A lifelong saga describing the joys and sorrows, trials and tribulations, of a not-so-ordinary Englishman from childhood to retirement and his search for true love and the perfect nest.
Author: Taran
Born into a middle-class English family, Taran was educated at a minor UK public-school and graduated from Imperial College, London as a mechanical engineer. He worked variously as a marine engineer, a marine surveyor, a company owner and as an industrial accidents investigator. He is a family man although now divorced from the mother of his two sons. He has travelled the world extensively, often as part of his employment, but also many times simply for the pleasure of experiencing new countries their cultures and their people. As well as calling England his home for much of his life, he is also a citizen of Canada where he lived for seventeen years and has had homes in Nigeria and Kuwait. Now retired, he lives in California, happily married to his second wife, and close to both his sons and his grandchildren. He continues to travel as often as possible and is enjoying his dream of becoming a writer.
The excitement is starting to build, the basic itinerary is all planned, flights have been booked, some places to stay have been found; but still we aren’t sure we are going to see what we want.
Earlier this year Celine and I returned from a road-trip vacation in Australia, telling everyone including ourselves, that we were going to Italy in the autumn. The world may well be our oyster but we are fairly sure now that the pearl we seek therein is somewhere close to the Mediterranean. You see we love Europe and all things European, and Italy always seems to be the country that has a stronger pull on us than everywhere else in the Old World. We have already spent altogether the best part of a year, scouting out France, the Basque Country, a wee bit of Liguria in northern Italy and a fairly unspoilt old fishing village on the Costa Brava in north Spain. We have even made a few visits back to the lands of our forefathers in Poland and England, but nowadays neither has the magic force needed to make us pick up sticks, pack our bags and build a new nest. What is lacking in one place, we find by the bucketful in others, and what we love about another place lacks that which we found in the first place. Dangerously for us we can be very impulsive; consequently we very nearly made three or four extremely rash, instant, house-buying decisions, but luckily our nerves got the better of us and our money still sits, safely we hope, in the vaults of England’s ancient high-street banks.
So we made the decision to satisfy that inner longing that both of us have for La Bella Italia, did some fairly basic research, and decided to make our base camp in an area of the country, the region of Abruzzo, of which neither of us has any prior experience but which seemed to have great potential for various reasons. But all the time, nagging thoughts rattled around in the back of my mind, that perhaps Portugal should also be given due consideration before we allowed ourselves to fall in love with yet one more location, which may or may not be as ideal as it seems at that moment. And that is where good fortune started to provide us with the bare bones of an itinerary that may, perhaps, put nagging thoughts to bedforever and give us good cause to pursue just one road along which to find our new home, well for a while at least!
For several years now I have been an avid though occasionally cynical reader of the outpourings of a couple of organisations that specialise in giving advice to wannabe emigrants such as my wife and me. The cynicism arises as much as anything the result of the constant flow of copy aimed at my wallet more than my heart. Nevertheless, I have continued to read much of this material in the belief that basically both companies care for the well-being of their readers and the aspirations of those readers to find better lives for themselves; the constant barrage of letters and articles advertising this or that new publication, conference or special membership, I trust to be simply the means by which these hopefully philanthropic publishers can continue to thrive. Thus our, or rather initially my, choice of Abruzzo had been influenced not inconsiderably by their enthusiastic writings. Celine and I began to delve more deeply into the offerings of this Italian province that we understood as being, in effect, the poorer man’s Tuscany, the undiscovered part of Italy that was every bit as beautiful as its neighbour to the west, and more affordable to the average person trying to make the best of their meagre pension. Taking our research beyond the aforementioned outpourings, we began watching videos on YouTube and, worryingly, realising that the poverty of the region might be more depressing than we were willing to live with. But the charms of the Italy that we had both been seduced by in the past continued to sway our thoughts and then, lo and behold, we read that one of the two organisations was arranging a conference to be held in Abruzzo during the time we were due to be over there. This seemed an ideal chance to both glean loads of useful information about everything to do with a new life in Italy, and to put to the test my sometimes waning faith in the organisers.
At last our travel plans had a focal point and we could get on with the nitty-gritty of planning in more detail. We booked our flights between Los Angeles and Rome and suddenly we were past the point of no return. But there is always a fly in the ointment and this time the fly was Portugal, for no sooner had we fixated our thoughts on Italy than we received details of a ten-day tour being promoted by “the other organisation” to give people like us a taste of the delights of living in Portugal and Spain; and the dates fitted in ideally with our eastbound flight to Rome. Of course we soon discovered that the cost of changing our flight to make our first European landfall in Lisbon was astronomical, and we chose instead to back-track from Rome to Lisbon, allowing ourselves to first of all luxuriate in the former city for three days. So now we have the best of both worlds before us. We will have a chance to experience to varying degrees, the two remaining countries on our search list, Portugal and Italy. We will get to compare the abilities of the two organisations whose publications have been so instrumental in keeping alive our desires to find a better place to live, and with luck we will return to sunny, overcrowded Southern California at year’s end with an even clearer idea of what the future holds for us.
Now all that we have to do is to reserve a few more accommodations, rent a car suitable for the vagaries of Italian driving and the narrow streets of the many hilltop towns we expect to visit in Italy, add a few basic phrases of Portuguese to our linguistic “skills”, and enjoy yet another stage in our search for the future. But who knows what we’ll be thinking by the time we get home again!
As a regular reader of www.taranstales.net you will have already learnt about our great side-trip to Darwin and the Kakadu and Litchfield National Parks; this was the last part of our travelling in Oz and the only part where we entrusted the driving to others and enjoyed the relaxation of being passengers. However, between our arrival back at my sister’s home in Bli Bli on the Sunshine Coast and our flight to Darwin, we got to know a bit more about life in southern Queensland.
We had spent the previous five weeks driving more than seven thousand kilometres, visiting three out of six Australian states or territories and sleeping in at least fifteen different beds, so getting back to Cescy’s house seemed like arriving ‘home’; at long last we could sleep in if we wanted and we didn’t have to re-pack each morning. Still, itchy feet made sure we didn’t get too settled and as we still had our rental car plus the additional luxury of occasionally being chauffeured around by Cescy and Richard, we were soon on the move again, albeit day-tripping only.
For our first local trip all four of us went to the Saturday market at Eumundi, a seemingly prosperous inland small town about twenty kilometres north of Bli Bli. What started out as a twice-weekly farmers’ market has blossomed and is now one of the largest country markets in the region. One could spend hours there as the range of goods was enormous, mainly lots of artisan work plus the usual gaggle of specialist juices, coffees and ethnic foods, and with stalls selling local farm produce seemingly very much in the minority. It was all rather civilised though and not really as much fun as the Fisherman’s Road market we had been to back in February, and nowhere near as outlandish as the small-town markets we enjoyed in France a year before.
In the end all that Celine and I came away with were a beautiful framed photograph of the local scenery, a CD of Didgeridoo music, a painting of local birds and a koala, and some traditional wooden toys for the grandkids “just like wot we ‘ad as children“; then we all chatted over coffee in a café across the road, enjoying the ambience of market day along with the music of The Raw Cigar Box Blues band.
Still nervous about letting the grass grow under our feet, the next morning we soon abandoned ideas of being sensible and checking our over-used credit card and sinking bank balances; instead we obeyed my inner man and went to a local food festival in Maroochydore. We bravely managed to avoid the many tempting but unhealthy offerings and instead shared a couple of actually very scrummy, veggie-filled, gluten-free tapiocawraps; apparently this use of tapioca is an old Brazilian recipe but it was definitely a first in our joint culinary experience. We followed that up with some beers, ginger for Celine and a very tasty schooner of Balter XPA for me, before getting home to a joyful reunion with my younger niece, Phillipa, the one member of that generation of the family I hadn’t seen for more than thirty years.
