Last weekend in Melbourne

There is some expectation that the final weekend one spends in an exotic location should be magical and memorable.  Or one should pack.

Our flight wasn't until Wednesday, so we decided to leave the packing for Tuesday.  For our magical memorable final weekend, we took a couple of long walks.

On Saturday,we walked from our house to the Botanic Gardens again.

Jonathan and Tim in the gardens.

The gardens are different in winter than fall, and different in fall than summer.  But now that July is almost over, we could see signs of spring.  The first sign?

Daffodils.

From there, we walked a few yards to the Shrine of Remembrance, and climbed to the balcony one last time, for an overlook of the city.

And then we walked up the St Kilda Road, across the Yarra river, for lunch.  We ate fast food.  But Australian fast food!

Later that evening, we returned to the city for a meal on the town to celebrate Tim's birthday, the week before.  Here is the birthday boy in China Town.

There was actually one thing I had wanted to do in Melbourne for some time.  In January, we were told that the flying foxes roost in the Yarra Bend Park.  I wanted to see them.  However, the Yarra Bend Park is very large, and I wasn't sure where to find them.  I had given up on that adventure, until Friday, when a colleague told me he had been the previous weekend.  They roost near the Bell Bird Picnic area.  We found it on the map, figured out how to get there by bus, and on foot, and back by train, and invited some friends.

Here we are on the bridge near the Studley Park Boat launch, near the spot where the bus dropped us off.

From there, we walked east and north along the river.  It was a pleasant walk.  The grass was green, the eucalypts evergreen, and the wattle trees have finally begun to flower.

Me and a flowering wattle tree.

One of the friends we brought along is a botanist, although his specialty is fungi.  He explained that the Australian wattle tree, or acacia, is unique from all other trees around the world.  After the continent split from Pangea, the wattles developed in hundreds of different ways.  The golden wattle is the flower on the Australian money.  In addition to seeing regular golden wattles, like the one in the picture above, there were flowering wattles that had needles instead of leaves, some whose leaves were like ferns, one with white flowers and long thin leaves, and one with small leaves and spines.  And actually, none of them have true leaves -- some other part of the plant has developed to look like a leaf, but it doesn't count.  The botanist tried to explain this to me a couple of times, but I'll let you look it up on your own if you'd like.

Meanwhile, the take home point is, wattle trees in bloom!  Spring is coming!

But not for us, because we're leaving.

After a half hour walk around the river, we reached the Bell Bird Picnic area.  And there, indeed, were the roosting bats.

There were hundreds of them, sleeping in the tree near the picnic site.  Remember that the flying foxes are fruit bats, the size of sea gulls.  They don't eat any insects, only fruit.  And they kind of stink. 

We tell our families apart by the shapes of their faces and their voices.  Apparently bats tell their families apart by their smell. 

As we walked up the path toward a bat overlook point, we realized there were not just hundreds of bats.  There were thousands of bats.

Or more accurately, tens of thousands of bats.  In 2003, the colony roosted in the botanic gardens, and it was 30,000 strong then.  I expect the population has only grown, if anything, since moving north to the Yarra Bend Park.

Here's a photo of the whole group, at the overlook area.

 We continued walking north, along the river, seeing the bats hanging in the trees on both sides.

Until eventually, the bats were gone, but the walk continued.  Green grass, eucalypts, and the blooming wattle trees.  To the north, after crossing a bridge, we exited the park right at the Mormon stake center, and then took the train home. Total time: two hours from bus to train. 

(Maybe we should have done that walk last June, instead of the two hour stake conference....)