We walked into our combined living room/kitchen/dining area this morning to this view.
The Docklands area with the Bolte Bridge, the longest cantilever bridge in Australia over the Yarra River in the background. This area and that view are why we booked this apartment; despite the fact that we happily cruise in inside cabins for months at a time, we like our hotels to have views (even at the Hotel Tiare Tahiti in Papeete we had a view of the harbor). This entire Docklands area is very safe and very walkable, with shopping and restaurants all along the water. However, the architecture is definitely different. There is no such things as a boxy building. Here, buildings lean and curve and scallop. G calls it DUI architecture: Designing Under the Influence.
A Google Maps Street View of our building. It looks like it was built from Legos.
It is a mixed use building, with just a handful of apartments mixed in with small offices.
We ate breakfast overlooking that view. What you can’t see in the photo are the trams that run right in front of our building. In fact, there is a stop just 30 seconds from our front door. From Wikipedia:
Trams are a major form of public transport in Melbourne, the capital city of the state of Victoria, Australia. As of May 2017, the Melbourne tramway network consists of 250 kilometres (160 miles) of track, 493 trams, 24 routes, and 1,763 tram stops. It is the largest urban tramway network in the world, ahead of the networks in St Petersburg (205 km), Upper Silesia (200 km), Berlin (190 km), Moscow(181 km) and Vienna (172 km). Trams are the second most used form of public transport in overall boardings in Melbourne after the commuter railway network, with a total of 204 million passenger trips in 2016-17.
Source: Wikipedia-Trams in Melbourne
All tram rides within the CBD are free of charge. Even better, there is a narrated tram called the City Circle (Route 35) that runs clockwise and counter-clockwise on an hour-long route around the center part of the city. We started our day by riding this tram around the loop and then disembarking near the Flinders Street Railway station where we walked on the pedestrian paths along the Yarra River. We had booked an hour-long cruise on a City River Cruise through the Port of Melbourne and the Docklands to get a perspective of the area from the water.
It was 1:30pm by the time we returned to the apartment and the temperature was 95 degrees on its way to a high of 97. While we were on or along the water it was bearable but as soon as we were walking to and waiting for a tram, it felt like an oven. As predicted, we stayed in our apartment until about 6pm (interneting wildly) when we took a tram just three stops to the nearest Coles Supermarket, and that’s when it really hit me. Melbourne- at least this part of Melbourne- is a really young city. At home there is a wide range of ages, so I never really take note of them. On these Golden Princess Cruises, I am probably at or under the median age. But at that supermarket today I was a full generation older than the average shopper. And they were a very international group of mostly Asian and Indian backgrounds.
We picked up the items we’ll need for our last three cruises - more hand wipes, gum, mouthwash and toothpaste, protein bars for excursions- and ice cream and beer, because G was wanting some in all this heat. Heavily laden, we figured out where to catch a return tram (not easy, as it’s rarely in the same place we get off one) and returned to the apartment before the ice cream melted (barely). At almost 7pm it was still in the very high 80s. But the sun soon lost its most intense heat, and we walked around the marina area, grabbing Subway sandwiches for dinner, which we ate while we watched sunset from our apartment.
Tomorrow is forecasted to be almost as hot, with Friday being much cooler (low 80s) and very stormy. Oh boy. Schlepping our backpacks and purchases back to the Golden Princess at Station Pier via trams could be a challenge.
