It's probably worth noting that I had a phone interview last night with a principal of one of the other schools I've applied to work at in the fall. Wow are my interview skills rusty! I'm pretty sure I completely buggered the interview, as I sure spent a lot of time saying "um" and "ah" and "could you repeat that please?". Ah well. At least I got an interview. If I didn't get the job, well, I didn't get the job and I'll be back at Charlton in the fall. On the other hand, there was another job posting today that I was eligible for, so I applied to it too. All is not lost yet. It feels strange to not have any idea where I'll be teaching in the fall, but on the other hand I know I've got a job to go back to, and that's all that's really important.
Today really did feel like the beginning of the end... of my travels here in OZ. I enjoyed a bit of a sleep-in after all of yesterday's running around, and spent most of the rest of the day puttering away here in my room, packing stuff, tossing stuff, and tidying stuff. I have to move out of my half of the room on Thursday so that Jen Challenger can move in. I have surprisingly little left to pack - and may even have room in my pack to bring home some Tim Tams! Keep your fingers crossed, everyone. (I swear I've eaten more bloody cookies this year than is strictly a good thing, but hey, they're Tim Tams and not available anywhere but here.)
Everything seems to be coming full circle. The weather is back to the same cold, miserable, rain/mist/drizzle/occasional patches of sun that we had when I first arrived in September. The leaves are changing colour and dropping off the trees. I am once again surrounded by bags and suitcases as I begin to pack up my life. There's a couple of goodbye parties planned for me later on this week. I'm almost out of credit on my cell phone, which I won't be recharging since I can't bring it back to Canada. Tomorrow I will go and close my Australian bank account and wire my extra money back home again.
Ironically, I find myself in almost exactly the same emotional state as I was in just before I began this trip! I'm so excited to go home. I can't wait to share all my stories and photos and gifts with my family and friends. I also don't want to leave. I'm afraid I will go home and find that everything and everyone has changed and somehow left me behind. I don't want this trip to end, there's so much more for me to see and do here. I don't want to leave behind all my new Aussie friends. I'm eager to just get GOING already, but at the same time I want to drag this week out and enjoy it for all it's worth.
So - while today I played the hermit and scarcely stirred from the house, tomorrow I'm off to run a whole bunch of errands all over town, and there's my last trampolining class tomorrow night, and shopping to do, and lots more, so I'd better go to bed. Here's hoping I actually sleep tonight! Last night was not good - my brain has started its annoying "wow do I have a lot of things to think about" routine and it would just not SHUT UP and let me be. Here's hoping tonight is better...
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
ANZAC Day and a trip to the Grampians
It's been a busy few days!
Friday was ANZAC Day, and Jen and I were up at 4:30 in the morning so we could make our way downtown to the Shrine of Remembrance to attend the Dawn Ceremony. This ceremony begins every ANZAC Day, as a way for Australians and New Zealanders to remember the battle of Gallipoli during World War I, where both Australia and New Zealand found their identities as a nation.
We caught a tram towards the downtown about quarter past five, and I was impressed at how full it was already, as we live pretty far from the city centre. As we headed towards downtown more and more people piled on the tram with us, until there was absolutely no room to move whatsoever. Once we passed Flinders Station and were close to the shrine, we could see hundreds - if not thousands - of other people all heading the same way on foot. Remember that this was all well before dawn and the city was pitch black.
When we reached the Shrine, it was really eerie. We piled off the tram with everyone else and walked up the hill towards the Shrine. All around us were hundreds of other people walking with us - and everyone was completely silent. The Shrine is set in the middle of a large parkland and there were no lights on anywhere, so we were all walking up the hill in complete darkness. As we approached, Jen and I could hear a voice over a loudspeaker. Turned out that the organizers of the ceremony had a someone reading a history of ANZAC Day over the speaker system while the crowds assembled.
The dawn ceremony began at 6am and was actually very short, lasting only about half an hour. A single light shone out from the top of the Shrine while we sang Australia Fair (the national anthem) and God Save The Queen. "In Flanders Fields" was read (which brought a tear to my eye, being Canadian and all). A young Australian soldier spoke about what it means to be an ANZAC today. A lone piper played the bagpipes from the observation deck near the top of the Shrine. At the end of the ceremony, the Governor of Victoria entered the Shrine to lay a wreath at the stone in the centre. Then the Shrine was opened to everyone so that anyone who wanted to could lay a poppy there. The line was huge though and we had a long drive to do later in the day, so Jen and I headed home at this point.
I am so glad we went down for the service though.
Once we'd made it back home, we both actually went back to bed for a couple of hours - and I surprised myself by actually sleeping! But we were up again around 10am to get ready for our weekend trip to the Grampians, along with our other Canadian teacher housemates and a few other folks from Leading Out, the company that helped Jen find employment here in OZ.
In total there were eight of us heading to the Grampians for the weekend. We drove out in a convoy of two cars. It took us longer than we'd expected to get there, but that's likely because we stopped at a winery along the way. Not such an exciting stop for us non drinkers, but everyone else looked like they were having a lot of fun. :-) (We didn't really mind - it was nice to get out and stretch our legs!).
The Grampians are a chain of big hills/small mountains found in inland western Victoria. The hills are high enough that the clouds were brushing their tops as we approached. The hills themselves are forested, but the land all around is mostly farmland now. As we passed the fields, we saw HUGE mobs of kangaroos - we're talking hundreds of kangaroos in each mob! Some of the girls we were traveling with had never seen 'roos before, so of course we had to pull over and snap some photos. It was almost dark by the time we made it to the Emu Holiday Park, where we would be staying for the weekend.
Since there were so many of us on this trip, we decided to rent some cabins instead of staying in a hostel. What a great choice that turned out to be! The cabins slept six people each, so we were able to spread out and enjoy some space. Each of the cabins had a wood stove inside and a fire pit outside, as well as a small BBQ on the porch. We wasted no time moving ourselves in and claiming beds. Vicky and Alyesha were in charge of dinner on Friday night, so Jen and I amused ourselves by making a fire in the fire place, and all of us just kinda sat around, nibbling on Alyesha's tasty beetroot dip and crackers, and enjoying various drinks. There was also lots of wildlife at the holiday park - we had kangaroos come right up to the cabin, and also a possum who ate the grapes and pear slices we put out. Cool! Apparently the local kookaburras will eat out of your hand too, but we had no luck there.
You could sure tell we were all teachers though - even though it was a holiday weekend, we were all in bed well before midnight! The cold likely had something to do with it. I think on the Friday night it went down to below 10C. BRRRR! We pretty much all hung out together in the one cabin, although four of us (including me) were actually sleeping in the other cabin. So of course, our cabin's fire didn't get lit until we went back to go to bed! I don't think the fire we did light actually warmed us up at all. Let me tell you, was I glad that there was an electric blanket on my bed!
Saturday morning dawned cloudy and grey, with the promise of rain to come. We gathered for breakfast around 8 and were out the door and on our way by 9. Our goal for the morning was to hike to the top of The Pinnacle, one of the big peaks in the Grampians range. What a hike! Definitely one of the more difficult hikes I've done this year, as it was basically 2.5kms straight up the side of the mountain. I must be getting into better shape. I was the slowest hiker in our group (not a surprise there) but I made it to the top and wasn't nearly as tired as some of the girls who'd power-walked their way up. On our way we passed through the Grand Canyon (cool narrow crevasse) and at one point had to clamber up a steep, narrow gorge where I swear it looked like we weren't going to fit! The views at the top were spectacular though.
We got off the Pinnacles hike just in time for the rain to begin in earnest, so we drove just down the rode to the small village of Halls Gap, which is the touristy center of the Grampians. With the rain bucketing down, we browsed through the shops and enjoyed hot drinks at one of the restaurants. (I think the waitresses at the restaurant were a little annoyed that we didn't order more than drinks, but ah well! We'd already eaten our lunches on the trail.) We also checked out Brambuk, the local Aboriginal cultural centre. Jen and I watched a 10 minute presentation in the Dreamtime Theatre about the creation story of Gariwerd, or the Grampians. It was really well done and we walked away with a copy of the story on paper so we can tell it to our students.
The rain let up as we drove back through the hills for two shorter hikes. Our first stop was the Balconies lookout, where we enjoyed a spectacular panorama of the hills and of course the jutting cliff faces that are called balconies. Jen and I enjoyed yelling at a couple of stupid, stupid tourists who had completely ignored the "do not enter" signs and were posing right on top of the jutting rocks - completely unaware of their instability and the thousand or so foot drop to the forest below. GADS! We unashamedly turned our "teacher voices" on and made them come back to the path. It was funny - as we were getting the tourists to come back, another guy passed us and said, "You know, it's their own lives they're risking out there, you don't need to interfere," to which we responded, "Yeah, but we're the first aiders who would have to go and get them if they fell off." The response - "Oh." Hee hee!
(Can't turn off the teacher now matter how we try!)
The last hike of the day was down a cliff face to get to the bottom of the MacKenzie Falls. It was about a 200m descent, I think - and not so bad going down but a lot harder coming up! We were hoping that since it had rained so nicely earlier in the afternoon, the falls would be roaring, but no such luck. Don't get me wrong, they were very pretty, but not as spectacular as some of the other waterfalls I've seen this year. We paused for the mandatory group shot and then huffed and puffed our way back to the top of the cliff and the cars.
Since Jen and I were in charge of most of the planning for this weekend trip, we were also in charge of dinner - so when we got back to our cabins, I took the meat and headed to our cabin to BBQ it, and Jen roasted the veggies and potatoes at the first cabin. We all feasted on sausages, lamb chops, roast veggies and baked potatoes, and of course the required tim tams and other yummy Aussie goodies. Vicky and Alyesha had brought the game "Canada-opoly" with them, so we spent the rest of the evening playing. One by one, folks folded and sold their properties and headed off to bed, so that at the end of the game there were only four of us playing and somehow I managed to win the game! Not sure I've ever won at Monopoly before. Ha ha!
