Destination: Melbourne

Last week we headed for Melbourne (that's 'mel-bin'), the capital of Victoria and the second-largest city in Australia. Melbourne and Sydney have a fairly serious rivalry going, a bit like Boston and New York. Except that they compete by trying to outdo the other in areas where the other isn't particularly interested. You can argue all day about Red Sox vs. Yankees, but where Melbourne is the capital of footy, Sydney is the heart of rugby. Sydney is the major banking centre, while Melbourne is considered the cultural capital of Australia. So the whole competition is a bit silly. Imagine if New York was full of soccer fans and Boston was football-crazy--how do you make any sort of comparison? I suppose they are a bit like two siblings that do different activities, but feel like trying to compete anyway.

Anyway, we were headed to Melbourne for a Fulbright dinner and some related activities that Chelsea was part of. We felt a bit silly going all that way for just a day or two, so we decided to add a little more to the trip. On the way down, we drove with Chris (an Australian Fulbrighter from a couple of years ago) and his partner Trudie. The first afternoon we simply ate up the relatively flat distance between Adelaide and the Wimmera. The next morning, however, we found ourselves in the Grampians. The Grampians (Gariwerd to the local Aboriginal peoples; 'Grampians' comes from the range of the same name in Scotland) are a fold-thrust belt comprised primarily of Cambrian-Devonian sediments that were deformed in the late Paleozoic during the assembly of Pangaea. Today, many of the ridges in the Grampians are topped by dipping sandstone units that stretch off for kilometers. The Grampians catch whatever moisture comes in from the ocean, so they are relatively green and the area is dotted with waterfalls.

Descending from the Grampians, we headed towards Melbourne, detouring to drive through Ballarat. Ballarat was the center of the Victorian gold rush in the late 1800s, but today it is a moderately-sized town with lovely architecture that sprung from the prosperity of that period. Our major stop here was at a lake. This lake has historically varied in its water level, but last week it consisted of grass. It is interesting to observe the choices that Australia (and Victoria) is making with regards to water. Faced with distributing limited water between agriculture, cities, recreation, and long-term water security (storage and other measures to ensure there is at least some available water for coming years, even in a drought), the Australians have decided that recreation is less of a priority than the other uses. Sounds fairly sensible, but in the American West the typical decision is to sacrifice long-term water supply for the other three. I can't see that one working out very well for us.



Before long, we found ourselves joining the traffic of Melbourne. Experiencing what I would consider to be fairly normal big-city traffic made us extremely happy to be living in Adelaide (where traffic is a relatively minor issue) without a car. From there, Chelsea was off to a fancy dinner in the Great Hall at the National Gallery of Victoria and I was dropped at the house of our hosts in Melbourne, the Dales...