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Last update: 2019-09-23

Reports and Pictures from Australia

From Febru­ary 2003 to Febru­ary 2004 I spent a year “Down Under”. I stud­ied in Mel­bourne for two semesters, which only left me lim­it­ed time to trav­el... still this page is main­ly about spare time ac­tiv­i­ties like bike rides and about trav­el­ing in that dis­tant yet pop­u­lar (in Ger­many at least) coun­try. This web site on me in Aus­tralia de­vel­oped over time. I tried to up­date it at least once a month, to have my friends and rel­a­tives at home take part in my ad­ven­tures.

  • I took and brought home around 3000 dig­i­tal pho­tos.
  • There are more than 750 pho­tos in the 14 gal­leries on this Aus­tralia web site.
  • I cy­cled more than 5000 km on my Hill­man bike and bought a sim­i­lar racer here in Ger­many.

The Time Dif­fer­ence be­tween Eu­rope and Aus­tralia is con­sid­er­able. Cen­tral Eu­rope gen­er­al­ly has UTC+1, Uni­ver­sal Time “plus one” (CET - Cen­tral Eu­ro­pean Time), in Vic­to­ria the time zone is UTC+10 (AEST - Aus­tralian East­ern Stan­dard Time). In fact the ac­tu­al dif­fer­ence is never nine hours, though, but eight or ten, de­pend­ing on where it is sum­mer with day­light sav­ing time.

Pic­tures

A Koala
  1. 12. - 27.03.2003: The flight and the first days in Mel­bourne
  2. 28.02. - 05.03.2003: Pic­tures from the uni and from an anti-war-protest in the city
  3. 06.03. - 16.03.2003: Quite dif­fer­ent pic­tures from ten days, days in which I de­vel­oped kind of a daily rou­tine
  4. 18.03. - 29.03.2003: The demon­stra­tion on the be­gin­ning of the sec­ond war on Iraq, “2003 Or­ange Great Mel­bourne Bike Ride”, the “Ad­ven­ture Trip” to Phillip Is­land...
    Bike Ride Panora­ma
  5. 06.04. - 22.04.2003: Lots of pic­tures from bike rides, main­ly along the Yarra Trail to the city
    Vic­to­ria‘s Num­ber Plates
    Three panora­ma pic­tures
  6. 27.04. - 10.06.2003: 18 pic­tures of na­ture, city and bi­cy­cle break­downs...
  7. 28.06. - 08.07.2003: La Trobe Uni­ver­si­ty 11 Day Cen­tral Aus­tralian Camp­ing Ad­ven­ture
    Three panora­ma pic­tures
  8. 22.06. - 20.08.2003: An­oth­er Rally, the City, Church­es, Bike Rides, the Uni...
  9. 09. and 10.08.2003: Great Ocean Road
  10. 20.08. - 17.10.2003: bi­cy­cle rides in and around Mel­bourne, a week-end trip to a farm in NSW, a protest camp near Coober Pedy and three days in Ade­laide
  11. 30.10. - 07.12.2003: pho­tos from Mel­bourne, a ride to the Dan­de­nong Ranges Na­tion­al Park, and the Great Vic­to­ri­an Bike Ride
  12. 11.12.03 - 08.01.04: one month of trav­el­ing be­tween Syd­ney and Cairns, most pho­tos are from Syd­ney
  13. 29.01. - 25.02.2004: some days of hik­ing and driv­ing across Tas­ma­nia
  14. 17.01. - 10.02.2004: my last days in Aus­tralia, some pho­tos I al­ready want­ed to have made months be­fore...
  15. 10. and 11.02.2004: the flight back with a one-day stop-over in Sin­ga­pore was way bet­ter than the sleep­less flight to Mel­bourne.

In 2006 I re­turned to Aus­tralia for about five weeks. Of course I vis­it­ed friends in Mel­boure, but I also ex­plored the west­cost for the first time.

2008 marked my third trip to Australia, but only to Victoria this time.


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Melbourne-Wetter
Dortmund-Wetter

The weath­er is fine

  • Mel­bourne Weath­er, fea­tur­ing a graph of last week‘s tem­per­a­ture.
  • Mel­bourne Weath­er (The Age), more com­mer­cial and with the well known sun/cloud symbols.
  • The mini weath­er fore­cast on this page is only avail­able in Ger­man - but with the sym­bols and the tem­per­a­tures it still has an in­for­ma­tion value for peo­ple who do not un­der­stand that lan­guage. And there are dic­tionar­ies on the web, in case you‘d like to learn some Ger­man weath­er terms.

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Links

The web is great be­cause ev­ery­thing is linked - so here are some links to Mel­bourne/Aus­tralia. Some of the web sites are more in­ter­est­ing for those who are in Mel­bourne (city map, pub­lic trans­port), others more for those who are not here (web­cams, uni­ver­si­ty). If you are in­ter­est­ed in where I come from, you can now find some information on that on the Dort­mund page.

Aus­tralia Map Di­rec­to­ry - after search­ing in vain for a while I now found a good on­line map for Mel­bourne.

La Trobe Uni­ver­si­ty - Mel­bourne - al­most like at home, the uni is “a bit” out of the city cen­ter...

Vic­to­ri­an Chan­nels Au­thor­i­ty of­fers up-to-date pic­tures from Mel­bourne‘s har­bour with sev­er­al we­b­cams.

Mel­bourne We­b­cam is some­times a bit noisy, but it can show a nice panora­ma pic­ture. Keep in mind the time dif­fer­ence!

A movie and film the­atre database for the city and more (vis­i­tors guide, search for ac­co­mo­da­tion...) can be found at mel­bourne.ci­ty­search.com.au.

Pub­lic Trans­port in Mel­bourne is not only com­plete­ly pri­va­tised, but (to make it worse) there are a num­ber of dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies for dif­fer­ent parts and lines. For­tu­nate­ly one can use the same three zone tick­ets in all trains, trams and busses (ex­cept Night Rider). The uni is at the bor­der of zone 1 (cen­ter zone), I‘m al­ready liv­ing in zone 2. Two hours zone 1+2 cost $4.80, day tick­ets the dou­ble.

For the Night-Rider Bus one paid $6 per trip, no mat­ter how far. The Eltham Bus brought me home from the CBD (city cen­tre) in about 40 min­utes

The biggest prob­lem with the dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies was that I could not find a com­mon timetable in­for­ma­tion web­site (like vrr.de). Vic­trip and Meltrip seem to be the best that ex­ists here. One can only find di­rect con­nec­tions and the other show only which lines there are in a given sub­urb. Both refer to the re­spec­tive com­pa­nies for ac­tu­al timetable in­for­ma­tion.

For me in WAT­SO­NIA most in­ter­est­ing were the Hurst­bridge line of Con­nex Mel­bourne and Dysons‘ 566, a bus that was not op­er­at­ing on Sun­days.

From the uni­ver­si­ty to the CBD the 350 "Ex­press" from Na­tion­al Bus is quite nice: it uses the high­way for some kilo­me­tres and makes the hole dis­tance in 48 min­utes. The "nor­mal" 250 needs near­ly half an hour extra for the same tour.

In that re­spect the mo­nop­o­lies in Ger­many also have their pos­i­tive sides. There is Con­nex as well, and they call them­selves "Ger­many‘s sec­ond biggest rail­ways com­pa­ny", but they are of lit­tle im­por­tance com­pared to THE rail­ways com­pa­ny, Die Bahn.

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