Sunday morning, after packing up and checking out of the cabins, we headed off to find some of the Aboriginal rock art sites in the Grampians park. The two sites we were searching for ended up being way down a long, challenging dirt road, and so for the first time I was glad that the rental car we had for the weekend had all-wheel drive! We found one of the art sites, but somehow missed a turn as we were searching for the second one and ended up about 25kms away from where we needed to be. So instead of retracing our steps (that was 25kms down a crazy dirt road that we shouldn't have been on in the first place with a rental car!), we turned for home.
We made one random, random stop on the way back to Melbourne - at a castle! When we were passing through Ballarat on the way out on Friday, we'd noticed a castle sitting up on a hillside just outside that town. So we made a point of stopping to check it out on the way back. Turns out that yes, it's a whole medieval-style castle, set up in much the same way as the Renaissance Fair used to be, with halls and dungeons and towers to explore, jousting and magic shows, and much more. We certainly didn't have time to explore the place properly (we were already running late), so we took a pass and headed for home. Hopefully Jen and some of the other folks who were on the trip will get a chance to go back out there in the next few months though - it looked really cool!
So suffice it to say that we were all rather tired when we got home last night. I took some of my housemates grocery shopping in the car, since it's not often that we have wheels to take advantage of in the city. Then I curled up on the couch to watch the finale of "So You Think You Can Dance" (sadly, I somehow got addicted to that show, ha ha!) and went off to bed.
I can't believe I'm now officially down to a week left in OZ. I have so much to get done! Yikes!
Friday was ANZAC Day, and Jen and I were up at 4:30 in the morning so we could make our way downtown to the Shrine of Remembrance to attend the Dawn Ceremony. This ceremony begins every ANZAC Day, as a way for Australians and New Zealanders to remember the battle of Gallipoli during World War I, where both Australia and New Zealand found their identities as a nation.
We caught a tram towards the downtown about quarter past five, and I was impressed at how full it was already, as we live pretty far from the city centre. As we headed towards downtown more and more people piled on the tram with us, until there was absolutely no room to move whatsoever. Once we passed Flinders Station and were close to the shrine, we could see hundreds - if not thousands - of other people all heading the same way on foot. Remember that this was all well before dawn and the city was pitch black.
When we reached the Shrine, it was really eerie. We piled off the tram with everyone else and walked up the hill towards the Shrine. All around us were hundreds of other people walking with us - and everyone was completely silent. The Shrine is set in the middle of a large parkland and there were no lights on anywhere, so we were all walking up the hill in complete darkness. As we approached, Jen and I could hear a voice over a loudspeaker. Turned out that the organizers of the ceremony had a someone reading a history of ANZAC Day over the speaker system while the crowds assembled.
The dawn ceremony began at 6am and was actually very short, lasting only about half an hour. A single light shone out from the top of the Shrine while we sang Australia Fair (the national anthem) and God Save The Queen. "In Flanders Fields" was read (which brought a tear to my eye, being Canadian and all). A young Australian soldier spoke about what it means to be an ANZAC today. A lone piper played the bagpipes from the observation deck near the top of the Shrine. At the end of the ceremony, the Governor of Victoria entered the Shrine to lay a wreath at the stone in the centre. Then the Shrine was opened to everyone so that anyone who wanted to could lay a poppy there. The line was huge though and we had a long drive to do later in the day, so Jen and I headed home at this point.
I am so glad we went down for the service though.
Once we'd made it back home, we both actually went back to bed for a couple of hours - and I surprised myself by actually sleeping! But we were up again around 10am to get ready for our weekend trip to the Grampians, along with our other Canadian teacher housemates and a few other folks from Leading Out, the company that helped Jen find employment here in OZ.
In total there were eight of us heading to the Grampians for the weekend. We drove out in a convoy of two cars. It took us longer than we'd expected to get there, but that's likely because we stopped at a winery along the way. Not such an exciting stop for us non drinkers, but everyone else looked like they were having a lot of fun. :-) (We didn't really mind - it was nice to get out and stretch our legs!).
The Grampians are a chain of big hills/small mountains found in inland western Victoria. The hills are high enough that the clouds were brushing their tops as we approached. The hills themselves are forested, but the land all around is mostly farmland now. As we passed the fields, we saw HUGE mobs of kangaroos - we're talking hundreds of kangaroos in each mob! Some of the girls we were traveling with had never seen 'roos before, so of course we had to pull over and snap some photos. It was almost dark by the time we made it to the Emu Holiday Park, where we would be staying for the weekend.
Since there were so many of us on this trip, we decided to rent some cabins instead of staying in a hostel. What a great choice that turned out to be! The cabins slept six people each, so we were able to spread out and enjoy some space. Each of the cabins had a wood stove inside and a fire pit outside, as well as a small BBQ on the porch. We wasted no time moving ourselves in and claiming beds. Vicky and Alyesha were in charge of dinner on Friday night, so Jen and I amused ourselves by making a fire in the fire place, and all of us just kinda sat around, nibbling on Alyesha's tasty beetroot dip and crackers, and enjoying various drinks. There was also lots of wildlife at the holiday park - we had kangaroos come right up to the cabin, and also a possum who ate the grapes and pear slices we put out. Cool! Apparently the local kookaburras will eat out of your hand too, but we had no luck there.
You could sure tell we were all teachers though - even though it was a holiday weekend, we were all in bed well before midnight! The cold likely had something to do with it. I think on the Friday night it went down to below 10C. BRRRR! We pretty much all hung out together in the one cabin, although four of us (including me) were actually sleeping in the other cabin. So of course, our cabin's fire didn't get lit until we went back to go to bed! I don't think the fire we did light actually warmed us up at all. Let me tell you, was I glad that there was an electric blanket on my bed!
Saturday morning dawned cloudy and grey, with the promise of rain to come. We gathered for breakfast around 8 and were out the door and on our way by 9. Our goal for the morning was to hike to the top of The Pinnacle, one of the big peaks in the Grampians range. What a hike! Definitely one of the more difficult hikes I've done this year, as it was basically 2.5kms straight up the side of the mountain. I must be getting into better shape. I was the slowest hiker in our group (not a surprise there) but I made it to the top and wasn't nearly as tired as some of the girls who'd power-walked their way up. On our way we passed through the Grand Canyon (cool narrow crevasse) and at one point had to clamber up a steep, narrow gorge where I swear it looked like we weren't going to fit! The views at the top were spectacular though.
We got off the Pinnacles hike just in time for the rain to begin in earnest, so we drove just down the rode to the small village of Halls Gap, which is the touristy center of the Grampians. With the rain bucketing down, we browsed through the shops and enjoyed hot drinks at one of the restaurants. (I think the waitresses at the restaurant were a little annoyed that we didn't order more than drinks, but ah well! We'd already eaten our lunches on the trail.) We also checked out Brambuk, the local Aboriginal cultural centre. Jen and I watched a 10 minute presentation in the Dreamtime Theatre about the creation story of Gariwerd, or the Grampians. It was really well done and we walked away with a copy of the story on paper so we can tell it to our students.
The rain let up as we drove back through the hills for two shorter hikes. Our first stop was the Balconies lookout, where we enjoyed a spectacular panorama of the hills and of course the jutting cliff faces that are called balconies. Jen and I enjoyed yelling at a couple of stupid, stupid tourists who had completely ignored the "do not enter" signs and were posing right on top of the jutting rocks - completely unaware of their instability and the thousand or so foot drop to the forest below. GADS! We unashamedly turned our "teacher voices" on and made them come back to the path. It was funny - as we were getting the tourists to come back, another guy passed us and said, "You know, it's their own lives they're risking out there, you don't need to interfere," to which we responded, "Yeah, but we're the first aiders who would have to go and get them if they fell off." The response - "Oh." Hee hee!
(Can't turn off the teacher now matter how we try!)
The last hike of the day was down a cliff face to get to the bottom of the MacKenzie Falls. It was about a 200m descent, I think - and not so bad going down but a lot harder coming up! We were hoping that since it had rained so nicely earlier in the afternoon, the falls would be roaring, but no such luck. Don't get me wrong, they were very pretty, but not as spectacular as some of the other waterfalls I've seen this year. We paused for the mandatory group shot and then huffed and puffed our way back to the top of the cliff and the cars.
Since Jen and I were in charge of most of the planning for this weekend trip, we were also in charge of dinner - so when we got back to our cabins, I took the meat and headed to our cabin to BBQ it, and Jen roasted the veggies and potatoes at the first cabin. We all feasted on sausages, lamb chops, roast veggies and baked potatoes, and of course the required tim tams and other yummy Aussie goodies. Vicky and Alyesha had brought the game "Canada-opoly" with them, so we spent the rest of the evening playing. One by one, folks folded and sold their properties and headed off to bed, so that at the end of the game there were only four of us playing and somehow I managed to win the game! Not sure I've ever won at Monopoly before. Ha ha!
Sunday morning, after packing up and checking out of the cabins, we headed off to find some of the Aboriginal rock art sites in the Grampians park. The two sites we were searching for ended up being way down a long, challenging dirt road, and so for the first time I was glad that the rental car we had for the weekend had all-wheel drive! We found one of the art sites, but somehow missed a turn as we were searching for the second one and ended up about 25kms away from where we needed to be. So instead of retracing our steps (that was 25kms down a crazy dirt road that we shouldn't have been on in the first place with a rental car!), we turned for home.
We made one random, random stop on the way back to Melbourne - at a castle! When we were passing through Ballarat on the way out on Friday, we'd noticed a castle sitting up on a hillside just outside that town. So we made a point of stopping to check it out on the way back. Turns out that yes, it's a whole medieval-style castle, set up in much the same way as the Renaissance Fair used to be, with halls and dungeons and towers to explore, jousting and magic shows, and much more. We certainly didn't have time to explore the place properly (we were already running late), so we took a pass and headed for home. Hopefully Jen and some of the other folks who were on the trip will get a chance to go back out there in the next few months though - it looked really cool!
So suffice it to say that we were all rather tired when we got home last night. I took some of my housemates grocery shopping in the car, since it's not often that we have wheels to take advantage of in the city. Then I curled up on the couch to watch the finale of "So You Think You Can Dance" (sadly, I somehow got addicted to that show, ha ha!) and went off to bed.
