A/NZ - Melbourne - Day 18

Melbourne is the largest city and capital of the state of Victoria. It is the second largest city in Australia at 3.5 million people. Sydney is first at just over 4 million. The total population of Australia is about 22 million so over a third of all Australians live in one of these two cities. Most of the rest of the population is located in just a few other cities on the coasts. That means that there is a whole lot of unpopulated open spaces away from the coasts. Australia is slightly larger than the contiguous 48 states of the U. S. but has about 7% of the population. Lots of elbow room here.

We pulled into port early in the morning.

There were lots of things we could have done here but we decided to do something totally different than we had been doing by riding the "Puffing Billy" coal fired steam engine train.

Sigrid loves trains.

Not a great photo but not bad for just sticking the camera out the window. We were trying to catch the train and the engine as we went around a bend.

Here it is......the engine is just puffing away.

Unique trees along the way.

Pretty countryside.

The conductor helped us see all the interesting things as we traveled.

The engineer.

It was a great ride.

We transferred from the train to buses for the trip to the mountains. We stopped briefly where cockatoos typically hang out waiting for tourists to feed them.

We went to a scenic lookout point at the top of one of the mountains in the Blue Dandenong range. On a good day you have a fabulous view of Melbourne. It was sunny but smoggy so no good photos here.

Back at the ship. I took a few more photos. The roof was rolled back and the pool was popular on this warm day.

A panorama of Melbourne just before we "set sail".

We are off to Burnie, Tasmania.