Nightmare

On our last day in Melbourne, we woke on time, did a last sweep of the hotel room and were just generally hanging about (I was writing the blog) when we realised that the clocks were all in one way or another, completey wrong. So we abandoned the blog, grabbed our stuff and headed downstairs to check-out, hoping no-one would notice our tardiness and chagre us late fees. Luckily, no-one did.
With our bags in storage at the hotel for the rest of the day, we took the tram down to Fed Square to enjoy breakfast, looking out through the glass a steel geometry of the Atrium onto a theatrical stage and the river. After our tasty breakfasts, we waddled gently down to the museum and went about the various exhibits. Never have we, either one of us, been more disturbed, horrified or strangely fascinated by all the things that exist in Australia (and much of the rest of the world) that would like nothing better than to hurt/paralyse/injure/destroy you and then probably eat you too for good measure. We saw giant, spindly legged crickets and armour plated cockroaches. We submersed ourselves in plastic bubbles so as to see giant ants close up, at eye level. We witnessed the many horrifc ways in which sea creatures disable you before they eat. No-one needs imagination for nasty aliens or thrille rmovie monsters - they should just spend an afternoon wandering the Melbourne Museum to find all the inspiration they need for something really, really bad.
Once we had horrified ourselves with the denizens of the deep and the insects above (including one exhibit of free-roaming spiders with no protective steel plating or iradium or lasers or anything helpful, at all, we went into the mind and emotions section. There, we learnt what things could attack us rom within, mental disorders and the like. Sounds truly disturbing, but there were some brilliant interactive bits, like taking to a couch to experience a dreamscape movie for three minutes, or standing in pods filled with short film clips meant to inspire a rollarcoaster of emotions. After all this, we sat and looked at the dinosaur skeletons for a bit, to soothe our fractured minds, then we took our leave of the museum (but not without gazing longingly at the toy possums and platypus' in the gift shop). Do you know, it turns out that in Australia, possums are actually a protected species? They cherish them here. Not like the bloodthirsty New Zealanders. Obviously, Oz is some sort of possum freeland and they have possum protection programs and so on.
We went back to the food court for dinner and then it was back to collect the bags and off to the station to catch our night train to Sydney. We checked in the lugguage, ate muffins bigger than a small child's head in the food court and then went to board our train. Where we waited. Waited. Waited some more...eventually, almost an hour after it was meant to leave, everyone was allowed on the train and off we went. The leg room was ok, the chair was rubbish, it was your usual semi-horrific night journey on public transport. Added to the complete inability to sleep in such conditions, and thus staying in a sort of dozy, weary trance as the train bumped and swayed about, the whole thing had to stop about two and a half hours out of Sydney due to railworks. We finished our journey on coaches, having been woken up to be told this and move accomodation at 4am. Gah.