I can't believe I'm now officially down to a week left in OZ. I have so much to get done! Yikes!
Thursday, April 24, 2008
A Radio Interview and a Photo Contest
Check 'em out!!
Once I managed to get my poor computer re-connected to the internet today (seems that in my absence this past week, someone hacked into our house network and was using up all our bandwidth, so Rob, one of my housemates, had to do some finagling with the router to make it all secure again, and that meant I couldn't log on without his assistance, but that's another story...)... I spent some time uploading more stuff for everyone to enjoy. (Wasn't that the longest run-on sentence ever??)
Two items of note.
#1 - Back in March when Janet (Jen's mom) and I were in Mount Isa, we were interviewed on the local Aboriginal radio station. I finally figured out how to upload the interview in a way so you can hear it. Try not to laugh too hard. Click on this link to download the interview onto your computer, then you can play it and enjoy.
#2 - When I was in Broken Hill this week, I was very taken with the artwork of Pro Hart, who is recognized as having pioneered the outback art movement in Broken Hill. His work includes a number of large metal sculptures, and I took lots of photos. So take a look at his work and send me your comments! Best sculpture title/explanation/story wins a prize.
OK, off to bed. Jen and I are getting up at 4:30am (gasp) so we can make it downtown in time for the ANZAC Dawn Ceremony. Goodnight!
Once I managed to get my poor computer re-connected to the internet today (seems that in my absence this past week, someone hacked into our house network and was using up all our bandwidth, so Rob, one of my housemates, had to do some finagling with the router to make it all secure again, and that meant I couldn't log on without his assistance, but that's another story...)... I spent some time uploading more stuff for everyone to enjoy. (Wasn't that the longest run-on sentence ever??)
Two items of note.
#1 - Back in March when Janet (Jen's mom) and I were in Mount Isa, we were interviewed on the local Aboriginal radio station. I finally figured out how to upload the interview in a way so you can hear it. Try not to laugh too hard. Click on this link to download the interview onto your computer, then you can play it and enjoy.
#2 - When I was in Broken Hill this week, I was very taken with the artwork of Pro Hart, who is recognized as having pioneered the outback art movement in Broken Hill. His work includes a number of large metal sculptures, and I took lots of photos. So take a look at his work and send me your comments! Best sculpture title/explanation/story wins a prize.
OK, off to bed. Jen and I are getting up at 4:30am (gasp) so we can make it downtown in time for the ANZAC Dawn Ceremony. Goodnight!
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
No Sleep on the Train for Me
Well I think I can safely say that I am GLAD that my days of having to sleep in the day-nighter seats of the trains here are officially OVER. The trip from Broken Hill to Sydney wasn't all that bad, really - the train was much less crowded than the ones I'd ridden on the way to Broken Hill, and I ended up with a four-seater all to myself! I enjoyed stretching out in relative luxury until it came time to try and go to sleep. I'd already discovered on my trip on the Ghan that propping my feet up on the seats opposite to where I'm sitting doesn't work - my knees go to sleep. So I spent some time trying to figure out how I could (a) sleep lying down on the seats, (b) stretch my legs out so my blasted knees wouldn't be bent all night, and (c) support my knees so they wouldn't go to sleep.
In the end I laid my small suitcase down between the two sets of seats, put my backpack down on top of the suitcase, and a towel down on top of the backpack. This brought the whole precarious pile almost level with the seats, so I could bridge the gap between them and actually support my knees in the process. This worked fairly well, except that the train spent about four hours going over some seriously wonky tracks just after lights-out, and it was absolutely impossible to sleep for all the shaking and shuddering we were doing. Once we reached some smoother tracks, though, I think I actually did manage to catch a few zzz's.
The train pulled into Sydney this morning right on time, and Ruth met me at the big YHA across from the train station. I stashed my luggage for the day (note: the Sydney YHA has a great luggage store room!) and we headed off to do some exploring. Unfortunately it was absolutely POURING rain and we spent quite a bit of time dashing between the raindrops! We went to the Guide Shop, just a few blocks from the train station, to purchase some badges and books. Then we headed across town to the Sydney Museum. I visited the Museum on my own last September at the start of the trip, but they've just opened up a new exhibit on dinosaurs, and of course I needed to see that. :-)
The museum was jam-packed full of small kids and their families - I had managed to forget that it's still school holidays here (hence why Ruth could join me in the first place, she is a teacher after all!) and of course any exhibit on dinosaurs draws children like flies to honey. There was some pretty neat stuff though. They'd done an excellent job making life-size replicas of a number of dinosaur species, including many of the theropod dinosaurs that scientists are now pretty sure sported feathers. There was also a good explanation on the modern view of how birds are really just highly-evolved cousins of T-rex, which was cool.
What with one thing and another, Ruth and I didn't leave the museum until almost 4pm, and then we had to hoof it back across the downtown to pick up my luggage and then catch a train out to the suburbs. The train was crowded and I ended up standing almost the whole way, so it sure felt nice to curl up on the couch once we got here to Ruth's!
I've spent the evening uploading pictures to facebook, so if you'd like to see what I was up to whilst in Broken Hill, check my pages there.
The next few days will be very busy... tomorrow I fly back to Melbourne and have half a day to get all ready for our big trip out to the Grampians this weekend. So if you don't hear from me again until Sunday or Monday, that'd be why!
In the end I laid my small suitcase down between the two sets of seats, put my backpack down on top of the suitcase, and a towel down on top of the backpack. This brought the whole precarious pile almost level with the seats, so I could bridge the gap between them and actually support my knees in the process. This worked fairly well, except that the train spent about four hours going over some seriously wonky tracks just after lights-out, and it was absolutely impossible to sleep for all the shaking and shuddering we were doing. Once we reached some smoother tracks, though, I think I actually did manage to catch a few zzz's.
The train pulled into Sydney this morning right on time, and Ruth met me at the big YHA across from the train station. I stashed my luggage for the day (note: the Sydney YHA has a great luggage store room!) and we headed off to do some exploring. Unfortunately it was absolutely POURING rain and we spent quite a bit of time dashing between the raindrops! We went to the Guide Shop, just a few blocks from the train station, to purchase some badges and books. Then we headed across town to the Sydney Museum. I visited the Museum on my own last September at the start of the trip, but they've just opened up a new exhibit on dinosaurs, and of course I needed to see that. :-)
The museum was jam-packed full of small kids and their families - I had managed to forget that it's still school holidays here (hence why Ruth could join me in the first place, she is a teacher after all!) and of course any exhibit on dinosaurs draws children like flies to honey. There was some pretty neat stuff though. They'd done an excellent job making life-size replicas of a number of dinosaur species, including many of the theropod dinosaurs that scientists are now pretty sure sported feathers. There was also a good explanation on the modern view of how birds are really just highly-evolved cousins of T-rex, which was cool.
What with one thing and another, Ruth and I didn't leave the museum until almost 4pm, and then we had to hoof it back across the downtown to pick up my luggage and then catch a train out to the suburbs. The train was crowded and I ended up standing almost the whole way, so it sure felt nice to curl up on the couch once we got here to Ruth's!
I've spent the evening uploading pictures to facebook, so if you'd like to see what I was up to whilst in Broken Hill, check my pages there.
The next few days will be very busy... tomorrow I fly back to Melbourne and have half a day to get all ready for our big trip out to the Grampians this weekend. So if you don't hear from me again until Sunday or Monday, that'd be why!
Monday, April 21, 2008
More Broken Hill Exploration
So... it's been an interesting couple of days...
Since I ended up renting that blasted expensive car for two days, I figured I'd better make the most of it and spent yesterday driving all over the town. Even though I paid a ridiculous amount for the car, in the end I think it was (almost) worth it, as there were a number of sights I wanted to see that I wouldn't have been able to get to at all without wheels. I started off my exploration by driving all the way out to the airport to visit the Royal Flying Doctor base there. Whilst I'd had an introduction to the RFDS when I was up in Mount Isa (their original base was in Cloncurry, just a few hours from Mount Isa), I hadn't been able to see the planes. Here in Broken Hill, the tour included an excellent film about the history of the RFDS and a tour of the hangar where the planes are maintained. The planes are pretty cool. Once the RFDS purchases an aircraft, it undergoes a major refitting to turn it into a high tech mobile intensive care unit. The planes also have their underbodies strengthened and their wheels reinforced, which allows them to take off and land on short, dirt airstrips out in the bush. Pretty impressive!
Next I drove up to the top of the HUGE mullock pile that dominates the skyline in Broken Hill, to the Visitors Centre and Miners Memorial. Once again, I was sure glad I had the car! Whilst on the map it didn't look like all that far if I'd had to walk it, the drive to the top of this artificial hill was deceptively long and with no path for pedestrians. I would have been taking my life in my hands if I'd tried to walk up that thing with cars whizzing by. The view from the top was pretty good, though. I'd hoped to dine in the "Broken Earth" restaurant which is in the Visitors Centre at the top, but once I glanced at the menu it was clear that the place was waaaay out of my budget. :-) However, in the gift shop I found the PERFECT present for my Grandma. She'll have to wait 'till Christmas to get it though! Heehee...
The Miners Memorial was erected to honour all the men who have died in the mining operations at Broken Hill, since the mine was first opened in the mid 1800's. In total there are more than 800 names on the memorial, and beside each name is listed how old the miner was and the method of their death. It was pretty gruesome - deaths by asphyxiation, mechanical failure, by falling, by crushing, by silicosis, and many more. Like at the War Memorial in Canberra there were slots beside each name where loved ones could leave flowers, and there were silk roses placed beside many names. It was very touching - and a good reminder of how dangerous mining is - even in the modern day with all our safety precautions. One of the most recent deaths (from just a couple of years ago) was listed as caused by "remotely operated machinery".