She hadn’t changed much at all and seemed anything but a stranger. She and her husband Mark moved to Margaret River in Western Australia many years ago ‘cos of the wonderful surfing to be found on that coast; the love of surfing is a recurring theme with nearly everyone in that generation of the McKenzie family, just like practically all Australians brought up on the coast it seems. So it was no surprise to learn that she and son George were spending most of their time in Queensland testing out the east coast surf again; after all this bronzed Aussie surfing girl was once the Australian Senior Women’s Champion, a ‘relly’ to be really proud of!!
We had another large family supper together that evening and all agreed that we should take a family outing to Australia Zoo, the last chance for Celine and I to see some of Australia’s more elusive animals that we had missed on our travels. Australia Zoo is a wildlife conservation facility set up by the crocodile hunter Steve Irwin and his wife Terri, and it was inevitable that a show involving salt-water crocodiles was a ‘must-do’ part of the visit. It was somewhat contrived however, and the big croc that Terri and the younger Irwins, Robert and Bindi, were enticing to jump up and grab the proffered lumps of dead flesh, seemed to have lost some of his man-eating hunger and had become rather bored with the whole business of being a circus performer. Still, the wild birds that opened the show did some impressive flying tricks, including one large parrot whose speciality was to grab, in flight, a five dollar bill from the hand of a spectator standing up in the bleachers. It reminded me a bit of the cake-grabbing kookaburra in Sydney’s Botanic Garden (see Oz 2018 Part 2).
The rest of the visit, however, was eminently more satisfying than the croc show. We saw a very friendly-looking Tasmanian Devil – friendly that is until he opened his mouth wide and showed us his bone crushing fangs – who evidently wasn’t aware they are nocturnal animals.
Our first live wombat was only slightly camera shy, the komodo dragon was impressive compared to the other lizards, the dingoes were rightly proud-looking animals, even if they are described in Wikipedia as merely being feral dogs of debatable taxonomic status,
and the mainly vegetarian red panda and the omniverous binturong were cuddly, regardless of their predatory eating habits!
Lots of beautiful birds though some, such as the bush turkey and the endangered cassowary, were not quite so endearing!
And yet, even though we had already seen plenty in the wild, the kangaroos and koalas were the real scene stealers, especially as we were able to get up-close and personal with them.
In another encounter with Australia’s wildlife, Celine had an amusing meeting with parrots at Maleny Botanic Gardens. We felt we needed to take another look at the Glass House Mountains in real life, after purchasing a beautiful photograph of them at Eumundi market. The weather was somewhat threatening near the coast but unperturbed we took the pretty route out to Maleny again, only to see the mountains disappearing as they were quickly engulfed by the low clouds drifting inland; it also started raining so we paused to consider our options, and retired to the café for coffees and cake. Once the rain had stopped, the idea of a rain-forest walk appealed initially but we soon abandoned that plan as well, realising we lacked the necessary insect repellent, suitable waterproof gear and leech-resistant boots. Instead we started to head home and after a couple of kilometres came upon the aforesaid botanic gardens. Of course just as we were about to pay our entrance fee, the heavens opened up again, and as we were about to return to the car, we met the owner of the gardens who asked us if I would like to take a photograph of Celine holding one of his parrots. Well we thought he meant ‘one’, but with both arms outstretched, Celine soon had ten of the lovely birds perched upon her, all of whom were very polite and well-behaved including the large white cockatiel on her head.
The rain continued on and off for the next few days but we still managed a couple more local walks. We had a bit of trouble finding the start of the trail up Mt Ninderry that towers above Yandina, but when we did eventually arrive we were greeted in true Aussie style by a couple of kangaroos enjoying the neighbours’ grass. The effort was well worth while as we enjoyed a wonderful hike up a fairly steep, partially stepped path through pretty open woodland to the top, from where we had good views from a couple of designated look-outs; plus we found a bonus spot where we stood right on the edge of a rocky promontory, watching various birds of prey flying by below us. The only sad part was seeing the three monuments to young people who had chosen to end their lives from that same precipitous outcrop.
Other outings we took that week included a fleeting visit to the heavily developed and extremely busy beach town of Noosa Heads. And finally to get away from the madding crowds, we took a gentle stroll along the Heritage Tramway Walk in Mons, a village a couple of kilometres outside Buderim. This lovely, almost level walk skirts around the edge of very steep hilly terrain, now covered in re-growth sub-tropical forest. It follows a 2 kilometre segment of the the Buderim to Palmwoods railway line that was built in the early 1900’s to help local farmers to move their produce, fruit and timber etc to the main-line station at Palmwoods and thence to market in Brisbane. Built entirely manually without mechanical aids, it is a fairly impressive piece of civil engineering from the mainly horse-powered age (https://www.buderim.com/tramway).
And so the day arrived for us to start out on our Kakadu adventure; but as our plane departed from Brisbane airport, we gratefully took advantage of yet another invite to relly-surf, this time with my godson David’s younger daughter, Alyce, and her boyfriend, Kris, who live in a green suburb a short drive from the centre of Brisbane. We arrived to find they had kindly planned a very complete day’s entertainment for us starting with a hike up Mount Coot’Tha. Less than five kilometres from Brisbane’s CBD, the look-out on the top gave us marvellous views of the city laid out below and out to the offshore islands protecting Moreton Bay.
We didn’t tarry too long as we still had to hike back down to their car, and they had easily realised that my speed on the trail was no match for their fit young legs! After a quick change back at their house, we headed out again with the back of their SUV full of a portable gas barbecue and coolers of food and beers. This time we made a bee-line for the grassy park atop Kangaroo Point Cliffs Park , a popular downtown picnic spot overlooking the Brisbane River, so popular that Sunday evening that by the time we arrived parking was hard to find and many of the picnic tables had already been bagged. So with a slight change of plan we opted to picnic closer to the water; and as the sun set and the lights of Brisbane’s business district started to reflect on the river, we settled down to a wonderful dinner of barbecued steaks and all the trimmings.
The next morning being a Monday, we awoke long after Alyce and Kris had left to pursue their medical careers in the city, and only Harold the cat remained to see us safely off the premises. We took our time leaving their happy period home, built very much in the original Brisbane style, eventually driving to the south bank and parking in the bargain-priced Performing Arts Centre Car Park. There was lots to see in that very attractive city and we started off by visiting the Queensland Art Gallery. They had there, a very interesting collection of 20th century aboriginal art, much of which was inspired by Albert Namatjira, a resident of a mission in the McDonnell Ranges, who decided to break away from the traditions of his people, with their abstract designs and symbols, and started to paint beautiful watercolours of the outback, in imitation of Western artists.
His story makes fascinating reading, and he even became the first Aboriginal to be granted restricted Australian citizenship.
The other major gallery in that area of the city is the Gallery of Modern Art, which we found much less interesting, and so we walked across the unusually designed Kurilpa foot bridge and onto George Street in the CBD. The city centre has its fair share of modern buildings, all the same we enjoyed our walk towards the Botanical Gardens, where we had proposed to meet Alyce’s sister, Danielle, for lunch; however, after a rather slow meander through the park, we arrived rather too late for lunch and found the café had just closed. So we grabbed a quick snack at the university refectory and continued on our way, following the riverside path until crossing the Goodwill pedestrian bridge back to the south bank.
