The big land Down Under

As I can't be arsed to rewrite this, it's a cut and paste job of a post I put on Bird Forum just now.
I've just arrived in Australia and the fact that Melbourne is less than warm is a nice change after the sauna of Singapore!
It's 0644 and I've not gone to bed yet, probably won't until bedtime now, not that tired and the birds are out there waiting! Or until it gets light enough to see what I am doing, it's a crowded hostel room, I didn't want to wake anyone so I opened the door, slung my rucksack in and came down to the computers instead.
Did make one mistake though - I've not been to Melbourne before and jumped into a taxi at Tullamarine Airport thinking it won't cost more than $25 'cos it can't be that far surely...an appalling $63 later I was wishing I'd waited another hour for the airport bus! F**king rip-off merchant. Even in Singapore where the airport is just as distant the taxi's only a fraction of the price. I'm pretty pissed off but, you live and learn.
At least I have found that my debit card works ok - I had some hassle at the ATMs in Singapore but that could have been because I forgot my PIN. I had to use my debit card to pay for the hostel as the taxi prick relieved me of what little Australian cash I had on me.
There are penguins here in St Kilda, down at the breakwater, so I'm going on a penguin hunt later.

I blamed Wordpress for messing with the posting the other day. It wasn't them, it was Firefox. The hostel in Singapore had Firefox and this one here uses IE (which I normally use at home - I don't rate Firefox much, although it is better than IE for some things).