I decided to take advantage of the car once more and did a big circular lap all around the outskirts of Broken Hill, to visit all the art galleries that are not an easy walk from the downtown core. So I spent the next couple of hours dipping in and out of various shops, some in actual storefronts, and many in converted houses set in residential streets. The variety of art available here is pretty good. I kept hoping I'd find an original piece that I could afford to bring home, but unfortunately no such luck. I ended up purchasing postcards from as many of the art galleries as I could, so I have a memento of the different artists I met here.
Probably by far the most famous of all of Broken Hill's artists is Pro Hart, who basically started the Broken Hill art movement. I really liked his gallery and his body of work. Of course, since he's so famous, there's no way I could afford even a print! Pro worked in the mines for 20 years and he brought his experiences of working underground into his work. I'm not trained enough in the terminology to really express what it is that I like about his work, but his art is colourful, engaging, and poignant - even to me. He also produced a number of sculptures, many of which are exhibited in a sculpture garden across from his gallery, as well as a hugely famous ant sculpture that stands in a park in downtown Broken Hill. I took photos of as many sculptures as I could, and when I get back to Melbourne in a couple of days, I'll post 'em so you can see them yourself.
My last stop for the day was the Living Desert, an area of desert parkland about 6kms outside of Broken Hill that has been turned into a cultural heritage walk. The first part of the trails through the Living Desert deal with the area's native fauna, with all sorts of different desert plants labeled. The second part of the walk encompasses a number of sites of Aboriginal significance. Unfortunately I arrived there too late in the day to see this part! The cultural walks are surrounded by predator (dingo?)-proof electric fencing, and the gates are locked at 4:30pm. Ah well!
The reason why I'd left the walks to the end of the afternoon was because what I really went out there to see was Broken Hill's famous Sculpture Symposium. Actually, the reason why I became intrigued with Broken Hill in the first place was because of a postcard of one of the sculptures that I found on the wall of my friend Nikki's house in Canberra! The Sculpture Symposium was a community project back in 1993, which aimed to bring together artists from all over the world to produce sculptures that would celebrate the Living Desert. The results are pretty darn spectacular! The 12 huge sandstone sculptures are situated on top of a hill with stunning views of the surrounding desert. Since I was approaching from the cultural walks, I had to hike about 1.5kms up the hill to get to the sculptures. (You can also access the sculptures by driving up a different road and parking right there, but I figured that since either way you had to pay $10 per car to get to see them, I might as well get some hiking in too.) The views as I puffed my way up the hill (regretting having left my knee braces back at the hostel, ha ha!) were fantastic.
I made it up to where the sculptures are about 45minutes before sunset, so I managed to snap some pretty cool photos of the sun lighting up the stones and silhouetting them from behind. The postcard views I'd seen of this site made me think that the sculptures were strung out in a line like ancient standing stones, but that's not actually the case. There was a winding path that took me through them. Of course I wasn't the only one there - and after a while I got a little tired of trying to stay out of other peoples' photos, so once I'd taken all the pictures I wanted to take, I headed back down the hill towards the car.
Partway down I found a bench that was facing the sunset, and there I stopped. I was far enough away from the crowd at the sculptures that I felt like I was on my own again, and still high enough on the hillside to get a pretty spectacular view over the desert. So that's how I spent my last evening in the Outback - sitting on a park bench, watching the sun go down, snapping a bazillion sunset photos (yes, Jen, you'd have gone mental on me, hee hee!), and just plain enjoying the quiet. Once the sun had dropped all the way below the horizon I walked the rest of the way back down to the car.
When I was driving out of the reserve, I went SLOOOOWLY (once again, there I was, driving at dusk, when the 'roos are out!)... and was rewarded by spotting several euros (a large, dark grey species of kangaroo) grazing by the roadside. And when I reached the main highway and headed back towards town... WOW! The moon was rising HUGE and full and golden, over the tops of the hills. Totally magical.
Today I checked out of the hostel, put my bags in storage, and have spent the rest of the day so far wandering through the downtown core, sticking my head into shops and yet more galleries, and basically bumming around. I'm ready to get on the train NOW, but of course it doesn't leave until 6pm tonight! Ah well. If needs be, I'll find myself a shady park bench, pull out my trusty book, and enjoy some more fresh air before I get bottled onto the train one last time.
I'll be at Ruth's house in Sydney tomorrow night, and then back in Melbourne on Thursday. I woke up this morning with the realization that I fly home in two weeks time. Yikes! I want to make the most of this last little bit of my Aussie adventures....
Since I ended up renting that blasted expensive car for two days, I figured I'd better make the most of it and spent yesterday driving all over the town. Even though I paid a ridiculous amount for the car, in the end I think it was (almost) worth it, as there were a number of sights I wanted to see that I wouldn't have been able to get to at all without wheels. I started off my exploration by driving all the way out to the airport to visit the Royal Flying Doctor base there. Whilst I'd had an introduction to the RFDS when I was up in Mount Isa (their original base was in Cloncurry, just a few hours from Mount Isa), I hadn't been able to see the planes. Here in Broken Hill, the tour included an excellent film about the history of the RFDS and a tour of the hangar where the planes are maintained. The planes are pretty cool. Once the RFDS purchases an aircraft, it undergoes a major refitting to turn it into a high tech mobile intensive care unit. The planes also have their underbodies strengthened and their wheels reinforced, which allows them to take off and land on short, dirt airstrips out in the bush. Pretty impressive!
Next I drove up to the top of the HUGE mullock pile that dominates the skyline in Broken Hill, to the Visitors Centre and Miners Memorial. Once again, I was sure glad I had the car! Whilst on the map it didn't look like all that far if I'd had to walk it, the drive to the top of this artificial hill was deceptively long and with no path for pedestrians. I would have been taking my life in my hands if I'd tried to walk up that thing with cars whizzing by. The view from the top was pretty good, though. I'd hoped to dine in the "Broken Earth" restaurant which is in the Visitors Centre at the top, but once I glanced at the menu it was clear that the place was waaaay out of my budget. :-) However, in the gift shop I found the PERFECT present for my Grandma. She'll have to wait 'till Christmas to get it though! Heehee...
The Miners Memorial was erected to honour all the men who have died in the mining operations at Broken Hill, since the mine was first opened in the mid 1800's. In total there are more than 800 names on the memorial, and beside each name is listed how old the miner was and the method of their death. It was pretty gruesome - deaths by asphyxiation, mechanical failure, by falling, by crushing, by silicosis, and many more. Like at the War Memorial in Canberra there were slots beside each name where loved ones could leave flowers, and there were silk roses placed beside many names. It was very touching - and a good reminder of how dangerous mining is - even in the modern day with all our safety precautions. One of the most recent deaths (from just a couple of years ago) was listed as caused by "remotely operated machinery".
I decided to take advantage of the car once more and did a big circular lap all around the outskirts of Broken Hill, to visit all the art galleries that are not an easy walk from the downtown core. So I spent the next couple of hours dipping in and out of various shops, some in actual storefronts, and many in converted houses set in residential streets. The variety of art available here is pretty good. I kept hoping I'd find an original piece that I could afford to bring home, but unfortunately no such luck. I ended up purchasing postcards from as many of the art galleries as I could, so I have a memento of the different artists I met here.
Probably by far the most famous of all of Broken Hill's artists is Pro Hart, who basically started the Broken Hill art movement. I really liked his gallery and his body of work. Of course, since he's so famous, there's no way I could afford even a print! Pro worked in the mines for 20 years and he brought his experiences of working underground into his work. I'm not trained enough in the terminology to really express what it is that I like about his work, but his art is colourful, engaging, and poignant - even to me. He also produced a number of sculptures, many of which are exhibited in a sculpture garden across from his gallery, as well as a hugely famous ant sculpture that stands in a park in downtown Broken Hill. I took photos of as many sculptures as I could, and when I get back to Melbourne in a couple of days, I'll post 'em so you can see them yourself.
My last stop for the day was the Living Desert, an area of desert parkland about 6kms outside of Broken Hill that has been turned into a cultural heritage walk. The first part of the trails through the Living Desert deal with the area's native fauna, with all sorts of different desert plants labeled. The second part of the walk encompasses a number of sites of Aboriginal significance. Unfortunately I arrived there too late in the day to see this part! The cultural walks are surrounded by predator (dingo?)-proof electric fencing, and the gates are locked at 4:30pm. Ah well!
The reason why I'd left the walks to the end of the afternoon was because what I really went out there to see was Broken Hill's famous Sculpture Symposium. Actually, the reason why I became intrigued with Broken Hill in the first place was because of a postcard of one of the sculptures that I found on the wall of my friend Nikki's house in Canberra! The Sculpture Symposium was a community project back in 1993, which aimed to bring together artists from all over the world to produce sculptures that would celebrate the Living Desert. The results are pretty darn spectacular! The 12 huge sandstone sculptures are situated on top of a hill with stunning views of the surrounding desert. Since I was approaching from the cultural walks, I had to hike about 1.5kms up the hill to get to the sculptures. (You can also access the sculptures by driving up a different road and parking right there, but I figured that since either way you had to pay $10 per car to get to see them, I might as well get some hiking in too.) The views as I puffed my way up the hill (regretting having left my knee braces back at the hostel, ha ha!) were fantastic.
I made it up to where the sculptures are about 45minutes before sunset, so I managed to snap some pretty cool photos of the sun lighting up the stones and silhouetting them from behind. The postcard views I'd seen of this site made me think that the sculptures were strung out in a line like ancient standing stones, but that's not actually the case. There was a winding path that took me through them. Of course I wasn't the only one there - and after a while I got a little tired of trying to stay out of other peoples' photos, so once I'd taken all the pictures I wanted to take, I headed back down the hill towards the car.
Partway down I found a bench that was facing the sunset, and there I stopped. I was far enough away from the crowd at the sculptures that I felt like I was on my own again, and still high enough on the hillside to get a pretty spectacular view over the desert. So that's how I spent my last evening in the Outback - sitting on a park bench, watching the sun go down, snapping a bazillion sunset photos (yes, Jen, you'd have gone mental on me, hee hee!), and just plain enjoying the quiet. Once the sun had dropped all the way below the horizon I walked the rest of the way back down to the car.