The Commonwealth Games were still taking place, the official opening of which was the reason for Prince Charles’ visit to the country; so after walking past the Maritime Museum and an artificial “beach” where children were playing in the sand, we stopped at a riverside café for a well-earned rest and to enjoy our coffees and “patisseries” as we watched the day’s events on a massive TV screen at the riverside. Eventually it was time to drive to the airport, drop off our trusty Nissan X-Trail SUV, and catch our evening flight to hot sweaty Darwin.
The Kakadu trip was really our swan-song as we only had three more days back in Bli Bli before we had to pack our bags and get ready to fly home. Cescy had organised one more lovely family luncheon with the local McKenzies, which also served as a joint early birthday bash for David and myself. And then on our last night the four of us, Cescy, Richard, Celine and I, had dinner at Maroochydore Surf Club, a cross between a fancy yacht club and a typical Aussie “hotel” complete with the Totalisator Agency Board (“TAB”) TV screens for betting on televised horse and dog racing, and a small casino which was actually no more than a room full of fruit machines and an ongoing weekly high-value raffle; they certainly enjoy their betting in Australia. Still the food was good value, and the club provided a free shuttle service to and from home so no complaints from this one.
All good things come to an end and after ten wonderful weeks exploring the eastern side of Australia the time came to say our farewells. You can only “relly -surf” for so long before they begin to fear you might be moving in, but it was a risk worth taking as we had some delightful times with them all. The trip was a real eye-opener for Celine and I, as we had arrived with no expectations other than we were going to see lots of interesting wild animals and birds, and meet all the McKenzie clan; and so we were surprised to find ourselves at times actually wondering whether we should consider migrating to such a fine country. I think that much of this had to do with the ease with which we struck up so many friendly conversations with the locals, ‘cos of the common language; though we did also find many attractive small towns and some very beautiful countryside which would have been easy to live amongst.
All the same, Europe is still very much in our blood, and Australia offered very little of the cultural heritage we so enjoy. Anyway, thank you Australia and all our family there for giving us such a wonderful holiday and showing us so much natural beauty; we certainly hope we’ll see you all again ‘ere long, but no, we don’t see ourselves applying for Aussie residence visas in the near future. Instead we are deep into planning our next foray into the Old World, this time to Italy, basing ourselves in the province of Abruzzo. We fly mid-September and I hope to be travel-blogging again soon.
Saturday morning, 14th April, and it’s around thirty-two degrees centigrade outside, the humidity is just less than 90%, and partly obscuring the clear blue skies, lots of big dark grey cumulus clouds are stacking up in the distance preparing for another short sharp late-afternoon thunder-shower. It has been like that for the last three days, ideal weather to visit this tropical tip of the Northern Territory as nature starts to recover from the wet season and prepare itself for the annual dry-season onslaught of 200,000 camera-toting tourists.
We came to Australia’s ‘Top End’ to see the famous – infamous?? –“salties’, the salt water crocodiles that inhabit the waters all around, fresh, brackish and saline. As the largest crocodile in the world, and being extremely carniverous, they have rightly claimed a place in the tourist bucket list of dangerous animals to be seen but not touched; a ‘glamping’ tour of Kakadu National Park promised to give us the chance to see them up close and in the wild.
Darwin Airport is rather unusual in allowing flights to land at all hours of the night and so our 01.00 arrival at the Palm City Resort in downtown Darwin was quite normal to everyone except ourselves! As we have done for much of this Aussie saga, we used AirBnB to find our accommodation for a couple of nights before heading off into the wilderness of Kakadu and we were somewhat surprised to learn that hotel rooms are now considered “couch-surfing” territory. Still, in spite of the lack of ‘homeliness’ we get from sharing someone’s home, it was comfortable enough and very convenient for exploring Darwin’s Central Business District – “CBD” in the local vernacular – which is how we set about acclimatising ourselves the following day. Darwin is a modern city lacking the charm of some of the other state capitals we have visited over the last couple of months; there is good reason for this, namely the terrble destruction wrought by Cyclone Tracy in 1974, which flattened virtually the complete city. As we wandered past Parliament Building we encountered a couple of motorcycle cops barring the road with their flashing blue lights who told us that, as the royals tend to do so often, Prince Charles was about to plant a tree.
Unsure whether or not this ceremony was open to the public, we stood by the iron railings of Government House, along with precisely two other members of the great proletariat, carefully watched by a security type who seemed somewhat surprised by our presence. As one of the assorted staff told the waiting media, “He just won’t stop chatting”, but Australia’s future king eventually came out after his luncheon as the guest of Vicky O’Halloran, the Administrator of Northern Territory. He chatted with some of the waiting minions, fellow guests apparently, shovelled two or three spades full of clean soil around the already planted tree, swapped horticultural niceties with the gardener who was the keeper of the royal spade, and drove off into the afternoon sunshine having completed his regal duties in Darwin.
We arrived in Australia having only limited knowledge about the indigenous population, the aborigines and the Torres Islanders. Visits to one or two museums – the National Gallery in Canberra in particular – had enlightened us somewhat, in spite of the predominance of displayed material about the lives of the early European settlers. But with a few exceptions, we hadn’t seen many aborigines in the cities, towns and villages we had visited. Our flight from Brisbane gave us our first close encounter when in the departure lounge we met a lovely group of Jawoyn ladies from Katherine, a town some 300km south of Darwin, on their way back from an International Women’s Federation conference that we think was part of the Commonwealth Games activities.Their laughter was totally infectious and they enjoyed having their photograph taken with Celine as much as we appreciated being part of their happiness. The streets of Darwin sadly presented a very different view of life for these people who have been so poorly treated ever since the white man arrived.
We have plenty of hopeless, homeless people in California but they don’t stick out in quite the same way as the many beautiful black faces we saw squatting alone or in groups, or wandering along the sidewalks, some slightly the worse for wear. The inequality of this still quite racial society became quite apparent, confirming what we had suspected but rarely witnessed earlier in our travels. We stopped in a small gallery that sold only aboriginal art, much of it being produced on site by a group of artists working cross legged on the floor; and there we bought another memento to remind us of our trip in future years, a stylised wooden carving of a Jabiru, the black-necked stork that is found in the local swamplands.
Booking tours in such a popular tourist destination is often a bit hit and miss, but we seem to have been reasonably lucky in our choice of WayOutBack Tours. Trish, our Irish-Aussie guide for the “3-Day Dragonfly Dreaming” tour of the parks, arrived fairly promptly around the appointed hour of 06.30am on Wednesday morning, and we were soon comfortably ensconced into our seats aboard “Ziggy”, the seventeen seater, 4WD, Isuzu truck-based bus that was to be our transport for the next three days. Kakadu NP is a vast area covering some 20,000 square kilometres – about the size of Wales – and although ‘relatively’ close to Darwin, our first day’s destination was a good three-hours-plus drive away; nothing is ever very close by in this vast continent of a country.Our first stop was a short visit to Window on the Wetlands, an educational building on a small hill overlooking green pastures of the Adelaide River valley. This was followed by a picnic lunch at Jabiru.
Later on, a couple of side excursions to see some examples of aboriginal rock art at Anbangbang gave us a chance to stretch our legs on short walks up among the rock formations along the edge of the Arnhem Land Escarpment.
The second of these, a steep clamber partway up the side of Nawurlandja (aka Nourlangie Rock), presented us with expansive views over the surrounding countryside and towards Arnhem Land in the distance, an area that remains forbidden territory to permit-less tourists such as ourslelves.
