I am not sure how many of you have seen calendars having this wonderful picture of a set of huge rocks standing in the middle of a beach, and with projections of a hill range on the shore. It will look as if the hills have split-up from their parents and gone in to the beach! Otherwise, how many of you have seen the film songs where the hero/heroin is shouting standing at the tip of a huge piece of rock with beach underneath it? If you have seen that, you have seen Great Ocean Road some 100kms near Melbourne!
You would have heard of Melbourne for the cricket ground, or Australian Open or at least in one of my weekenders. They call Melbourne the cultural capital of Australia and if you remember my story, this beautiful city on the banks of Yarra River was as good as Sydney to be considered for being the capital of Oz! May be if Melbourne would have been this good, Sydney would have become the capital!
It was a peaceful Wednesday evening. I was sipping a coffee back home, and casually asked Krithi on what can we do this weekend. As usual, she put the ball on my court. I asked, ‘What about Melbourne?’ She was looking at me like ’are you mad?’! It is 880kms away and takes 11 hours to reach by overnight train. A weekend will be enough if all goes well. Again, provided that you have to sit and come on the train whole night and go straight to office.
Krithi was excited of the place, I had shown her what is Great Ocean Road and she was dreaming of having her first helicopter ride above this natural wonder! But now, because of her present situation, we have to see that she is not suffering sitting the whole night, we are ready to face her vomiting while travelling through Great Ocean Road, which is obviously hilly, and nearly 600kms long!
I was ready for taking care of her provided she is fine with the travel and she was ready! We checked the country link, and booked the ticket. Checked for accommodation and forecasts, both didn’t look that great. But it is all done in an hour time!
Now comes budgeting. We had the big Cairns trip the week after next and I will have to book for my return tickets to India for March. So we were tight on finance. We took all the available booklets on Melbourne, and started budgeting. We had to choose between two tours – a penguin parade (which happens at night, along a coast where small penguins comes out of their dens in bulk and go in to the sea) and our dream Great Ocean road. They both won’t fit in, as the first one’s timing is from 3:30pm to 12 midnight. Again we may have to leave next day early morning at 8 for the Great Ocean road tour, and catch the train at night straightaway and me, end up in office next day morning. So it will become a hectic schedule. We dropped the Penguin parade at last, because of financial and time constraints.
The only part missing now was the accommodation. We need one night stay, which is tough to find in net. Most of them insist on minimum two nights stay during the weekends. By Friday night, I realised that I am not going to find any accommodation in Melbourne in net. That is something we had to risk. But even for the long weekends, I have seen people getting down at the station and trying the accommodation desk and get through with one! So I was sure that we will get something.
We started Friday evening. I was surprised to see that the train was an hour late! May be this is the first time ever I am seeing a train getting late by an hour outside India. It started by 9:30, took another one or two hours to finish off the ticket checking and to switch off the lights. We had tried two neck pillows from a Chinese shop, both were punctured L ! But still, I think we could sleep without much disturbance. Krithi also was not as bad as I thought, may be, we got some leg space between the seats.
All sort of negative things happening to us – no accommodation, negative weather forecasts, and now the train getting late and our sleep arrangement also flopped! But it is too late to rollback !