When I was driving out of the reserve, I went SLOOOOWLY (once again, there I was, driving at dusk, when the 'roos are out!)... and was rewarded by spotting several euros (a large, dark grey species of kangaroo) grazing by the roadside. And when I reached the main highway and headed back towards town... WOW! The moon was rising HUGE and full and golden, over the tops of the hills. Totally magical.
Today I checked out of the hostel, put my bags in storage, and have spent the rest of the day so far wandering through the downtown core, sticking my head into shops and yet more galleries, and basically bumming around. I'm ready to get on the train NOW, but of course it doesn't leave until 6pm tonight! Ah well. If needs be, I'll find myself a shady park bench, pull out my trusty book, and enjoy some more fresh air before I get bottled onto the train one last time.
I'll be at Ruth's house in Sydney tomorrow night, and then back in Melbourne on Thursday. I woke up this morning with the realization that I fly home in two weeks time. Yikes! I want to make the most of this last little bit of my Aussie adventures....
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Bopping Around Broken Hill
God my feet are sore. And my wallet is too. But more on that later...
I've been in Broken Hill now for two days, and have covered a lot of ground. Yesterday I hoofed it around town on foot, with the goal of checking out as many of the town's art galleries as I could possibly reach. This didn't seem like a bad plan first thing in the morning, but the galleries aren't all strung along the main street and I know I walked at least 10-15kms as I explored. Fortunately it wasn't too hot out, and the flies weren't too bad (yes, Dad, I forgot the fly net you bought me back in Melbourne. Gah.). Broken Hill reminds me in many ways of Mount Isa, since they're both mining towns and they both have a huge mining operation looming over the cities. However Broken Hill shows off its wealth in ways that Mount Isa just doesn't. The architecture of the buildings here is superb. The parks are well groomed and tidy, even if there isn't much grass (not a lot of water here!). And there are art galleries everywhere!
Unfortunately, the Curse of the Closed Shop, which plagued Jen and I when we were exploring Coober Pedy, continued here. Only about half of the galleries I visited were actually open! When I started to get frustrated and re-read my travel brochures to check opening times, I found that some of the galleries that were closed were actually supposed to be open, they just weren't. Bah. Well at least I've got a good grasp of the town's geography now!
I did spend some time in the Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, which is housed in an old hardware store from the turn of the last century. It's not a big gallery but it has some beautiful artworks, and their current temporary exhibition was on food. So they had all these different artworks representing various artists' interpretation of our relationship with what we eat. Some of the pieces were beautiful, and some were just... well... disturbing. Like the painting of the guy sitting alone at a table with a huge pile of steaming... something... for dinner. Or the five "death masks" of slaughtered pigs. Yummy.
My feet were so sore by the time I got out of the art gallery that all I wanted to do was stumble down Argent St. (the main drag) towards the hostel and find a little cafe where I could sit and have a cuppa. No such luck for me. It was only about 2:30pm, and it turns out that pretty much all of Broken Hill's downtown closes at 1pm on Saturday afternoons! Yikes! I finally manged to find a small takeaway place which was selling cold drinks, so I bought a coke, staggered back to the hostel, and took a nap.
When I woke up it was almost 6, and already dark outside. I didn't want to explore too much further, since my feet were killing me, so I wandered back down the street two blocks to the "Demo Club", one of the many clubs in town. I ate there on Friday night and the food was great, so I went back again. The club scene here in OZ reminds me a bit of Dave and Buster's in Toronto - in a typical club you have a bar, a restaurant, a games room, a pokie (slot machine) room, and much more. But the food was yummy and there were lots of people around, so this was definitely the place to be. I ordered a burger, and when it arrived, wow, what a burger! Here are all the toppings: lettuce, tomato, sauteed onions, BBQ sauce, pineapple, beetroot, shredded carrot, and a fried egg! A little strange (for the Canadian tastes, that is, this is quite normal here in OZ), but very good.
Today I realized I was going to have to rent a car, if I wanted to get out to Silverton and other places on the far side of Broken Hill. The only rental agency that's open on the weekends appeared to be Thrifty (I'd talked to the guy last night), so that's where I ended up. He had only one car left to rent, and it's a big 6-L Mitsubishi something-or-other. Don't ask me how much it's costing me to rent the blasted thing for two days. You don't want to know. The car has absolutely no headroom (and for me to say that, that's saying something; I don't even know if Dad would fit into the drivers seat!), but actually has a pretty smooth ride.
Today's adventures started with me driving out to the Daydream Historic Mine, about 20kms outside of Broken Hill - and a good chunk of that on unsealed road. I had to pass through two cattle gates that I had to shut behind the car, which was interesting. I began to feel like I was driving into the middle of nowhere, but then I finally made it out to the mine. The Daydream Mine was actually the first silver mine to operate in the Broken Hill area, before the big "Line of Lode" was found here. (No, I can't remember the dates). The mine was all cut by hand and all the ore was removed by hand - no mechanization here!
Let me tell you, of all the mine tours I've been on this year, this was the hardest one. The pathway we took down into the mine was extremely difficult to clamber down - and we had both hands free and a handrail! The miners would have entered the mine through the same shaft, carrying a lit candle in one hand and a pick axe in the other. YIKES. Wait 'till you see the pictures. The conditions in the mines were horrific, and many men didn't live past their mid-30's because of typhoid, silicosis of the lung or cirrhosis of the liver (from all the alcohol that was consumed to deal with the harsh conditions). Most miners also smoked opium as a way of dealing with the pain from their jobs. Boys as young as 8 were employed in the mine to haul carts and to gather ore after the blasting. Most of them would have been orphans and they could typically only work underground for a couple of years before their eyesight was so bad they had to be shifted to work above ground. At one point on the tour, our guide had us extinguish our headlamps and he lit a candle, to show us the low light conditions the miners would have worked in. No way I'd want to be doing that!
My next stop was the ghost town of Silverton, which is about 25kms outside of Broken Hill and just down the road from the Daydream Mine. I can only describe this place as a "bustling ghost town" - most of the buildings were moved to Broken Hill when that town boomed, and so there are only a few buildings left. Among them is the Silverton Hotel, which is probably one of the most-filmed pubs in all of Australia. It's best known from the Mad Max films and also A Town Like Alice. Outside the pub they have a replica of Mel Gibson's car from the Mad Max movies, so of course I had to get a picture with it. (I know I've seen the Mad Max films, but it's all blurry... I'm gonna have to add them to my list of movies to revisit in the coming year!). There are also several more art galleries in the old buildings, which I explored but didn't find all that inspiring.
My last stop of the day was out to the Mundi Mundi plains lookout, another 5kms down the road from Silverton. The plains were also used in the Mad Max films. All I can really say is... wow... those are some big, flat, desolate plains. I'm not sure the photos will do them justice.
I had one more stop before heading here to the library, and that was at White's Mineral Art and Living Mining Museum. What a find! They've got all these excellent displays on the history of mining in Broken Hill over the past 125 years. But what really makes the place fascinating is the artwork. The artist who owns the place has taken crushed powders of the different ores extracted from the mine and used them to make these elaborate, beautiful "sand paintings" that illustrate aspects of the town's history. They were exquisite.
Anyhow - I've gotta go - the library's closing in 5 minutes and I need to sign off. More to report on Tuesday, when I'm next back here!
I've been in Broken Hill now for two days, and have covered a lot of ground. Yesterday I hoofed it around town on foot, with the goal of checking out as many of the town's art galleries as I could possibly reach. This didn't seem like a bad plan first thing in the morning, but the galleries aren't all strung along the main street and I know I walked at least 10-15kms as I explored. Fortunately it wasn't too hot out, and the flies weren't too bad (yes, Dad, I forgot the fly net you bought me back in Melbourne. Gah.). Broken Hill reminds me in many ways of Mount Isa, since they're both mining towns and they both have a huge mining operation looming over the cities. However Broken Hill shows off its wealth in ways that Mount Isa just doesn't. The architecture of the buildings here is superb. The parks are well groomed and tidy, even if there isn't much grass (not a lot of water here!). And there are art galleries everywhere!
Unfortunately, the Curse of the Closed Shop, which plagued Jen and I when we were exploring Coober Pedy, continued here. Only about half of the galleries I visited were actually open! When I started to get frustrated and re-read my travel brochures to check opening times, I found that some of the galleries that were closed were actually supposed to be open, they just weren't. Bah. Well at least I've got a good grasp of the town's geography now!
I did spend some time in the Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery, which is housed in an old hardware store from the turn of the last century. It's not a big gallery but it has some beautiful artworks, and their current temporary exhibition was on food. So they had all these different artworks representing various artists' interpretation of our relationship with what we eat. Some of the pieces were beautiful, and some were just... well... disturbing. Like the painting of the guy sitting alone at a table with a huge pile of steaming... something... for dinner. Or the five "death masks" of slaughtered pigs. Yummy.
My feet were so sore by the time I got out of the art gallery that all I wanted to do was stumble down Argent St. (the main drag) towards the hostel and find a little cafe where I could sit and have a cuppa. No such luck for me. It was only about 2:30pm, and it turns out that pretty much all of Broken Hill's downtown closes at 1pm on Saturday afternoons! Yikes! I finally manged to find a small takeaway place which was selling cold drinks, so I bought a coke, staggered back to the hostel, and took a nap.
When I woke up it was almost 6, and already dark outside. I didn't want to explore too much further, since my feet were killing me, so I wandered back down the street two blocks to the "Demo Club", one of the many clubs in town. I ate there on Friday night and the food was great, so I went back again. The club scene here in OZ reminds me a bit of Dave and Buster's in Toronto - in a typical club you have a bar, a restaurant, a games room, a pokie (slot machine) room, and much more. But the food was yummy and there were lots of people around, so this was definitely the place to be. I ordered a burger, and when it arrived, wow, what a burger! Here are all the toppings: lettuce, tomato, sauteed onions, BBQ sauce, pineapple, beetroot, shredded carrot, and a fried egg! A little strange (for the Canadian tastes, that is, this is quite normal here in OZ), but very good.
