A month spent cat-sitting in Melbourne | Housesitting in Australia for free

People we met on the internet let us have their house for a month. Here we were, two Brits in Australia, house-sitting Jinx, Jelly and Ally, the unsociable one. It was our first time in Australia and now we had a month to live in Melbourne and do whatever we wanted, as long as we were home in time to feed the cats. We'd just spent a few months living in hostels in the cramped cities of South East Asia and to house-sit in Melbourne after all that was an absolute dream. We had our own space to live and cook around food and get back to normal life without having to go home and give up travelling. When it's even remotely close to feeding time, they just look at us. Make a massive shake. A few, maybe like four or five days in Melbourne before we moved here, living like near the city centre. We're in the suburbs right now and I've been pretty much absolutely loving it. There's been a lot of opportunities to take like street photography. The biggest thing that I've been longing in the whole of South East Asia, there's space, there's space and there's time, there's clean air, there's pavement, cars wait for you, there are places where you can cross the road, there are traffic lights. We learned about indigenous Australian life, saw the penguins of St Kilda Beach and more kangaroos than you could shake a boomerang at. We're going to a gig tonight. We're going to go see Jeremy Loops, which I literally can't wait for, but before then, Molly has an interview. It's weird. For the people in the UK, it'll be like the first thing they do in the morning, but for us, it's not till like 6pm. Here she is and how did it go? Super well. We've had some very good news. I got a job. And we got things for pancakes this morning, taking me back to my Gilly A days when we were doing this every day. A lot cheaper there. Pretty good. Lost a bit of banana. No. That's all right. Now that's what I call a cake. Thank you. Yeah. Too good to resist. Ever since the business with my ACL the previous year, I've missed the mental and physical benefits of a good exercise routine and I knew Melbourne's open spaces and quiet streets would help me get back to it. So it's been nearly a year. So like it's June now and it was last August when I had my body in a working shape and I was running. I want that time in my life back and I'm going to try and take it today. There will be no running section on the vlog. Get loads of comments like, oh, copy Casey Neistat. But like I'm going to exempt myself from that. I ran my first marathon before he ever posted a vlog. So you know. So it happened. I don't feel amazing. I think my knees are a little bit achy, but it's not painful. One night in town, we saw these people holding up TVs that showed slaughterhouse footage and spoke to one of them for a while. We had a really interesting conversation about veganism, which ended with them telling us that the Australian fast food place we previously just walked past, Lord of the Fries, was 100% vegan. So here's how to make your own vegan lemon drizzle cake. I've been scouring the forums to see which locations are good for wildlife spotting and which ones you can get to on the bus. We've come about an hour out of the city to go to Warrandyte State Park because the internet said there were koalas there. This is what Coggy can't do. Everything is going wrong. Okay, this is the spot where apparently there's koalas. Still nothing. It's so hard to spot if there even are any here. We're going full hunter on this. I think it might be wombat. That would be cool to see too. We found quokkas first times. We found kangaroo the first time. If we can even see a wombat today, that would be good. That would be another must-see put on the list. But it feels like we're not going to see koalas on our first go. We just had a scare with those but we're pretty sure it's two birds, not one koala. Okay, koala dream is potentially over. But Molly just pointed out... Well, I mean, it's obvious. Look at how many kangaroos are over there. They're like creeping forward with the shadow of the trees so they're always in the sun. How many kangaroos are there? That is nuts. They're so weird. Just passing through, don't worry. The last grocery run before we say goodbye to the cats. I'm bringing Molly breakfast in bed. I'm going to the post office again because I've got a couple of birthdays in the family. This is our ultimate day in Melbourne. I never thought it would actually end. President Bill Clinton had two bolts, how many can you have? So that's why we couldn't find any koalas, they've all been turned into jerky. It took the whole month but they all love us. This is the last beer of the house sit, the last beer of Melbourne. Which I'm really sad about. But I've made sweet and sour tofu. Which I'm very happy about. Melbourne is a gorgeous, diverse, fun, functional and clean city and experiencing it while house-sitting was the best thing. We were staying in a nice house for free with three cats and by the end of that month even shy old Alec was on our bed every night. Melbourne gave us time to rest and research the next part of the trip while still having a good time seeing new places. After a weekend in Sydney we were moving on to Japan which is somewhere that I'd wanted to go for forever. But even Japan didn't make it easy to leave the cats or to leave the house or to leave the city where we'd had the best month of our lives.