If it's Saturday we must be in Mebourne: capital of Victoria, Australia’s second biggest city, population 3.5 million. From the air, air huge sprawl of housing and greenery, with a prominent sky-scapered CBD down near the water. Solid, fine architecture, Hove to Sydney’s Brighton, if you get my drift

Picked up the rental car at the airport and drove to the hotel. We had printed of a route from Google Maps, and all was going well until, a couple of blocks from the hotel, a road we needed to go down was closed for road works. Trapped in the one way system, we drove around for a while, and eventually sought help from a guy running a pony-and–trap tourist ride. He was very helpful, and even stopped the traffic for us so we could do a U turn. You don’t get that in Worthing.

Our hotel is on the edge of Chinatown, so there are plenty of restaurants though, oddly, a lot seem to be Korean. A bit further along, Lygon Road is lined on both sides with eateries – Italian, Indian, Thai – so we’ll be in our element. We ate at Toto’s, the oldest pizza place in Australia (Established 1961! Inducted into the Pizza Hall of Fame!). Our waitress was a Londoner, doing a year out here before finishing her doctorate, in psychology. Later we met two ladies, weekending here from Adelaide. One grew up in Portsmouth, and is married to a man from Titchfield; the other has an Italian parent, and is married to a Ukrainian. Once the Portsmouth connection had been established, we were up and running. I read in the Qantas magazine in the plane that more than 50% of the current Australian population was either born abroad, or has at least one parent who was. That’s refreshing your gene pool on a major scale.

Tomorrow, some exploring.