From Christchurch we travelled by plane to Melbourne Australia, timeshift was -2 hours. We’ve been a little frightened on immigration procedure because we had some seeds bought in NewZealand with us.
We ticked truthfully “Bringing seeds,fruits,plant material to Australia” on the arrival card, which resulted inspection by a friendly Biohazard lady. The seeds were bought at a plant nursery in New Zealand. The biohazard lady was searching for the latin name of the seeds, unfortunately there was none printed on the sticker besides the english name of it. She was looking up the seeds in bio-security database, but failed to find. So they had to confiscate it.
I did afterwards some search on my own, it was “Gomphocarpus fruticosus”. This took me 3 minutes to find the latin name, but by the time at customs i was offline.
Lesson learnt: always buy packages with latin name printed to.
Paua shells, Shadi found at some beach havent been a problem. Unless it is clean, no tissue on it and dry the biohazard-lady said, it’s ok to bring them in.
Melbourne’s airport is a 30 minutes bus-drive away from the city-centre. There is no public transport to go into the Centre, we had to use SkyBus Express shuttle for about 20€/pax. We stayed at Ibis Bourke Street hotel which was in convenient walking distance to all of the tourist’s spots. Good thing in Melbourne is , that city centre’s tram is free and most of the attractions are in the free tram zone and it is easy to find your way, because of the grid-like setup of the city.
First impression i had on Melbourne: a mix between Manhattan (where i’ve not been so far) and any Chinatown (of which i’ve seen quite a few) in the world.
We went to an Poke restaurant next to an Karaoke club. Although there was a concrete wall between the 2 venues, it was somehow odd to eat raw fish accompanied by loud singing of K-pop next door.
Next day we did some sightseeing tour by walk/tram. We crossed Flinders Street Station, the “Australian Centre for the moving image” (a Film-museum which was closed unfortunately) and the “Marvel Stadium” (a ~60000 seat football stadium , formerly known as Etihad stadium).