Our destination that evening was the Cooinda Lodge Gagadju, a campsite and motel owned by the Murrumburr people who are the traditional owners of the surrounding land, though now operated by the Accor Hotel Group. When booking the tour, the idea of sleeping under canvas for a couple of nights seemed rather appealing but when we arrived, tired, hot and sweaty, aware of the unkempt grassy walk between “fixed tents” – the “glam” part of glamping – and the ablution and toilet facilities, and the threatening dark black clouds and the swarms of insects flying around, we were quite glad we had taken the advice of a couple of our fellow travellers and requested a late upgrade to a cabin, which turned out to be as good as many a multi-starred hotel room we’ve stayed in over the years! We still enjoyed a communal dinner with our fellow travellers in the group kitchen tent and afterwards experienced the challenge of finding our torchless way back to our cabin in the total blackness of the outback nights before the heavens opened up once again.
Thursday started with a leisurely breakfast of cereals, toast and coffee, preparing ourselves for what would prove to be the highlight of the tour, two hours aboard a boat gliding along the waters of the North Alligator River, mistakenly named by the original white settlers who didn’t know the difference between ‘gators and crocs. Mandy, our Murrumburr guide, happy boat driver, and a wealth of local knowledge, was a delightful lady, full of tales from her life in this land of Ngurrudjurrudjba, which translates as Yellow Water. Her well-worn PA system was a bit unreliable and so we missed a lot of what she had to say and point out to us; nevertheless, we did see four of the “salties” we had been hoping for, three floating motionless and the fourth, quite a “big boy”, lying on the mud among the tree roots at the water’s edge.
Identifiable birdlife was pretty good as well: a couple of beautiful Black-necked storks or Jabiru in the local lingo, one or two Magpie Geese, two flocks of Plumed Whistling Ducks puddling in the riverside mud, Pacific Black Ducks, Snake-neck Darters, Magpie Geese, Cattle Egrets standing motionless among the tall riverside grass, a gang of Corellas squawking in the treetops and a very delicate Comb-crested Jacana guarding its two eggs laid among the lily-pads. The experience of floating along in such pristine wilderness, surrounded by nature on all sides, was sublime, and the time went by far quicker than we would have wished. All too soon, we were back aboard the bus being driven along the still flooded road to the lodge where Ziggy waited with Trish at the wheel to take us on another two hour drive to our next overnight stop near the entrance to Litchfield National Park.
While seeing the wild life and especially the salties is perhaps the major draw of this part of Australia, the tropical scenery has to come a close second. However, travelling with a group in a bus means one is very much at the mercy of the tour guide and we rather missed being our own masters, stopping as and when the whim takes us as had been the case when we were driving ourselves earlier in our trip.
All the same, we did stop at some very beautiful places of which our next destination was a perfect example, an unidentified, deep pool beneath a small waterfall surrounded by fern-covered rocks and tropical forest. “Swimmers” had been the dress order of the day, and once the bus had parked, a short walk through the forest found us ready to divest ourselves of our walking gear and take the plunge.
Other tour groups had got there before us and the place was already quite busy when we arrived, but after staking our claim for a rocky corner on which to deposit our belongings, most of us slid off the edge of the rocks into the deliciously cool water, and even those less keen swimmers took full advantage of its blissful refreshing properties.
The destination for our second night of “glamping” was what had once been an enormous cattle station. Mount Bundy Station was established in 1911 and in those days covered an area of 2160 sq.km. The tourist part of the station, close to the banks of the Adelaide River, is now more of a hobby farm; the area around the original station buildings offers both camping facilities, including the permanent tents that are jokingly considered to provide glamorous camping, as well as rooms in what were once the stockmen’s sleeping quarters. We again opted for one of the latter which was certainly a step up from a hot, mosquito-infested, fixed tent, but hardly The Ritz!
The main social meeting place is small bar complete with a miniature horse that hangs around among the customers and a swarm of cane toads that hide under the ancient beer cooler. Several regulars, including a few who came to visit years ago and have found it hard to leave and help with the chores to pay their rent, give the place a friendly atmosphere that make it one of those places one would be happy to return to if one ever happened to travel that way again. We took a couple of peaceful walks around the grounds, made friends with Nigel, the Brahmin bull, failed to see the pet pig, and tried in vain to photograph the many rather skittish wallabies that disappeared into the bushes near the river as soon as they were looked at.
Friday the 13th April was our last day of the tour and the main attractions of the day were the pools and waterfalls for which Litchfield NP is best known. We had an early start, just in time to see the sun rise and then disappear behind threatening grey clouds;peacocks and a jabiru were wandering the grounds, the wallabies were hopping everywhere and four highly-spirited horses were running around the adjacent field, enjoying the early morning dampness of the grass. Driving back along the Stuart Highway we judiciously gave road space to several of the ubiquitous 50+m long road-trains, most of which were hauling cattle. Flooding is another regular part of life in Australia’s Top End; our road passed through the town of Adelaide River where the river had risen 11m in January, the highest for years, causing the town to be evacuated for three days.
Just outside the town of Batchelor, best known for the Batchelor Institute, a technical and further education college with a strong focus on providing higher education opportunities for indigenous students from all over Australia, we stopped for a pee-break at the Banyan Tree Cafe.
Pytheta, the owner of the cafe, has a pet Children’s Python – a non-venomous snake named after the zoologist, John G Children – which a few of us were lucky enough to hold and discover how powerful these snakes are as they hang on to your arm, or neck!
And soon it was time for our first swim of the day at Buley Rockhole, a small pool just deep enough to jump into safely with a miniature waterfall at one end and a natural infinity pool effect at the other end where the stream cascades over the rocky ledge. We luxuriated in the warm water for much longer than Trish had anticipated, until eventually we reluctantly departed not realising that our next stop, at Florence Creek Falls, would be just as wonderful.
The day was marching on and so while Trish prepared lunch, we all trod the 150+ steps down to the pool, stopping only at the lookout for a birds-eye view on the way down. This pool was very different from Buley Rockhole.
The water was extremely deep, the twin 20m high falls were in full spate and the resulting current across the large pool was so strong that swimming straight to the falls was well nigh impossible for all except the strongest swimmers. It was also quite crowded so we didn’t overstay our welcome and while some lingered, Celine and I took the scenic route back up to the car park along Shady Creek Walk, to find lunch awaiting us laid out on the rather grubby picnic table. Lunch this day was the leftovers from the trip so not much of a surprise, but welcome all the same after our healthy morning activities.
The afternoon involved another fairly long drive so a lot more sitting in the bus, but we did make a couple more stops to prevent terminal stiff-leg syndrome setting in. The first wasto look at another fine waterfall, Tolmer Falls at the edge of Table Top Plateau, which we viewed from a very smart wheel-chair accessible platform. These falls drop some 40m into a plunge pool which is no longer accessible for swimming; it seems that this prohibition resulted from some thoughtless people who had been throwing stones at a rare colony of bats living in a cave near the base of the falls.
The second stop was at the “pièce de résistance” of Litchfield Park, Wangi Falls, a segmented waterfall dropping 54m into a large pool, that was also closed to bathers when we visited as it had not yet been declared clear of crocodiles; the rangers need to have at least six weeks of croc-free waters at the end of the wet season before they will run the risk of allowing people to swim in any of the pools, except for those that are high enough to be out of saltie territory!
