Australian hotels (I)

Writing this from Melbourne, Tuesday morning. We’ve been in town since Saturday, and our stay has coincided with the most rain the area’s had in years. So, the good news is that we Canadians are to thank for breaking a decade-long drought. The bad news is it’s not a lot of fun to be outside in a rainstorm.

On the plus side, we were able to spend a lot of time visiting with my cousin Navin and his girlfriend Lauren, as well as my Uncle Charles and Aunt Petty, who are from Toronto but visiting Navin and Lauren for a few months. It’s a Haggart family reunion south of the equator! Navin also took us, Charles and Petty on a day trip down the Great Ocean Road. It fully lives up to its name; Natasha will post some photos and commentary.

Navin and Lauren live in a two-bedroom low-rise apartment in Fairfield, a suburb of Melbourne (think Bloor West Village, both in terms of distance to downtown and its funky shops and restaurants), so our initial plan was to stay at a guesthouse 15 minutes by foot from their place.

I always look for a few things in a guesthouse. A comfy bed, good location, a TV/VCR with a good selection of videos, a basket of fresh fruit and crumpets. But, and this may simply be a matter of personal taste, I try to avoid the guesthouses with long-term residents who swear at you and try to intimidate you when you ask them to please turn down the television, as there are folks trying to sleep in the next room. Especially when you’re the only three people in the house.

This fellow was straight from central casting. Bald, in the shaved-head mental-patient style, smelling of booze, with dark, sunken eyes, prominent forehead, big hands and short fingers, he mentioned in his profanity-laced, um, explanation of the proper way to ask someone to turn down the TV that he’d been there for six months.

And I always thought locks on the room were to protect your belongings.

We left early the next morning. We told the guesthouse owner, Lindsey, a Dude-type fellow with long-grey hair, and he comped the night and offered us a self-contained suite in the back of the house, but we decided that it was perhaps time to see what else Melbourne had to offer in terms of low-end accommodation.