After breakfast this morning we have a couple of walks around Melbourne planned, but first we decided to visit Tourist information to make sure there wasn’t anything else we should be doing. There are a series of walks which all start from Federation Square which is a public space that originally was where the tourist information was and there is also a performing arts space and some areas for pop up shops and restaurants. As we were looking around a lady came up to us and started telling us all the best places to go visit in Melbourne, we didn’t like to tell her that we had already researched everything and knew what we wanted to do as she was only trying to help. We talked to her for a while then stated our first walk which was called The Cosmopolitan. This was a walk around the main city area and also China Town. We started in the main old area with the Town Hall and the Manchester Utility Building which was a very exotic Art Deco building built in the 1930s we walked from here up to the Theatre district and into one of the premier shopping areas where almost every shop was either a designer brand or a watch / jewellery shops, unfortunately some of the office buildings that have impressive entrance ways were closed so we were not able to go in and have a look but the outside of the buildings were quite impressive anyway. We walked along to the Old Treasury Building which is now a museum. It was built in the 1850s it was designed by a 19 year old called JJ Clark as a store for the gold flooding in from the goldfields, the basement has a number of vaults while the upper floors were offices for the Governor, Premier, Treasurer and other officials, as well as that there were also a couple of rooms downstairs where the family lived. We spent a bit of time walking around the museum then continued the walk and finally we came back round to China Town and walked around the main streets before stopping for lunch. We had a Thai which was really nice and gave us energy to start the next walk which was called On the waterfront and was all around the river area of the city. The Yarra River runs through the city, it is now very much a shopping and restaurant area and seems to be quite a modern area. We walked along the river then made a diversion to the Eureka Tower which has a viewing deck on the 88th Floor, so we went up and had a look round, it provides fantastic views of Melbourne and has some very helpful pointers to the key areas such as the Cricket ground and the Grand Prix circuit. the tower is 975 feet and can flex up to 30cm in each direction in high winds. It also has two 300,000 litre water tanks on levels 90 and 91 to prevent any excess building sway. It has 92 storeys and 52,000 sq metres of glass windows and the glass on the top 10 levels is 24 carat gold plated! There is also a glass box that slides out to provide a ‘thrilling experience; where you can look in all directions including down – funnily enough we decided against doing this but I did go outside which was rather breezy but the view wasn’t much different to inside so I cam back in. We then continued our walk up to the wharfs then crossed the river and walked back the other side. By the time we had finished this was it was almost 6pm so we went back to the hotel to relax and do some laundry so we have as much as we can clean before we head to Tasmania.