Just one more stop to look at the Magnetic Termite Hills, an impressive demonstration of nature’s ingenuity in building structures that have minimal exposure to the midday sun, and then we were on our way back to Darwin. As we arrived at our respective hotels, we each made our brief farewells to our travelling companions and returned to urbanity once more. Celine and I gave ourselves a much deserved gourmet dinner at “Moorish Cafe”, which offered an eclectic mix of Spanish Tapas and North African cuisine, before retiring to our room, catching up on our electronic mail, watching part of a movie, and then falling gratefully into bed.
The next morning, on the way to the airport, we had time to make a brief but very educational stop at The Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory, with its well presented collection of modern aboriginal art; most of the artworks were an expression of frustration with the convoluted workings of the Australian Human Rights Commission and the legislation that it generated. We also learned more about the effects of Cyclone Tracy, and got close to lots of stuffed birds and animals, most of which we never got to see, or at least recognise, in the wild.
All-in-all we had had a fascinating three day adventure; it was not exactly what we had expected in some ways but was well worth making the detour. We didn’t manage to see crocodiles jumping out of the water, but that was perhaps because our boat tour was aimed more at giving us an understanding of aboriginal life in the swampy wetlands of the Kakadu, rather than doing the touristy thing. We felt slightly short changed by the small selection of wild animals we saw. And like others who had written reviews in the past, we were disappointed by the large amount of time that was spent sitting in the bus. But then again, as we had already discovered for ourselves Australia is a big place and always involves a lot of travelling; and wild animals are very often elusive at the best of times!
Coming soon:
Oz 2018 – Part 6 – No worries, mate, see you ‘gain sometime!
It would have been rude to omit a visit to the capital city of the fine country we had been exploring these last five weeks, and conveniently our excursion to see Mt.Kośziucko had positioned us nicely to ensure such an offence was not committed. In choosing which route to take each morning, Google maps would often give us a couple of options. Whenever I saw an alternative route including a road with an interesting name such as “Snowy Mountain Highway”, that not only went in the right general direction but also veered off onto a “road less travelled” through yet another National Park, I would be tempted to take it even if Google advised it would take somewhat longer than the more obvious route following a major road.
So soon after we left the resort town of Jindabyne behind us, we turned northwards on the B72 in the direction of Adaminaby keeping a keen eye open for a minor road taking us into Namadgi NP in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. Once found, this narrow road immediately made known its true character as it divested itself of tarmac, eliciting some slightly negative feelings from my co-pilot who, rather unusually, suggested that we might see the same scenery from a “proper road”. Driving on dirt roads was exactly the reason we had chosen to rent a half decent 4WD SUV, and my confidence in that decision was well rewarded as we drove into some superb up-country bush passing by the very occasional isolated farm.
One house in particular caught our attention with its rusting corrugated iron roofs, the lines of washing strung between trees and the nearby hydro pole, kids’ bicycles lying on the ground outside the fence and a child bouncing on a dilapidated trampoline. A young teenager walking his horse through a gate gave us a long stare as if questioning our presence, and with no sign of other habitations in any direction the place felt very remote.
We stopped nearby for our picnic lunch next to some large rocks and to take in the beautiful views of the surrounding countryside as we also watched the antics of a flock of rose-breasted Galah cockatoos, as they struggled to perch on the hydro wires. And we saw our first wild wombat, though sadly as yet another example of road kill.
The dirt road continued onwards and upwards, passing a gate of lost shoes, mementoes of travellers past, and as we entered the park itself, a sign advising us about poisoned baits put down for wild dogs; then somewhat ironically in view of the last hour’s driving, a second sign warned us to drive slowly as ahead of us we had another 19km of narrow winding gravel road with blind crests and curves! And it was a thoroughly enjoyable drive, with sightings of kangaroos bouncing along among the eucalyptus trees, and a short stop for a walk beside Rendezvous Creek, among huge rocks and some pretty red-trunked gum trees, with the sweet sound of the creek running close by. Finally around 6pm we arrived in Garran, a suburb of Canberra, where we were met by Matthew, our host for the next couple of nights.
As well as adding to our list of state capitals visited, Canberra is also home to the National Museum, where we had been told there was a fund of information about Australia, both after andbefore it was settled by the early white immigrants. We had come to realise that the fate of Australia’s original inhabitants was not something that seemed to cause much concern to many people, including some of our own family, and we were eager to learn more about these neglected people who had once lived so proudly in such harsh lands. The first few galleries in the museum focused on the white settlers, how they struggled to adapt their European ways and the farming knowledge they brought with them, to live successfully in the very different conditions they found surrounded by nature that was completely alien to them.
Their story was interesting enough in its own way, but it was bizarre to realise that they appeared to make little or no attempt to learn from the locals, indeed finding them to be more of a nuisance than a fund of knowledge. So we were very pleased to finally find ourselves in a couple of galleries where we learnt the aboriginals’ side of the story as told by many elders with first-hand experience of their treatment as second-class “citizens”, and gleaned much historical detail passed down through their families. The fates of many of the Stolen Children, the half-caste children of Australian Aboriginals and of Torres Strait Islanders who had inter-married with the white settlers, who were forcefully removed from their families to be brought up in mission schools and white foster homes, is another particularly dark period in white man’s relations with Australia’s native peoples, and was well documented in the exhibits.
We ended up spending most of the day in the museum, which was just as well, it being a grey rainy day outside. When we eventually left, we took a tour around Canberra’s CBD and the artificial lake overlooked by The National Carillon. This latter edifice is a bell-tower gifted to Australia by Great Britain to celebrate the 50thanniversary of the founding of Canberra, a purpose-built capital city that had been much maligned in its early years as “a cemetery with lights”, “the ruin of a good sheep station” and “six suburbs in search of a city”. And after driving around the CBD I’m sorry to say that neither of us was overly impressed by this rather ordinary city, full of post-war concrete architecture, and having a city-centre that was both dirty and untidy and had little about it that was graceful. It was in fact a pleasure to get back to our little pad out in the ‘burbs’ and the welcoming sounds of the birds in the trees.
Leaving Canberra the next morning, we continued heading north towards Orange. The drive took us through yet more agricultural lands with the now familiar scatterings of sheep and cattle, and as the day wore on, the scenery became more hilly and greener. As we got closer to Orange, we passed lots of fruit orchards and vineyards, though with many more kilometres still to travel, we decided against stopping to taste the latter’s produce! In the afternoon, as weariness began to take its toll, we arrived in the small town of Cowra where we came across one of the usual brown tourist signs saying “Japanese Garden”. During WWll there was a prisoner-of-war camp near the town confining a mixture of Italian and Japanese POWs. The story goes that there was a mass escape attempt by the Japanese prisoners that resulted in the deaths of two hundred of them along with three of the Australian soldiers guarding them.
After the war, both sides let bygones be bygones and the result of this rapprochement was a charming peaceful garden with waterfalls, large koi carp swimming in the ponds, and many beautiful plants and trees; it was, in fact, the ideal place for us to slough off our fatigue, eat our sandwiches, and enjoy an afternoon ‘cuppa’.
A few miles further on, we stopped briefly to look at the “Historic Main Street” of the small township of Canowindra and buy some fruit and veggies before driving on to Orange and another night’s stay courtesy of an AirBnB host.
My dear Celine was still under the weather, so the next morning we visited a local doctor to get some idea what was ailing her. Somewhat buoyed by his prognosis, we collected the prescribed medications from a local pharmacy and took a quick turn around the city of Orange before going on our way and driving at a leisurely pace towards Coonabarabran.
