Saturday morning dawns and again we’re up early – 7am. While Erin doesn’t leave until tomorrow my flight to Melbourne is this afternoon; I had changed it to make the stag do for the wedding we’re going to next week. That means we have a few hours to fit some stuff into and the plan is to have a look around an island in Sydney Harbour, Cockatoo Island.

It doesn’t take us long to get there – we even manage to catch the bus to the ferry this time – and then we’re ready to explore the island. The ferry journey gives us some different views of the harbour and bridge as it’s in the opposite direction from Manly.

The islands is tiny – just 0.2km^2 – and quite an interesting place. It started as a prison colony back in the mid-1800s; the buildings from the prison still exist and it’s quite hard to imagine living in those conditions. It then morphed into what turned out to be Australia’s busiest shipyard, especially through WW1 and WW2, until it was eventually shut down in the early 90s. Learned quite a lot about how ship design used to work, including that they used to do the designs at 1:1 scale on the floor of *extremely* large buildings. Interesting!

As I said, it really is a tiny place so it doesn’t take us long to see all there is to see. It didn’t really live up to the name – didn’t see a single cockatoo – but there were quite a lot of angry nesting seagulls to bother. I would have thought it was quite late in the year for nesting but I’m sure they know what they’re doing.

We escape the hordes back onto the ferry to Sydney and from there walk along the harbour-side. Spotted a warship of some kind as well as what I think is my first real-life viewing of a submarine.

Water-side brunch was quite nice, followed up with some icecream -black sesame, an interesting almost-hazelnutty (and delicious!) flavour.

Time for me to depart Sydney, then. To the airport via rail replacement bus (shivers of dread, but at least it was free!). Check in, board, quick 90-minute hop to Melbourne. We definitely land in a shed, Tiger Airways have clearly taken Ryanair as their model.

I’m meeting the stag party at a restaurant; I get to the train station, drop my bag, do a bit of walking, and soon I’m eating bits of a whole roasted pig!

The stag do was excellent fun. There was much REDACTED and some REDACTED, plenty of REDACTED as well. There was even a little bit of REDACTED! What will they think of next.

Here are some nice views from a high-up hotel room we were in.

I stay the night (well, a few hours of sleep anyway) on a couch in the suburbs; I wake up at 7am and decide to walk the 6km into central Melbourne. It was pleasant and quiet, I did some podcast listening and photo taking along the way.

Breakfast was a double sausage roll from a bakery (thumbs up, Bread Top), then after settling myself for a bit of a read in a coffee shop (where there was a “why is there milk in my long black” controversy) I did some minor Melbourne sightseeing.

I’m meeting Erin and a friend (hi dev!) for lunch at midday but at this point I can definitely smell myself; a pattern for my recent travels, apparently. I’d gone through three t-shirts yesterday because walking in the heat with a backpack is terrible, so I’m all out until I get access to my luggage from storage again. Luckily this is something that is catered for; I buy a cheap shirt, find the Traveler’s Aid in the train station, rent a towel and a shower. Clean again, and presentable in company!

Erin has now arrived, we meet dev for a delicious lunch. I had potato gnocchi but forgot to take pictures. We also had some apparently-cold-drip coffee, but we were sceptical that it was anything but chilled brewed coffee; oh well. Also, some cake.

Then we were off again on the train, this time out to the countryside; next phase of the trip will be a relaxing few days with Erin’s dad.