Today I realized I was going to have to rent a car, if I wanted to get out to Silverton and other places on the far side of Broken Hill. The only rental agency that's open on the weekends appeared to be Thrifty (I'd talked to the guy last night), so that's where I ended up. He had only one car left to rent, and it's a big 6-L Mitsubishi something-or-other. Don't ask me how much it's costing me to rent the blasted thing for two days. You don't want to know. The car has absolutely no headroom (and for me to say that, that's saying something; I don't even know if Dad would fit into the drivers seat!), but actually has a pretty smooth ride.
Today's adventures started with me driving out to the Daydream Historic Mine, about 20kms outside of Broken Hill - and a good chunk of that on unsealed road. I had to pass through two cattle gates that I had to shut behind the car, which was interesting. I began to feel like I was driving into the middle of nowhere, but then I finally made it out to the mine. The Daydream Mine was actually the first silver mine to operate in the Broken Hill area, before the big "Line of Lode" was found here. (No, I can't remember the dates). The mine was all cut by hand and all the ore was removed by hand - no mechanization here!
Let me tell you, of all the mine tours I've been on this year, this was the hardest one. The pathway we took down into the mine was extremely difficult to clamber down - and we had both hands free and a handrail! The miners would have entered the mine through the same shaft, carrying a lit candle in one hand and a pick axe in the other. YIKES. Wait 'till you see the pictures. The conditions in the mines were horrific, and many men didn't live past their mid-30's because of typhoid, silicosis of the lung or cirrhosis of the liver (from all the alcohol that was consumed to deal with the harsh conditions). Most miners also smoked opium as a way of dealing with the pain from their jobs. Boys as young as 8 were employed in the mine to haul carts and to gather ore after the blasting. Most of them would have been orphans and they could typically only work underground for a couple of years before their eyesight was so bad they had to be shifted to work above ground. At one point on the tour, our guide had us extinguish our headlamps and he lit a candle, to show us the low light conditions the miners would have worked in. No way I'd want to be doing that!
My next stop was the ghost town of Silverton, which is about 25kms outside of Broken Hill and just down the road from the Daydream Mine. I can only describe this place as a "bustling ghost town" - most of the buildings were moved to Broken Hill when that town boomed, and so there are only a few buildings left. Among them is the Silverton Hotel, which is probably one of the most-filmed pubs in all of Australia. It's best known from the Mad Max films and also A Town Like Alice. Outside the pub they have a replica of Mel Gibson's car from the Mad Max movies, so of course I had to get a picture with it. (I know I've seen the Mad Max films, but it's all blurry... I'm gonna have to add them to my list of movies to revisit in the coming year!). There are also several more art galleries in the old buildings, which I explored but didn't find all that inspiring.
My last stop of the day was out to the Mundi Mundi plains lookout, another 5kms down the road from Silverton. The plains were also used in the Mad Max films. All I can really say is... wow... those are some big, flat, desolate plains. I'm not sure the photos will do them justice.
I had one more stop before heading here to the library, and that was at White's Mineral Art and Living Mining Museum. What a find! They've got all these excellent displays on the history of mining in Broken Hill over the past 125 years. But what really makes the place fascinating is the artwork. The artist who owns the place has taken crushed powders of the different ores extracted from the mine and used them to make these elaborate, beautiful "sand paintings" that illustrate aspects of the town's history. They were exquisite.
Anyhow - I've gotta go - the library's closing in 5 minutes and I need to sign off. More to report on Tuesday, when I'm next back here!
Friday, April 18, 2008
I'm in Broken Hill
Me again! (Then again, who else would it be, ha ha!)
Just a quick note to let you know I made it safely to Broken Hill yesterday about 5pm... two days on the train, even with an overnight in Adelaide in a real bed, was pretty rough. I met some interesting characters on the train though, including a guy who makes Aussie tessellations for a living. Strange but true. When I have more than three minutes I'll take a look at his website and pass it on to you (of course this also means I need to find his website address again, ha ha!).
The sun was going down when I got here last night so I didn't do a lot of exploring. But the hostel is nice and clean and has an aquarium in the foyer, so it got into my good books right away. I'm in a twin share room and so far (fingers crossed) I'm not sharing it with anyone. And I've got my own TV! So considering this will be the last hostel I stay in while I'm here in OZ, I think I've lucked out.
So far all I've managed to do today is visit the tourist info centre and pick up some groceries, and now I'm sitting here in the library doing a quick catch up. There's free internet access here so once I've done some exploring, I'll come back and tell you all about it. Cheers!
Just a quick note to let you know I made it safely to Broken Hill yesterday about 5pm... two days on the train, even with an overnight in Adelaide in a real bed, was pretty rough. I met some interesting characters on the train though, including a guy who makes Aussie tessellations for a living. Strange but true. When I have more than three minutes I'll take a look at his website and pass it on to you (of course this also means I need to find his website address again, ha ha!).
The sun was going down when I got here last night so I didn't do a lot of exploring. But the hostel is nice and clean and has an aquarium in the foyer, so it got into my good books right away. I'm in a twin share room and so far (fingers crossed) I'm not sharing it with anyone. And I've got my own TV! So considering this will be the last hostel I stay in while I'm here in OZ, I think I've lucked out.
So far all I've managed to do today is visit the tourist info centre and pick up some groceries, and now I'm sitting here in the library doing a quick catch up. There's free internet access here so once I've done some exploring, I'll come back and tell you all about it. Cheers!
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Trip to Traralgon
I'm in a bit of a better frame of mind this morning, after last night's rant. I've spent the morning doing laundry and beginning the not-so-fun process of packing up. When I head to Broken Hill tomorrow I'm taking one of my two big bags with me, and I'll leave it in Sydney at the end of that trip. This'll allow me to avoid the extra baggage charge I would otherwise have to deal with if I flew both big bags out of Melbourne at the start of May. But it does mean I am once again packing my life into a suitcase. I'm actually rather surprised at how small the pile of stuff is that I've gotta stuff into my bags. It's kinda amazing how little I've needed to survive this year of traveling.
So... another update appears to be in order...
Monday morning I got up at 6, was out the door by 7:20, and on a train to Traralgon at 8:30am. Once again Metlink conspired to make my trip down to Southern Cross Station more stressful than was strictly necessary, and I only made it there with 5 minutes to spare! Gah. I will be happy to leave Metlink behind. But at least the V-Line train to Traralgon was one of the new "sprinter" trains and so I enjoyed a comfy, smooth ride all the way out there.
(A note to all the Canadians reading this: Traralgon is pronounced "Ta-ral-gun". There's an extra "r" in the town's name that isn't pronounced, for some reason. It's taken me forever to figure out how to pronounce it, ha ha!)
Anyway.
I went to Traralgon to meet Di, a Guider I've chatted with online for over 10 years, and Adrienne, a Canadian ex-pat and Guider who is now living in Traralgon with her husband and five kids. Traralgon is in Gippsland, the region of Victoria to the northeast of Melbourne. The ride out there took me through all sorts of cute little towns, farmland, and rolling hills. When I was nearing my destination the train passed what looked like several huge factories of some sort. I learned later on that these were either paper mills or coal-fired power plants, as these are two industries that the area is well known for.
Di and Adrienne met me at the station, and once again I was amazed by how easy it was to (a) identify and (b) become instant friends with fellow Guiders from the opposite side of the world. We did a brief walking tour around Traralgon's downtown, then headed off to a local restaurant for lunch. There we were met by several other Guiders, some of whom were ALSO Canadians! (For whatever reason, there seems to be a lot of Canucks and former Canucks in the area.) Lunch was delicious - I had fish and chips and sure enjoyed the all-you-could-eat salad bar. MMMMM.
In the afternoon, Di and Adrienne took me on a bit of a tour around the valley that Traralgon sits in. We visited the local Guide camp property, which has a really cute main building and several nicely-laid out tenting sites. We drove up to the top of one of the bigger hills for a panoramic view of the valley. I hadn't realized that Traralgon sits on a very rich deposit of brown coal, which is why there were several coal-fired power plants visible from where we were. We also drove across the valley to get a closeup look at one of the open pit coal mines and the Low Yang power station, which was pretty cool. (I somehow managed to leave my camera at home for this trip, so Di took all the pictures. Once she sends me copies, I'll post 'em.)
In true Aussie fashion, we paused throughout the afternoon to enjoy tea, first at Di's house ('cause we had to pick up some stuff for the Guide meeting that night) and then at Adrienne's ('cause I had to dump my stuff there and get changed into my uniform and all that jazz). They run a unit of older girls (Pathfinder aged), and the girls had decided on the program for the evening. When Adrienne and I arrived at the hall, half-barrel portable fire pits had been set up in the parking lot. Once all the girls had arrived, we split into groups to tackle different parts of the night's cooking. The girls prepared sausages, onions and tomatoes in foil wrap and baked them in the fire like we would prepare our standard foil dinners. I spent a good chunk of the evening in the kitchen, working with another group of girls to make lamingtons. (MMM. Lamingtons.) I think we ate more sponge cake than we actually turned into lamingtons though. :-)
While the sausages were cooking, and after the lamingtons had been made, I took all the girls and taught them a few silly games. This mostly resulted in a lot of hooting, hollering, and screaming, but I'm pretty sure they all had a good time, ha ha! Then we enjoyed a nice sit down dinner together. The girls surprised me at the end of the evening with a beautiful gift. They'd worked all together the week before to make me a dilly bag (we'd call it a mesh bag or a ditty bag) for my camp dishes! It's got a picture of a white cockatoo on it - and while they wouldn't have known this at the time, the cockatoo is one of my favorite Aussie birds! Cockatoos were the first "new" birds I spotted when I was driving from the airport in Sydney way back in September, and ever since they've been a kind of a symbol for me, to remind me that I'm in a different country. So thank you, everyone. That was a very kind and thoughtful gift!