The sun was strong, the day was hot, and the scenery became flatter and drier. There were still many herds of sheep and cattle, but in the main they stood around listlessly and often sheltered in groups in the small amount of shade to be found beneath the scraggy gum trees; the farming conditions were by no means as attractive as we had seen closer to the south and east coasts. We pulled off the road for lunch at what was at the time a quiet ‘B’ road but rapidly turned into a noisy, major thoroughfare as several of the 34-wheel ‘B-double’ juggernauts thundered past, many of them transporting livestock; so much for our own hopes of a peaceful half-hour in the shade.
After passing through the town of Wellington, Google Maps diverted us off the main highway and onto a very narrow country road which eventually included ten kilometres or more of ‘gravel’ road which was bumpier and lumpier than any we had encountered earlier and, rather surprisingly, had many puddles in the ditches alongside. Eventually, being in dire need of liquid refreshment, we did what we perhaps should have done more often on our trip, we stopped at The Royal Hotel (= ‘pub’) in the very small township of Mendooran, population about three hundred!
The obliging young barman who looked very much the typical street-wise city lad surprised us by telling us that he had never travelled outside New South Wales, though he had once visited Sydney! We then chatted briefly with his uncle, the proprietor of this worthy establishment, who dressed like one of the local stockmen but when asked if he now preferred owning a pub to life on the range, assured us the pub was definitely the better option in view of the lack of beer in the outback! He also resolved the mystery of the puddles in this very dry territory; a couple of days previously they had received a very localised, brief but extremely heavy dump of rain, the unusual nature of which partly explained the jovial nature of the bar’s occupants!
As the hot shimmering sun sank to the horizon, we arrived in Coonabarabran and our lodgings in a very dilapidated old house and were met by our charming hostess Grace. As we entered her home, the very original state of the hallway caused us some misgivings about our choice of abode, but when she showed us our beautifully clean, comfortable, newly decorated bedroom, and the open plan kitchen and living room which had been similarly refurbished, we realise we had actually found ourselves a real gem. We learnt that the building had originally been constructed as the town’s maternity home where Grace herself had been born. Grace and her husband had bought the property some twenty years previously, but it was only recently that she had finally found time to start giving the heritage building the TLC it desperately needed.
Grace told us about the local Warrumbungle Observatory, privately owned by the retired astronomer Peter Starr, and we decided to go there that evening. Josh, the young man who made the presentation to our small group, was very knowledgable and had four or five different telescopes set up enabling us to get wonderful views of the Moon, Jupiter and it’s four moons, and several galaxies. We also met there an amateur astronomer from Wales, who leased one of the small observatory “pods” where he kept one of his three telescopes he has around the world to study and photograph “dying” galaxies; some people have fascinating hobbies!
The next morning we awoke to find that Grace had left for her work at a shop selling school uniforms and the like, and so we took a leisurely breakfast while meeting Jo, the young “woman who does”, and the neighbour who mowed the lawn. We were somewhat sorry to leave as this was such an interesting place, and it would have been lovely to stay a long time and help Grace fulfil her dreams of fully restoring her graceful home to it’s former glory. We hung on till well past 11am but we had to move on eventually; and so we continued our gentle progress north, aiming for the city of Inverell.
But first of all, we retraced our steps past the observatory and up into the hills to visit Warrambungle NP where we walked the short trail up to Whitegum Lookout from where we had great views of the extinct volcanic plugs of the “Crooked Mountains” – a loose translation of the park’s aboriginal name. Like so many places we had visited in Oz, the park is recovering from a major forest fire; in 2013, this fire had passed through mainly at ground level, so the trees we walked past were bursting with new growth as young shoots sprouted optimistically from the flame blackened tree trunks. Later in the day we would drive through another fire damaged forest, where the fire had been mainly through the tree-tops and the blackened branches were sending out masses of little leaves which made the trees look as if they were covered in moss. It is truly wonderful to see how nature handles these catastrophes, many of which are nature’s own doing anyway.
The drive there and back took us through some lovely scenery and we were also well amused by the locals’ very artistic postboxes at the roadside. Passing back through Coonabarabran we filled up the fuel tank and drove out into some more really flat countryside, still mostly pastoral with some croplands, but all of very poor quality.
After a couple of hours however, we arrived in a quite hilly, rocky area, and following a sign for a much-needed rest stop, we found ourselves in the car-park for Mount Kaputar NP. After eating our sandwiches at a well shaded picnic table, we walked along Sawn Rocks Track, another trail among low-level fire-damaged trees, which led to a spectacular cliff of hexagonal basalt columns, some of which had fallen down and looked like neat piles of sawn stone logs.
There we met a couple of English gentlefolk about our age, travelling in a very luxurious Mercedes camper van, and had an amusing chat in posh accents; this was much to my linguist wife’s delight as it confirmed for her that I really wasn’t exactly the well ‘brung up’ English gentleman she had once imagined!
Our digs that evening in Inverell were very different from the previous night. We were met by our hostess who, excited to be receiving her first “foreign” guests, gushingly showed us into our quarters through a side door off our “en-suite” garage. The apartment was rather bare though clean and spacious enough, but the bathroom was miniscule and the kitchen decidedly limited. At least we had a working television, in front of which we sat eating our tasty salad supper with some of Grace’s chooky eggs, before retiring to our slumbers.
Next day we set off much earlier, there being little reason to tarry. But before we set out on the road we stopped in to look around Inverell’s CBD and were pleasantly surprised – though I don’t know why we should have been, considering the many fine towns we had seen on our travels. We took our usual stroll up and down the main thoroughfares, taking photos and looking in shop windows, and were struck by the unusual sight of several groups of aborigines, especially around the Law Courts, as we had previously seen very few signs of aborigines living among the whites. When I asked one of the guys, as he was leaning against his truck enjoying a snack of chips and gravy, “What’s going on?”, he replied “Nothing special”. When I explained that we were tourists interested in their ongoing problems he said “I guessed that. None of the locals ever take photographs of the Court House!” We found out later that there had recently been a rather violent fracas between a couple of the families resulting in police being called, and that was the combatants’ day in court.
Back towards the town centre, Celine stopped at Aboriginelle, a small art gallery, and while we decided which of the beautiful paintings to buy, we chatted with the artist, Elenore Binge Harrison, and her partner, Leroy, both of whom were teachers in the local school. It was an interesting conversation, Leroy in particular having some very strong views about the lack of a treaty between the native tribes and the white settlers, that left the original peoples in a much worse position than say the Maoris in New Zealand or the N.American Indian tribes. Then with our delicately detailed painting of an echnida in hand, we headed to the car again, stopping briefly for coffee and hot-cross buns at Funki Munki, a café-cum-health food store.
With the car and us refuelled, we soon arrived at the outskirts of Glen Innes and an old hospital dating back to 1902, now lovingly(?) referred to as the “Land of the Beardies” Historic House Museum. We decided there probably wasn’t enough to see beyond what we read on the various plaques outside the buildings, and so we took a quick look at the old farm machinery in and around the adjacent “Bill Cameron’s Machine Shed”, before driving into the town. This town was even nicer than Inverell, being both very old and charmingly laid out with wide city streets, many of which were tree-lined. We noted another common factor among Australian country towns was the large number of independent bookshops selling both used and new volumes.
And in Glen Innes we also came across a couple of gun shops, notably one in what was originally a bank building. The proprietor of the second shop came out to talk as I was taking a picture of her window and assured us that, unlike in the States, she wasn’t allowed to sell any automatic weapons, and gun controls were far, far stricter ever since the 1996 massacre in Tasmania.
As we drove along the New England Highway looking for a good place to stop for our usual mid-afternoon luncheon picnic, we happened upon yet another national park, namely Girraween NP in the midst of the so-called “Granite Belt”.
