Down under - made it to OZ!

Manchester to Dubai to Singapore to Melbourne – this is what long haul is all about. Still we watched about seven movies between us including Catching Fire (Hunger Games), Snowpiercer (a Korean-made, fairly violent, post apocalyptic sci-fi redeemed by a brilliant cameo from Tilda Swinton) and my favourite, a Pixar movie called Up! On arrival in Oz we checked in on Friday and Saturday morning ran in the Parkrun in the park opposite our hotel. They start early over here with the off being at 8 am, this was a single lap flat dirt track round this lake and I was surprised to get round over half a minute quicker than at Rhyl 2 weeks ago – so much for the theory that you run quicker against folk that you know. I was 18^th in 20.27 (1^st V60) and Vicky was 202^nd in 35.31. http://www.parkrun.com.au/

  And for the twitchers among you....there's a real mix of birdies over here. This photo was taken by the lake and shows an indigenous Purple Swamphen in the foreground with a bunch of coots. Introduced from Europe, coots are en masse everywhere round the lake and are clearly very happy here - seems to be a distinct absence of whatever eats them back at home. The lake is also home to about 150 black swans (like what we saw in Devon a few weeks ago) and all over the place there are magpies and magpie larks , myna birds and parrots galore.

 Melbourne is a fine city - weather is a bit mixed at this time of year and we had to put our jumpers on but then it is winter here. It's full of skyscrapers and older heritage buildings in the city but it's also by the seaside -  we walked to St Kilda beachfront on our first morning and strolled along the pier to St Kilda's Kiosk which was rebuilt after a recent drastic fire. Breakfast in our hotel is rather pricey so we've decided to take a tour of the various local cafe's sampling a different one each morning - we'll let you know which one scores top marks but the beachfront cafe at St Kilda's certainly hit the spot.

And here are pics of the two magpie type birds that inhabit the park over the road - the one with the big beak is an Australian Magpie and it attacks runners and cyclists during the breeding season - hence the need to wear a helmet with spikey antennae or a hat with big eyes painted on - it works! The smaller bird is not the Willy Wagtail which I remember seeing in Brisbane a year ago - no it's the Magpie Lark, quite a harmless little bird.