After four days of wonderfully sunny days, our fifth day in Melbourne finally saw inclement weather. Not quite to the extent the state experienced a week before we arrived, it did mean a somewhat more chilly morning. We returned to the Queen Victoria Market in the morning to get fresh fruits – tourists routinely always suffer from fruit and vitamin C deficiency when traveling – before making the 20 minute walk down Williams Street and across about the entire breadth of the city center to get to the Sea Life Aquarium. Like everywhere else in the city center, it’s a reasonably easy walk and pram/stroller friendly too.
The aquarium-park is the third of four parks we included in our itinerary for the kids, the fourth and last being Healesville Sanctuary that we’ll be visiting on Sunday. Over the recent years, I’ve visited Aquarium of the Bay @ San Francisco, the New England Aquarium @ Boston, Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan, and Singapore’s very own SEA Aquarium @ Resort Worlds Sentosa. The New England Aquarium remains my favorite, but the Melbourne one isn’t too bad – and has a couple of very interesting bits. Comments.:)
Admission is quite pricey at AUD40.50 and AUD26 for adults and older than 4 year old children respectively. We went with the the Family of 4 of AUD99 and saved ourselves a couple of dollars. The tickets as sold on the Aquarium’s web site permits a single visit over the course of 7 days, and you have the option of keeping an e-ticket that gets scanned at the ticketing booth. Pretty convenient.
The entrance to the park is a little flat and not quite as dressed up to give visitors the initial wow. In fact, despite it being not too old at about 16 years old – it opened in 2000 – the place looks like it could use a refurbishment soon, if nothing just to modernize some of its decor.
There’s a photographer right at the entrance who’ll take your family pictures, and have them digitally imposed onto a variety of settings. The printed photos come in an album that you’d be able to see at the exit, and decide if you’ll want to buy them. We plonked AUD59 for both albums since we don’t really have nearly as many family photos coming out of this trip as we’d like – and more importantly, the photos are also provided digitally for you to download at your leisure later too.
If there’s one particular highlight of Sea Life Aquarium that sets it apart from the others, it’s that this Aquarium from the get-go seems to set up for an educational park for children. The aquarium includes about 15 exhibits that are sequenced in a single-direction, and one follows the colorful signs to go from exhibit to exhibit. Many of the enclosures have little viewing galleries designed for kids to crawl into and get a very different perspective of each tank. There are also numerous activities and play areas for children, including a very special one where kids can color onto paper one of several critters, get it scanned next, and it’ll appear on the very large viewing display in short order. Very nifty and fun, and some adults even got into it too!
Three other exhibits were also especially memorable, often so because of the lively and informative accompanying them. The two million liter “Oceanarium in the round” has several viewing areas, each giving a different perspective of enclosure, and a couple of divers were also in the enclosure working in it. The largest viewing gallery of the Ocenarium isn’t quite the size of the Sentosa’s SEA Aquarium, but you still get nifty views. The Crocodile’s Lair also has another four meter long critter that was lazing about, but the great attending commentary provided fun bits of information about the fellow, more so because of the string of tragic accidents of late involving alligators and crocodiles around the world. The most interesting enclosure was the Penguin Playground, and again especially because of the informative commentary. We learned for example that penguins poop a lot – like every 20 minutes – and the keepers spend 4-5 hours every day just clearing up the colony’s poop. “So, who wants to be a penguin keeper?” the commentator quipped to everyone’s laughter.
All in, if you’re not with kids, and considering the admission prices, then I think the Sea Life Aquarium Melbourne is passable if you’ve seen better ones already. If you have kids though, then go for this one. A 2 hour visit is about sufficient, 3 hours if you want to take your time too.
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