Road Trip 07 - Day Eight

Tags: aquarium, melbourne, photos, travel

city view of melbourne from rialto tower

Another great day for us in Melbourne. We started off a bit late as we slept through our alarms till 11am (Melbourne time) because the room was so dark from the thick curtains (three pass blockout lining - thanks Gem!). We then walked down to the Melbourne Aquarium where we spent the majority of our day.

The Aquarium had a heap of interesting stuff on display and enough to keep us entertained for a couple of hours. The Aquarium underneath was great and had the largest manta ray I have ever seen, this thing was massive and was probably at least 2 metres wide and there were a heap other large ones as well. We listened to the hourly presentation which I think Gem took a real interest in and it gave some good details about the Aquarium and the animals in it. When leaving we got to see a really funny sight with a large turtle biting a shark and getting really aggressive at the shark and scaring it away from it!

We then went for a walk through the CBD. We also visited the Federation Square (didn’t mind the design, but for its purpose its a bit out there and a bit of a contrast to Flinders Station) which had some F1 cars on display, we were amazed at how small they actually are. Later on in the late afternoon near sunset we went to the observatory deck at the Rialto tower. The deck was great and even had some outside sections which a few viewpoints like it (Q1) don’t usually have. I was getting some ok photos (bit hazy) and wanted to get some night shots as the sun was about to set but then the batteries went flat in the camera! So we checked if we were able to come back later which they said was ok, so we went back to the Hotel to charge the batteries and went and got some dinner at a cafe nearby. We then went back to the hotel, got the batteries (and tripod ) and practically ran back to the viewing deck as we only had 10 mins till they had last entry and just got in time and took some shots which weren’t the best because we were having clouds pass through there most of the time.