Melbourne – Day 3 – Royal Botanic Gardens, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Street Exploration

The original itinerary I drew up for Day 3 really had just one item – Melbourne Zoo in the morning, and that’s it. It was a fine day though with a wonderfully blue sky, and the weather wasn’t as chilly as it could had been for a typical winter day. So when we’d left the zoo, we decided to head straight off to the Royal Botanic Gardens by cab, then explored the area checking out Flinders Street Station, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Block Arcade, and a good part of Elizabeth Street. Or in short, a good part of the itinerary that was originally planned for a later day in our 9 day stay of the city.

Comments and the like.

The Royal Botanic Gardens is huge at a whopping 38 hectares, and the early afternoon sun made for a mix of quite a pictureseque scene with many trees still in late autumn colors. The interesting bits of the Gardens though seem to be in the southern-most bits of the park, while we started off on the opposite end. Peter was already fast asleep in his stroller, and Ling and Hannah both looked a little tired (me though, I still had plenty of energy and wouldn’t have mind walking the entire stretch of the park), so we took it real easy by exploring just the Queen Victoria Gardens and Linlithgow Lawn. I reckon you would probably need at least 3-4 hours to walk the length and breadth of the Gardens, and probably even more than that to really take in the sights.

Flinders Street Station was bustling with activity since it’s a major train station with several interconnecting lines. We explored the interior briefly, but felt like tourists in the way of commuters who were bustling in and out to get to where they had to.

St. Paul’s Cathedral is directly opposite Flinders Street Station, and with it being consecrated in 1891 is is slightly more than a hundred and ten years old now. Truth to tell, the old European churches – and even the Trinity Church in Boston that I still have very vivid memories of – are far more impressive both in the interior and exterior sense, but it’s still worth a look if you’re in the area. Visitors are able to enter the church freely, though there is a small donation fee if you wish to take pictures too (we obliged). Probably about 30 minutes is sufficient for a quick visit.

Block Arcade has a nifty central atrium and – what looked liked – pricey speciality goods shops – and numerous cafes and pubs. It wasn’t really our thing, but we did take a quick look just to check it off our list.

As I remarked to Ling – Melbourne at this time of the year is a wonderful city to walk around in. We were initially planning to take the tram back from the Royal Botanic Gardens to our apartment, but ended up walking the entire stretch back. The evening finished with the night market at Queen Victoria Market, but I’ll write on that in a separate post later.