I spent the night at Adrienne's, and her daughter kindly lent me her bedroom. (Thank you!) I also got to enjoy the jacuzzi at Adrienne's house... now THAT was a wonderful treat. I haven't had a bubble bath, let alone a jacuzzi bath, in god only knows how long. My shoulders were very happy by the end. :-)
In the morning, and after a yummy hot breakfast of pancakes and bacon and homefries and eggs, Adrienne, her husband Rob, Di and I drove out to Tarra Bulga National Park, about a half hour from Traralgon. The park is in the hills that lie between Traralgon and the ocean, and is another remnant of the southern temperate rainforest that Jen and I explored in the Otways on the Great Ocean Road. It was beautiful. We took a short hike through the rainforest to a suspension bridge over a tree-fern-filled gully, and then back to the car. We also drove up one of the tallest hills (Mount Tassie), to get another panoramic view of the valley. Then we headed back to town to enjoy lunch, and then all too soon it was time for me to get on the train and head back to Melbourne!
It was a short visit, but a wonderful one. Di and Adrienne and everyone else made me feel so welcomed! I was sorry I couldn't stay longer, but Jen and I had a "date" with a Gumnut group in Melbourne last night that I had to get back for! So after another comfy 2.5 hr ride on the sprinter train (I snoozed a good portion of the way back), I found myself at Flinders Station. I changed platforms, caught a train heading out on the Belgrave line, stopped and bought Jen and I Boost Juices, and made it to her school by 4pm. Phew!
Jen, unfortunately, was having problems with her laptop, and was waiting in the front hall of the school for the computer repair guy to show up. She needs to get the report card program put on her machine, but apparently it had a virus, which is what the computer guy needed to deal with. What with one thing and another, we didn't leave for the Gumnut meeting until much later than we'd planned, and we were 2o minutes late! Yikes! But the girls had fun anyway, and we taught them some new games and songs and showed them where on the map of Canada we live. They were so cute!
The daughter of Jen's teaching partner, Isabelle, was one of the Gumnuts (hence how we ended up being invited to the unit in the first place), so once the meeting was over we went back to her house for dinner. So by the time we finally got home, it was well past 9pm. I was POOPED. Again. This last bit of my Aussie adventures is proving to be very tiring.
And then I read that stupid, insensitive blog comment that someone sent me last night, and I was so angry/upset about it that I had a hard time sleeping. BLAH.
Today I'm madly trying to get everything ready for my adventure off to Broken Hill tomorrow, and finish booking stuff for our Grampians trip, and all that jazz. Time is slipping by rapidly! So I'd better get back to it. If you don't hear from me for a few days, it's because I am once again in transit. I will do my best to report next from Broken Hill on Friday evening. Cheerio!
So... another update appears to be in order...
Monday morning I got up at 6, was out the door by 7:20, and on a train to Traralgon at 8:30am. Once again Metlink conspired to make my trip down to Southern Cross Station more stressful than was strictly necessary, and I only made it there with 5 minutes to spare! Gah. I will be happy to leave Metlink behind. But at least the V-Line train to Traralgon was one of the new "sprinter" trains and so I enjoyed a comfy, smooth ride all the way out there.
(A note to all the Canadians reading this: Traralgon is pronounced "Ta-ral-gun". There's an extra "r" in the town's name that isn't pronounced, for some reason. It's taken me forever to figure out how to pronounce it, ha ha!)
Anyway.
I went to Traralgon to meet Di, a Guider I've chatted with online for over 10 years, and Adrienne, a Canadian ex-pat and Guider who is now living in Traralgon with her husband and five kids. Traralgon is in Gippsland, the region of Victoria to the northeast of Melbourne. The ride out there took me through all sorts of cute little towns, farmland, and rolling hills. When I was nearing my destination the train passed what looked like several huge factories of some sort. I learned later on that these were either paper mills or coal-fired power plants, as these are two industries that the area is well known for.
Di and Adrienne met me at the station, and once again I was amazed by how easy it was to (a) identify and (b) become instant friends with fellow Guiders from the opposite side of the world. We did a brief walking tour around Traralgon's downtown, then headed off to a local restaurant for lunch. There we were met by several other Guiders, some of whom were ALSO Canadians! (For whatever reason, there seems to be a lot of Canucks and former Canucks in the area.) Lunch was delicious - I had fish and chips and sure enjoyed the all-you-could-eat salad bar. MMMMM.
In the afternoon, Di and Adrienne took me on a bit of a tour around the valley that Traralgon sits in. We visited the local Guide camp property, which has a really cute main building and several nicely-laid out tenting sites. We drove up to the top of one of the bigger hills for a panoramic view of the valley. I hadn't realized that Traralgon sits on a very rich deposit of brown coal, which is why there were several coal-fired power plants visible from where we were. We also drove across the valley to get a closeup look at one of the open pit coal mines and the Low Yang power station, which was pretty cool. (I somehow managed to leave my camera at home for this trip, so Di took all the pictures. Once she sends me copies, I'll post 'em.)
In true Aussie fashion, we paused throughout the afternoon to enjoy tea, first at Di's house ('cause we had to pick up some stuff for the Guide meeting that night) and then at Adrienne's ('cause I had to dump my stuff there and get changed into my uniform and all that jazz). They run a unit of older girls (Pathfinder aged), and the girls had decided on the program for the evening. When Adrienne and I arrived at the hall, half-barrel portable fire pits had been set up in the parking lot. Once all the girls had arrived, we split into groups to tackle different parts of the night's cooking. The girls prepared sausages, onions and tomatoes in foil wrap and baked them in the fire like we would prepare our standard foil dinners. I spent a good chunk of the evening in the kitchen, working with another group of girls to make lamingtons. (MMM. Lamingtons.) I think we ate more sponge cake than we actually turned into lamingtons though. :-)
While the sausages were cooking, and after the lamingtons had been made, I took all the girls and taught them a few silly games. This mostly resulted in a lot of hooting, hollering, and screaming, but I'm pretty sure they all had a good time, ha ha! Then we enjoyed a nice sit down dinner together. The girls surprised me at the end of the evening with a beautiful gift. They'd worked all together the week before to make me a dilly bag (we'd call it a mesh bag or a ditty bag) for my camp dishes! It's got a picture of a white cockatoo on it - and while they wouldn't have known this at the time, the cockatoo is one of my favorite Aussie birds! Cockatoos were the first "new" birds I spotted when I was driving from the airport in Sydney way back in September, and ever since they've been a kind of a symbol for me, to remind me that I'm in a different country. So thank you, everyone. That was a very kind and thoughtful gift!
I spent the night at Adrienne's, and her daughter kindly lent me her bedroom. (Thank you!) I also got to enjoy the jacuzzi at Adrienne's house... now THAT was a wonderful treat. I haven't had a bubble bath, let alone a jacuzzi bath, in god only knows how long. My shoulders were very happy by the end. :-)
In the morning, and after a yummy hot breakfast of pancakes and bacon and homefries and eggs, Adrienne, her husband Rob, Di and I drove out to Tarra Bulga National Park, about a half hour from Traralgon. The park is in the hills that lie between Traralgon and the ocean, and is another remnant of the southern temperate rainforest that Jen and I explored in the Otways on the Great Ocean Road. It was beautiful. We took a short hike through the rainforest to a suspension bridge over a tree-fern-filled gully, and then back to the car. We also drove up one of the tallest hills (Mount Tassie), to get another panoramic view of the valley. Then we headed back to town to enjoy lunch, and then all too soon it was time for me to get on the train and head back to Melbourne!
It was a short visit, but a wonderful one. Di and Adrienne and everyone else made me feel so welcomed! I was sorry I couldn't stay longer, but Jen and I had a "date" with a Gumnut group in Melbourne last night that I had to get back for! So after another comfy 2.5 hr ride on the sprinter train (I snoozed a good portion of the way back), I found myself at Flinders Station. I changed platforms, caught a train heading out on the Belgrave line, stopped and bought Jen and I Boost Juices, and made it to her school by 4pm. Phew!
Jen, unfortunately, was having problems with her laptop, and was waiting in the front hall of the school for the computer repair guy to show up. She needs to get the report card program put on her machine, but apparently it had a virus, which is what the computer guy needed to deal with. What with one thing and another, we didn't leave for the Gumnut meeting until much later than we'd planned, and we were 2o minutes late! Yikes! But the girls had fun anyway, and we taught them some new games and songs and showed them where on the map of Canada we live. They were so cute!
The daughter of Jen's teaching partner, Isabelle, was one of the Gumnuts (hence how we ended up being invited to the unit in the first place), so once the meeting was over we went back to her house for dinner. So by the time we finally got home, it was well past 9pm. I was POOPED. Again. This last bit of my Aussie adventures is proving to be very tiring.
And then I read that stupid, insensitive blog comment that someone sent me last night, and I was so angry/upset about it that I had a hard time sleeping. BLAH.
Today I'm madly trying to get everything ready for my adventure off to Broken Hill tomorrow, and finish booking stuff for our Grampians trip, and all that jazz. Time is slipping by rapidly! So I'd better get back to it. If you don't hear from me for a few days, it's because I am once again in transit. I will do my best to report next from Broken Hill on Friday evening. Cheerio!
...And to all my friends and family...
Sorry you had to read that last rant. I felt it was important.
I just got back from Traralgon this afternoon, where I've spent a whirlwind 24 hours playing with the Girl Guides there. But I am totally wiped and am now heading off to bed. I promise I will update y'all on my adventures in the morning. Cheers!
I just got back from Traralgon this afternoon, where I've spent a whirlwind 24 hours playing with the Girl Guides there. But I am totally wiped and am now heading off to bed. I promise I will update y'all on my adventures in the morning. Cheers!
To the inconsiderate person who sent me a hateful message
Yep, that's right, I got home tonight after yet another awesome Aussie adventure and when I went to check my email, I saw that someone had sent me a comment for my blog. It wasn't very nice. In fact it was downright rude, uneducated, and racist. And while I understand the concept of free speech and that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, this is MY BLOG. I will not publish hateful material.
