P.S. All my Aussie restaurant reviews can be found on Zomato.
Well, it was supposed to be 16 days (the first day being in Sydney) if Qantas hadn't ruined it for us. But that's a totally different story which I don't even wanna remember. Let me give you a hint though ... peak season? overbooking? yeah something like that. So here we were in Melbourne ... cold cold Melbourne. We visited Australia in July, which is actually winter for them. We chose to stay at Radisson on Flagstaff Gardens as it was closer to the Central Station as well as it had some trams passing nearby. The plan that day was to visit Sovereign Hill ... which was 1.5 hours by train. There are other options too like a bus or car, but they are expensive. You can simply imagine how tired we were. We reached Melbourne after 17 hours (14 hours to Sydney + 1 hour from Sydney to Melbourne + some time at the airport ) and here we were travelling again. Not to mention running behind Qantas in Dubai for a day struggling to get on any flight to Australia! Okay, this was more like 17 + 24 hours! Anyway, when you're on a holiday, every minute is precious. We booked our tickets to Sovereign Hill while we were in Abu Dhabi itself. All we had to do now was just hop on a train! The reason we chose to visit Sovereign Hill that day and not the next or after was because they had a "Christmas in July" thingy going on which was supposedly gonna end the day we reached. I really wanted to see it. When we reached the city of Ballarat ( the place where Sovereign Hill was located), we took a cab to reach Sovereign Hill. Gosh, it was just so cold, and gloomy that day. It just wouldn't stop raining! Sovereign Hill is one of Melbourne's popular attractions. Its where Australia's history comes to life. You'll be transported to the 1850s ... an era of horse driven carriages, streets filled with costumed characters, steam driven machines .... an era when gold was discovered. Everything there was built based on that. We visited a Gold Museum too (this was part of Sovereign Hill ) and saw some gold artifacts, coins ..basically everything associated with the gold rush. And about that "Christmas in July" thing - you always associate Christmas with winter. Since it was winter in Melbourne, they turned Sovereign Hill into a winter wonderful. There was Santa Claus, Christmas tree, mulled wine, snow, etc. Although Sovereign Hill didn't look like anything what we'd seen in the pictures ( because of the rain and all), we still had fun. I remember having a lovely roast beef sandwich at one of the restaurants and lots of mulled wine. We left Sovereign Hill around 4pm and reached the city centre at 6pm. All that travelling and walking had made us hungry. After hunting around for a place to eat, we finally found this Malaysian restaurant called Mamak. Oh my, those yummy curries and spicy noodles were just what we needed. Here are some of the things we had. For more pictures & my review, click here. As if that wasn't enough, we thought we'd hit an ice cream place! Yes ice cream in a 4 degree freezing Melbourne. But N2 extreme was on my "TO-DO" list and we were lucky that it was just near our hotel. These were no ordinary ice creams! And those injections were WOW!! Click here to read my review about them. Then, we headed back to the hotel and called it a day.
P.S. All my Aussie restaurant reviews can be found on Zomato.
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