Melbourne: Look Beyond the Headlines and Find the Adventure
Look beyond the headlines and Melbourne is full of food, culture, surprises and unforgettable adventures.
Melbourne has taken its share of knocks. We went looking beyond the headlines — and found food, family, laneways, beaches, trams, surprises and one hell of an adventure.
Melbourne has had a rough run in the headlines.
Cost of living. Crime. Safety. Politics. Empty shops. The endless Melbourne-versus-everywhere-else comparisons.
Some of those conversations are based on very real issues. A great city doesn’t stop having problems simply because visitors enjoy themselves.
But here’s the thing we were reminded of during this trip:
A city is much bigger than its headlines.
And if you actually get out there, explore it, follow the trams, wander down the laneways, eat the food, talk to people, take the wrong turn, try somewhere unexpected and leave enough room in the day for something you never planned…
Melbourne can be absolutely brilliant.
We know because that’s exactly what we did.
We didn’t really have a Melbourne checklist
There wasn’t a rigid itinerary.
No military operation designed to race between the greatest number of attractions in the shortest possible time.
We walked.
A lot.
We caught trams.
A lot.
We ate things because they looked good. Walked into pubs because they looked interesting. Disappeared down laneways because we wondered what was there.
We went looking for penguins and found precisely zero penguins.
We found a bizarre hot maple pecan pie drink instead.
We discovered that a genuinely great Malaysian dinner can apparently still cost $10.
We found beaches, markets, street art, old buildings, little bars, giant shopping centres, Melbourne Central’s clock, the Yarra after dark and enough food to make the kilometres almost necessary.
Across the first three days alone, we clocked up 52,690 steps and more than 36 kilometres on foot.
And somehow, none of it felt like we were working through a sightseeing list.
It felt like we were experiencing a city.
Maybe that’s Melbourne’s trick
Melbourne isn’t necessarily a city that gives everything away from the outset.
You have to look.
The great little bar might be downstairs.
The street art is down the laneway.
The brilliant food might be inside a market.
The next part of the adventure might simply require jumping aboard a tram without needing every detail planned first.
And once we approached Melbourne like that, it just kept delivering.
Interestingly, while the city has attracted plenty of negative headlines, people elsewhere are seeing something very different. In 2026, Time Out named Melbourne the best city in the world, after surveying more than 24,000 city-dwellers and drawing on a panel of more than 100 experts. Food, art, culture, nightlife and the overall experience of the city all helped put Melbourne on top.
Statistics aren’t why we loved it.
But perhaps they are a useful reminder that the Melbourne seen through a stream of bad news isn’t the only Melbourne that exists.
The other Melbourne is still very much there.
We found it.
The adventure, from the beginning
Four chapters. Four very different parts of the same adventure. Jump into any one — or start at Day One and come along for the whole ride.
Day One — Melbourne hits immediately
Brisbane to Melbourne: And We’re Off
A 4am start in Brisbane. Melbourne by around 9am.
And then we made the obvious decision to spend the rest of the day walking more than 20,000 steps.
Laneways. Street art. Grand old buildings. Trams. An Irish pub. A tiki bar. The Yarra glowing at night. And the Lions on a television screen at dinner just to make sure Brisbane hadn’t completely let us go.
This was the day Melbourne introduced itself.
And we were listening.
Day Two — We stopped pretending there was a plan
Melbourne Day 2: Trams, Markets & Detours
South Melbourne Market somehow became breakfast.
Then St Kilda.
Then the beach.
Then the unsuccessful Great Penguin Hunt.
Then shopping for some and the pub for others — a perfectly reasonable division of responsibilities.
Add Philly cheesesteaks, Kingpin, the Charles Dickens Inn, an unusual hot maple pecan pie drink and a ridiculously good $10 Malaysian dinner, and Day Two became exactly the sort of day you probably couldn’t have planned if you’d tried.
There wasn’t exactly a theme to the day.
And that was probably the best part.
Day Three — Melbourne kept changing
Melbourne Day 3: Markets, Brighton & Family Time
By Day Three, we’d earned something slightly slower.
Apparently our definition of “slower” still involved almost ten kilometres of walking.
There was Brighton Beach. Queen Victoria Market. Melbourne Central. An accidental perfectly timed encounter with its famous clock.
And then something even better: an afternoon and evening with family.
Because adventures don’t always have to be about doing more.
Sometimes they’re about slowing down enough to realise you’re already exactly where you want to be.
Then the reason for the trip came into focus
Shepparton: Family, Memories & a Few Cows
Melbourne was an adventure.
Shepparton was personal.
We took the train north from Southern Cross and traded Melbourne’s laneways for family, an amazing Vietnamese takeaway, the Shepparton Observation Tower, Nagambie, a surprising number of painted cows and a tour through Dad’s old stomping grounds.
But underneath all of that was the real reason we’d come south in the first place.
Family.
Time together. Stories. Memories. Catching up.
The sort of things you can’t put a value on — and the part of the adventure that mattered most.
So… what did we think of Melbourne?
Forget trying to declare Melbourne perfect.
It isn’t.
Neither is Brisbane. Neither is Sydney. Neither is anywhere else worth exploring.
But Melbourne reminded us of something much more interesting.
If all you ever see of somewhere is its headlines, you’re allowing somebody else to experience the world for you.
Go.
Walk the streets.
Catch the tram.
Find the market.
Order the weird drink.
Turn down the laneway.
Eat somewhere you’ve never heard of.
Talk to people.
Make the detour.
Look for the good stuff.
Because there is an enormous difference between hearing about a place and actually experiencing it.
We went to Melbourne with an open mind.
We came home with tired legs, full stomachs, hundreds of photos, some fantastic memories and a fairly simple conclusion:
Melbourne, we had an absolute ball.
And we’d do it all again.
The world is one big adventure.
DARE to go there!®