Melbourne, victoria, australia

Thursday November 7, 2019 is a day that will be engraved in my memory for a long time. This was the day we embarked on a 17-hour flight from Vancouver, Canada to Melbourne, Australia to visit Bojana’s family. It also marked the first time that I left the American continent, crossed the Canadian border since June 2007 and enjoyed the chance to use a passport. Everything seemed a bit unreal and exciting for me.

Growing up, Australia always had a mystical aura to it. Being an avid fan of Skippy the Kangaroo, watching the Quebequois movie Les Aventuriers du Timbre Perdu, The Camel Boy and the infamous Simpsons episode (which turned out to not be a documentary), I thought I was ready for anything The Land Down Under was going to throw at me.

To my surprise, when we landed we were not welcomed by a swarm of Chazzwazzers (or Ouaouarons if you’re French Canadian), but by a beautiful sunny day and enthusiastically by Bojana’s dad, Relja. He drove us back to a suburb called Cairnlea and I met the rest of the family, Ana and Ruzica.

We took it easy on the first day, feeling tired from the long flight and the jet lag. We spent the day hanging out with Bojana’s family and a few of her friends. It was also our first introduction to the board game Ticket to Ride. We played every night – I highly recommend it to everybody.

From there, it feels like we made the best of our time visiting all the national parks, skateparks, coffee shops, pubs, restaurants, wild life, etc.

If you are a skateboarder, you will love Melbourne. There are a lot of skateparks to choose from, within the city or its surroundings, and every train station that I walked out of has a famous skate spot within a 5 minutes walk. You can also see so many parks and spots on the train ride from Cairnlea to downtown. I highly enjoyed skateboarding Riverslide, Brunswick and St. Kilda skateparks.

I also saw a lot of them while driving to the Healesville Sanctuary in the Yarra Valley and along the Great Ocean Road. Even villages with populations of only a few hundred people had at least a fun little bowl, some fun boxes and flat bars. You can see some photos of them on my instagram @turbokingdom or under the hashtag #turbodownunder. It gave extra beauty points to the already magical landscapes of the vineyards and seascape of the Southern Ocean.

The Southern Ocean is the host of the Great Ocean Road. It goes from Torquay to Allansford, but we only made it as far as Port Campbell. The first stop was Bells Beach, an internationally famous surf spot and from the cult movie Point Break. There was a good wave that day, very crowded with some good surfers. We kept following the coast and looked like you could surf most of the way until you cut back inland before reaching the 12 Apostles. Relja paid us a nice surprise visit on his motorcycle as we were just about to walk down to one of the beaches.

The 12 Apostles are limestone stacks, shaped into interesting forms by millions of years of erosion. It’s a huge tourist attraction. There are a few fun walks around the area and various types of formations, caves and beaches to see. We finished with a quick coffee in Port Campbell, a beautiful coastal town, and headed back to Cairnlea for dinner and some more Ticket to Ride games.

We also visited Healesville Sanctuary, Wilsons Prom, Melbourne Botanical Gardens and the Organ Pipes National Park. These parks are where I saw most of the wildlife. Healesville Sanctuary is more like a zoo and the other parks are open areas, where the animals roam free as they please. I really enjoyed the drive from Melbourne to Healesville. You go through the Yarra valley and all its vineyards. I saw lots of kangaroos running on the farm fields, some surrounded by regenerating forest from old bush fires. On the drive, being from Canada, I realized that the kangaroos are the deers of Australia. Also, I sincerely think that the Yarra Valley would be a pretty cool area to live in.

Wilsons Prom is roughly a 3-hour drive from Melbourne. It features a wildlife park, some beaches and hiking trails. There’s a bright white sandy beach called Squeaky Beach, which when walked upon makes the same squeaky noise as eating fresh cheese curds. This was the place I saw some of the Australian wildlife for the first time. The birds intrigued me the most. As a Canadian, it feels unreal to see cockatoos, lorikeet, parrots and parakeets in the wild or in the city. Rather, these are the species you would most likely see in a cage when you go to the pet store or in people’s homes.

I could go on and on about the fond memories that were created during our stay in the Melbourne area. The walks in Fitzroy while record shop hopping, the movie about the Northern Territory wildlife and Aboriginal culture at Imax theatre, the great coffee shops and restaurants, Bojana’s family and friends, the skateparks and the friendly skateboarders etc. We’re coming up to our 2-year anniversary of this trip, and I’m still excited by the memories as I type this. It looks like the Australian government is slowly reopening it’s door to the world after a long lock down due the Covid-19 pandemic, so hopefully we can make our way back to the other side of the globe again soon.

I hope you enjoyed the read and the photo gallery below. Feel free to comment and share!

Thank you,
Jonathan Turbide