Yarra River just outside of Melbourne are a little know attraction. There are hundreds in the trees along the river, all wrapped tight in the day, but at night it is an amazing site to see them fly out for a dinner of insects. A couple of site that I would recommend outside Melbourne are the Phillips Island penguins. There were 1000s that came in the night we visited. It was amazing to see their march across the beach to their homes in the hills. The Otway Sky Tree Top Walk gives you a excellent view of the rainforest regions from the ground level to the crown of the trees 47 meters above the ground. We spent a day and visited the Yarra wine region. The wines were excellent, the folks are friendly and love talking about their wines.

Everywhere we went people were friendly and helpful, guides were excellent and enthusiastic. We had a great time.