We ate our lunch elegantly seated at a picnic table, and then walked along Granite Arch Trail alongside Bald Rock Creek where it flowed across and around large flat slabs of granite. The trail then started upwards through another forest of gum trees among a jumble of enormous rocks, three of which formed the impressive arch. A large kangaroo stood tall as he watched us warily before loping off into the undergrowth.
We had been so lucky in finding so many delightful places on this journey. And then as we drove away from this particular find, two more kangaroos gave us a perfect demonstration of why so many of them end up dead at the roadside. They hopped along the ditch beside us for a short way and then one of them suddenly decided the few feet lead he had on us gave it ample space to dart across the road in front of us, an exercise he repeated some yards further on; sadly they seem to have absolutely no idea of the danger that vehicles present.
Our last night on the road was spent in the home of a pleasant easy-going lady in Warwick, where we had booked a little en-suite arrangement that suited our needs ideally. We even treated ourselves to a tasty evening meal at Soban House, a Korean/Japanese restaurant in a town with very few eating establishments. Our short drive back to Bli Bli the next day took us along mostly narrow country roads, past well-husbanded mixed farms, through Gatton and Esk. Finally we arrived at the edge of the highlands and went down the steep twisty rocky-sided road from Peachtree to Woreema before joining the M1 motorway for the last twenty miles or so. We had forgotten about the change of hour between Queensland and New South Wales, and much to my big sister’s surprise arrived an hour earlier than scheduled; well actually a day earlier, as our e-mail telling them our expected day of return seemed to have been lost in the ether!
Nevertheless we were glad to get ‘home’ and relaxed contentedly in the knowledge that the next day we didn’t have to drive anywhere at all. All the same we still had our final adventure to look forward to, three days in Kakadu NP in the tropical lands around Darwin.
We go north to Darwin, look for seawater crocodiles in Kakadu NP and bathe beneath the waterfalls of Litchfield NP.
Postscript: “We’re here”, a poem written by Phyllis Pitchford in 1984, succinctly stating the difficulties that Australian’s aboriginal people have in gaining equality.
We left Tasmania with heavy hearts for not only had we enjoyed such a happy relaxed week with Alistair and his family, but we both thought that the State itself was the best piece of Australia we had seen to date. The major objectives of our Aussie trip had been achieved, we had been warmly welcomed by five arms of the Mckenzie family, we had visited three State capitals and had already driven around more than two thousand kilometres of Australia’s wonderful coastline. Furthermore, we had seen a veritable plethora of some of the amazing Australian wildlife that seems to be so abundant, albeit rather too much in the form of roadkill, especially in Tasmania, I’m sad to say. We still had one special trip up our sleeve involving sea-water crocodiles, and there was still the sixth arm of the family to meet, my youngest niece, Philippa, who was scheduled to soon be flying in to the Sunshine Coast from her home in Margaret River, Western Australia, a destination that we had decided was one too far to include in this already very busy vacation.
However, we had not really experienced very much of inland Australia, we had failed to visit the country’s capital city, we had not seen Mt Kościuszko, the country’s highest mountain, and we still had to experience the famed Great Ocean Road. So, instead of taking the direct route back to Bli Bli, a journey of around eighteen hundred kilometres for which I had reckoned about five days of relatively easy driving, we decided to take a few detours and ended up taking twelve days and driving nearly twice as far!
Once we had disembarked in Melbourne and bought some supplies for the road at the local IGA, instead of heading north, we turned southwest following signs for the Great Ocean Road which we eventually joined at Anglesea – a very different place from the eponymous island off the north coast of Wales that I remembered from my childhood!
Some of my readers may be aware that Australia has a bit of a reputation for its surf and surfers, and as we had already learnt from my nephews, the south Australian coast has some of the best surf in the world. Thus it was no surprise that as we drove west, the surf breaks became bigger and wilder and the shoreline got rockier and more dramatic.
But to make sure we understood the true significance of this splendid coastal drive, we stopped first of all at the Memorial Arch, which celebrates the three thousand returned Australian servicemen who built the Great Ocean Road a few years after the end of the Great War in memory of their fallen comrades. After a couple of hours, we reached the small seaside village of Lorne, where we sat at a park bench by the ocean and shared our sandwich lunch with a pair of parakeets, not to mention the usual gaggle of ‘flying rats’, a.k.a. seagulls. The parakeets made themselves seem so friendly that a young lady even asked us if the birds were ours; evidently, she hadn’t been in Australia long!
An aspect of Australia that is not so very different from California is the ever-present danger of forest fires. Wherever we had been, we had seen signs indicating the current danger-level of fires occurring, and on many a day, we had come across the latent effects of the multitude of fires that had occurred in recent months and years. This particular day there were several fires burning inland from our route and whilst in Lorne we met a detachment of fire-fighters, ready with their off-road fire engines to be called to action. With no reports of fires reaching the coast, we continued on our way stopping a second time for coffee and a very yummy brownie at “Balhanna Cottage”, a health-food café in Apollo Bay, another charming small village on this coast where such communities are few and far between. Many of these places were originally established in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and it was easy to imagine how remote the settlers must have felt before the Great Ocean Road was built. After Apollo Bay, the road turned away from the sea for several miles skirting inland of Cape Otway, and apart from a quick peek at the Cape itself, we didn’t see much more of the coast until we were close to the Twelve Apostles Marine Park.
The weather had become more threatening by the minute, and as we started on the short walk to see those much-photographed hunks of rock sticking out of the Southern Ocean, the heavens opened making picture-taking an impossibility and the likelihood of spending the rest of the afternoon sopping wet a distinct possibility. So, we jumped back into the car and drove on to Port Campbell, where we booked into the Loch Ard Motor Inn and Apartments, bought more supplies at the small grocery across the road, and finished the day noshing on very garlicy ‘home-cooked’ pasta in our fairly commodious accommodation.
The next morning, we really had to face it, we weren’t going to see the sea again for another ten or twelve days. So, we took a stroll along the tidy main street to join the seagulls on the beach for one last walk at the seaside watching the breakers in the distance dissipating their force on the bar at the mouth of a pretty little cove before rippling gently up onto the sand. And then it was time to set off into the unknown Australian interior, our destination being the 1850s gold-boom town of Bendigo. We had very little idea what to expect on this part of the journey and were nicely surprised by the quality of the towns we passed through that first day.
We had our morning coffee break and did a bit of shopping at Ballarat, enjoying its wide main street and lots of elegant late 19th/early 20thcentury buildings. Then we went to Daylesford to taste the waters at the natural springs; they were all fairly horrible and definitely not suitable for filling up our water bottles.
Near to Mt. Franklin, we turned off at a sign saying “Chocolate Mill” where we used the loo, admired the artistic ironwork, and came away with four hand-made chocolates that we consumed immediately, after we got back into the car.
We shopped for knitting wool in Castlemaine which seemed to have some interesting shops, and much to our surprise, we found the ideal wool in a MaxiFoods supermarket.
A few miles further on, we went ‘offroad’ up a steep trail following a sign to a “Diggings Trail” hoping to see where gold was found in the old days but gave up after a mile or so and instead stopped atop a rough gravel knoll to have our picnic lunch and giving our driver some much-needed energy!
The final stop of the day was at Maldon, a very charming original old gold-mining town; the oldest building that we found there dated back to 1854 along with a butcher business which was established in 1857. It also had a traditional part-time fire service that we watched in action as the firefighters responded to the siren arriving by foot, bicycle, and truck to jump on the – very modern – engine as it departed up Main Street. We were once more reserving our accommodation using Airbnb, and we were grateful to that evening’s hostess, Jo, for her suggestions of places to visit that had made our day so interesting. Bendigo is a fair-sized city of 96,000 or more inhabitants, but Jo’s home was in a quiet green suburb, and the accommodation she provided was probably one of the nicest of our whole trip.
So we were glad to meet her the next morning, along with her young son, Jack, and their friendly border collie, Missie, and learn how the house and garden were very much a work in progress for her and her firefighter husband – firefighting seeming to have become a regular theme on this part of our trip!
We drove into Bendigo’s CBD before travelling on and once again found ourselves admiring these Aussie cities. The city planners of the early twentieth century seemed to have had a very good idea of what makes a city livable, and this one with yet more fine architecture, broad main streets, and green parks was another fine example. However, we did have some disappointments, Sheppartonbeing one of them. Around mid-morning, after driving through a lot of uninteresting flat dry farmland, we thought we had arrived there and stopped outside a Salvation Store with grain silos across the street and more of the enormous ‘B-Double’ truck trailer rigs thundering past.
We wanted some plastic containers with lids for our comestibles, and the Sally Army store proved to be a good place for such stuff. Chatting with the sales ladies as we do, we were surprised to learn that this rather downtrodden town was actually Mooroopa, still a few miles from Shepparton. So we jumped back into the car, hopeful of an improvement, only to find Shepparton if anything a whole lot worse. The main feature of the town was a dilapidated steel observation tower open to the public but not offering any very promising views; the architecture was mainly ‘60s concrete ugly, and most of the locals seemed to be overweight and looked thoroughly bored hanging around the streets rather aimlessly. We did manage to find a reasonable cup of coffee and the public loos were very clean as we had come to expect in Oz, but we certainly weren’t inspired to walk the main streets any more than necessary.
Our next chosen waypoint was the small town of Cobram, where we intended to turn east and drive along the Murray Valley Highway to Albury. Somewhere in Cobram’s vicinity, Google Maps seemed to get totally discombobulated and took us off on a minor road towards goodness knows where, till finally we took control ourselves and eventually reached the highway, missing Cobram completely. It was a hot afternoon and shade was scarce, so spotting a house with a tree-filled garden down a well-kept gravel road, we parked next to the garden gate and ate our sandwiches in the relative cool. Up till then the drive that day had been along miles of very straight roads through bone-dry pastureland, from which the poor cattle were grazing ‘living hay’, and the only menace had been the occasional 34-wheeler monster breathing down our necks.
Several miles east of Cobram, the scenery became much greener, and we stopped just past a bridge across the very lifeless River Ovens to take one or two pics. Up close, it looked more like a swamp, but all the same, it was pretty photogenic; we just had to breath in and press ourselves against the concrete parapet when the big trucks swept by, taking no prisoners as they careered along at their 100kph legal limit.
At Yarrawonga, a few miles further on, we drove over the bridge across Lake Malwala, created by damming the Murray River. The lake seems to have made Yarrawonga a bit of a tourist town, but it has also resulted in a stark landscape of bear white skeletons of dead trees standing in the shallow water for miles around.
My dear Celine was still suffering from a debilitating cold that she had been incubating for the last few days. So, as soon as we had got ourselves ensconced in our IKEA furnished burrow beneath a rather smart modern home in Lavington, a hillside community on the outskirts of Albury, I nipped out to the local grocery store for supplies, and, as I got back into the car realised, I didn’t have the address with me, and I had very little phone signal. Slight panic, but nothing that couldn’t be solved by a bit of “reverse-driving”, a bit like reverse-engineering! Anyway, got back safely, in the end, to find Celine tucked up in bed and ready to be fed our salad supper, like a baby bird.
So, come the morning, we decided a day of rest from driving was called for and opted to stay a couple of nights in Albury; luckily, our hostess obligingly accepted our changed plans, as long as we left at 9.00am sharp the next morning as it was Albury Cup day, the “biggest social event of the year”, in which she was playing an active part though not on horseback. As it happened, we chose a good place to spend the day as Albury is an attractive small city with lots of green space including a very peaceful Botanical Garden, an ideal place for a cool restful afternoon stroll.
The next morning, feeling much refreshed, we set off smartly at the appointed hour heading towards Jindabyne, a popular tourist destination overlooking the lake of the same name, near the Snowy Mountains and close to Kosciuszko National Park. This was quite a major detour which would eventually take us to Canberra, but the main objective of the day was to get as close as possible to Mount Kosciuszko, the highest peak in Australia.
A few miles outside Albury, we stopped briefly at the Bonegilla Migrant and Reception Centre, a camp set up for receiving and training immigrants to Australia in the post World War ll immigration boom. It wasn’t a very inspiring place and must have depressed some of the occupants escaping from the horrors of the war in Europe, but obviously, the authorities felt it was a necessary step in their integration into the Australian way of life. So we tarried not, and before long found ourselves at the entrance to the National Park at Khancoban, where we dutifully paid our $17 daily fee, stopped in the café for our mid-morning cuppa, and on the recommendation of a charming park ranger, drove to the Geehi Day Parking area, expecting to see one of the ever-elusive platypii (-uses?). We didn’t of course, but we did have a nice stroll along the river bank, before picnicking at a park bench and watching a rather energetic bunch of bikers from the Jindabyne Cycling Club preparing for the next stage of their arduous day’s ride along the park’s hilly roads.
Thwarted by the lack of platypus sightings but unfazed, we had fun driving the twisty mountain roads in scenery comprising yet more gum trees to the ski village of Thredbo, where there was a chair lift to take us up to the Mt.Kosciuszko lookout. The lift ride actually finished a good two kilometres hike away from the lookout, and as it was late in the afternoon, time was short. However, much refreshed by the clear mountain air, Celine set the pace, while I followed somewhat more slowly, and, I’m ashamed to admit, didn’t reach the goal. Finally, Celine came back looking radiant having seen the mountain named after her famous compatriot, General Tadeusz Kościuszko, by the Polish explorer Sir Paul Edmund Strzelecki.
Although the chairlift and ensuing hike was a bit of a rush, it had been exhilarating to be high above the tree line in a landscape of rocks and heather, so very different from the seemingly never-ending forests of eucalyptus trees of which we had seen so much on our travels. When we got back down into Thredbo at about 5 pm, everything was closing up, so we continued quickly on to our lodgings in Jindabyne. These turned out to be small, but clean and quite adequate, and they even had a washer and dryer which we made good use of as we watched “The Day of the Jackal” on TV while eating a Woolworths’ roast chicken for dinner. All in all, it had been a pretty satisfying day.
The next morning, we took a turn into the village and walked in the lakeside park, where we found an impressive monument to the aforementioned Sir Paul Strzelecki, who was made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London and was awarded its gold medal for “exploration in the southeastern portion of Australia”. The Society still displays his huge geological map of New South Wales and Tasmania for public viewing. He was also made a fellow of the Royal Society, having gained widespread recognition as an explorer as well as a philanthropist. Nearby, there was a much more modest stone, topped by an Irish harp, dedicated to the Irish labourers who helped make the Snowy Mountain Hydro Project a practicality.
The locals were also out enjoying the day, with a group of youngsters risking life and limb on their scooters in the skateboard park, and a much more sedate bunch of senior citizens doing their thing on the bowling green. A very happy scene to have found, before getting back on the road, we rewarded ourselves with large slices of banana bread, the “best veggie juice in Oz” for Celine and a damn fine mug of black coffee for me!