So: to the inconsiderate person who wrote me that message (I know you know who you are): if you don't even have the courage to sign your name to what you write, don't expect a response. I have far better things to do with my time. Like sharing all my WONDERFUL, AMAZING Aussie adventures (the good parts AND the bad) with my FRIENDS and FAMILY back home. Go away and bother someone else.
And yes, in case you were wondering: I've LOVED my time here in Australia. All of it. Even when it's been too hot or too cold or too many flies or there's been a billion parrots outside my window at 5am. If you'd taken the time to read more than one entry, you would have figured that out. God I hate uneducated people.
So: to the inconsiderate person who wrote me that message (I know you know who you are): if you don't even have the courage to sign your name to what you write, don't expect a response. I have far better things to do with my time. Like sharing all my WONDERFUL, AMAZING Aussie adventures (the good parts AND the bad) with my FRIENDS and FAMILY back home. Go away and bother someone else.
And yes, in case you were wondering: I've LOVED my time here in Australia. All of it. Even when it's been too hot or too cold or too many flies or there's been a billion parrots outside my window at 5am. If you'd taken the time to read more than one entry, you would have figured that out. God I hate uneducated people.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Vermont Guide Weekend Camp
Can I just tell you - it doesn't seem to matter how often I do this, but GOSH a nice hot shower feels awfully good when I get home after a camp! Jen and I spent the weekend camping with the Vermont Guides at the Stuart Glen Campsite in Tynong North. We've hung out with the Vermont Guides a couple of times this year, including for Thinking Day, and they're a blast.
I got picked up by Nina around 3pm on Friday, and after struggling all across town through horrendous traffic, we rendezvoused with Carol, another of the unit's leaders, and headed out in convoy towards the campsite. The town of Tynong is about an hour and a half outside of Melbourne, at least, when the traffic's behaving. We got caught in the Friday rush so it took us almost two hours to get there. We'd left early on purpose in the hopes of having time to do some of the set-up before the girls arrived, but in the end all we really had time for was to unload the cars and set up the dining shelter before it was completely dark!
Jen caught the train out to Nunawading after school and met up with Katie, the unit's third leader, and all the girls, and together they all rode a bus out to the site. The bus got a wee bit lost at the very end - at the site, Nina and Carol and I watched the bus cruise right by on the road. They completely missed the turnoff! The problem was that there were no floodlights or anything to light up the campsite's gate. I trudged back up the camp road to the highway and stood there with my flashlight until the bus driver realized his mistake and doubled back.
The girls arrived around 7:30, and it was completely pitch black at the camp site. Stuart Glen is out in the middle of a decent woodland, but the camp itself isn't all that big - there's a cool A-frame building that sleeps something like 24 people, and one tenting campsite where we were based for the weekend. Everything had to be set up - food and eating shelters, trestle tables, tents, the outdoor stove, the hot water copper - everything. The girls were great workers and super enthusiastic, but even so, we didn't pause for dinner until almost 9pm, and weren't completely set up until almost 11pm! The tents were cork tents of the same design that Jen and I had experienced at the Chiltern camp (note - the photo I just linked to there is from the Barree camp, not this weekend's - for once, I didn't take any pictures!). The cool thing about these tents is that all the pole segments are the same length, so they're pretty straightforward to put together, even in the dark. However they are canvas and really heavy and it was still a lot of hard work. There were only ten girls in the unit and the cork tents sleep five easily - so what we did was to place two of the tents end-to-end (they have doors on each end) to make one huge "barracks" for the girls. Pretty cool - and a good way to solve the "who's sleeping in who's tent" issue!
The weather this weekend was a little odd - it kept showering at inopportune moments (like the nice little downpour we had at 6am Saturday morning, when I had just woken up and was debating whether or not to get out of my nice warm sleeping bag to go visit the loo...). But at least it was warm-ish! I had sent my long underwear home to Canada with my parents, and as I was packing for the camp, I was really rather worried I was gonna freeze. Fortunately that didn't happen. Even so, it took a lot of convincing to get my body out of that nice warm sleeping bag on Saturday morning.
The theme of the camp was "Australia - Canada Friendship". Katie, one of the unit's Guiders, is also Canadian, so there were actually more Canadian leaders on the camp than Australians! The main events on Saturday focused on our first nations peoples and our explorers. We braided headbands and decorated them with feathers. Each patrol of girls (and the patrol of leaders!) made canoes out of cardboard boxes, and then after packing our backpacks with all our lunch stuff, we set off on an adventure, "paddling" our canoes through the woods! In the end we found our way to this little clearing where we stopped to make lunch.
This was really cool. Nina had been there ahead of time and dropped off four metal half-barrels and grills. Each patrol of girls had to use one of the barrels as a portable fire pit, make their own fire, and decide on their own how they were going to cook their lunches. Lunch ingredients/equipment included corn on the cob, potatoes, apples, damper (bannock) mix, newspapers, sour cream, jam, and table syrup. The leaders cooked our lunches on our own fire, strategically placed so we could keep an eye on all the girls at the same time and offer advice as needed. The potatoes were wrapped in layers of soaked newspaper and baked in the coals. We made damper and cooked it on sticks. The corn was placed on the grills and roasted over the fire, and the apples were cooked whole on sticks over the flames, and when they were nice and mushy, we rolled them in brown sugar and ate them like candy apples. Yummy! Lunch took us over two hours to do but nobody cared, it was all great fun. Then we packed everything back up, loaded ourselves back into our canoes, and "paddled" back to our main campsite.
When we returned to camp in the afternoon, we were greeted by the mysterious stranger "Madam Froo Froo", (Katie in disguise, and of course all the kids knew!), who was a fortune teller and correctly "read the minds" of the girls and predicted the messages they'd all written out for her on slips of paper. (That was a good trick and I've gotta remember to add it to my website at some point.) Apparently Madam Froo Froo's appearance is a bit of a tradition with this group - she's showed up at all their camps these past few years - but the girls still haven't figured out how she reads their minds. Ha ha!
The last part of the afternoon, the girls split into their patrols to get to work on dinner and preparing campfire. Jen and I did a good turn by completely cleaning out and re-digging the campfire pit, which badly needed some TLC. We taught some of the girls a really funny skit, which they pulled off at the campfire perfectly. The cook patrol made this delicious meatloaf over the fire which everyone inhaled - no leftovers here! Basically the whole weekend just kinda chugged along - this unit obviously had a good set of routines at camp that they'd used for years. The older girls knew what to do and the younger girls were super-enthusiastic and happy to help out.
I learned a few new things this weekend which I'm hoping to take back to my own unit in the fall. One weekend-long game this unit always plays at camp is "Camp Thief". Everyone drew a slip of paper out of a hat on Friday night, and one person would be selected in this way as the Camp Thief. Their goal throughout the weekend was to steal a small toy wolf figurine which was placed in the equipment shed, and have it reappear near the flagpole in the middle of camp without anyone noticing. Two other people in the group drew "Detective" slips, and their job was to figure out who the thief was. Sunday morning, once everything was all cleaned up, we sat down as a group and the detectives worked to figure out who the Thief was. It was great fun. The wolf figurine will be taken back to the Vermont Guide Hall, there to sit on a shelf along with all the other strange objects that the Camp Thief has stolen at previous camps.
I also really liked how this unit worked their meals. There were no tables at the campsite, just some trestles that we could use for preparing food on. So we "made" a table each mealtime by setting out situpons in a circle in the grass in the middle of the campsite. Leaders enjoyed the privilege of sitting in chairs. :-) The girls on cook patrol were in charge of serving out the food, and the girls in the "camp" patrol acted as waitresses and would take our plates from us as we sat at the "table", get them filled by the cooks, and then bring them back to us. Juice, margarine, and other items everyone would need were placed on trays which sat in the middle of the circle, and were passed around upon request. It was a BIG no-no to cross over the table during meals! Also, the leaders in this unit insist on proper table etiquette, which means that nobody was allowed to leave the table during the meal for a trip to the bathroom or to go get a jumper. And let me tell you, the table manners of their girls were fabulous!
Jen headed for home on Saturday night - she's been so tired this whole week we figured it was better if she had the chance to sleep in this morning in her OWN bed and get some work done for school. So I led the campfire all on my lonesome on Saturday night. I've definitely gotten used to leading campfires with my friends - it was sure hard on my voice (and I'm sure not nearly as funny), doing it on my own. But everyone seemed to have a good time and we sure had some tired girls by the time the fire was over. It didn't take long for everyone to climb into bed.
This morning we woke up to more rain - not a lot, but enough to wet the canvas tents so we couldn't pack them away in their proper bags. Instead, it took all of us working together to dismantle the tents and "sling" them over poles, and then hang them to dry in the workshop. Nina and Carol will have to go back out to the campsite in a few weeks' time and pack all the tents away properly (ugh). Once again the girls were super-helpful and I heard very little complaining from any of them. We did break up the work though - we'd strike a tent, then have a snack, then we struck the next one, and paused for Guides Own, and so on. And before we knew it, camp was over and it was time for everyone to head home!
I didn't get home until after 6pm and let me tell you, I was sure glad Jen had come home yesterday! She'd done all the laundry, done the grocery shopping, made me a snack for the train tomorrow, and while I was standing in the shower enjoying the warmth and great water pressure, she went out and bought us pizza for dinner. Fabulous. Needless to say I'm a little on the pooped side. The coming week's gonna be busy though - I'm off to Traralgon first thing in the morning to meet Di and Adrienne, two local Guiders. I've over the internet with Di for more than 10 years now, so it's about time we finally got to meet!
Off to bed, I'm one sleepy camper...
I got picked up by Nina around 3pm on Friday, and after struggling all across town through horrendous traffic, we rendezvoused with Carol, another of the unit's leaders, and headed out in convoy towards the campsite. The town of Tynong is about an hour and a half outside of Melbourne, at least, when the traffic's behaving. We got caught in the Friday rush so it took us almost two hours to get there. We'd left early on purpose in the hopes of having time to do some of the set-up before the girls arrived, but in the end all we really had time for was to unload the cars and set up the dining shelter before it was completely dark!
Jen caught the train out to Nunawading after school and met up with Katie, the unit's third leader, and all the girls, and together they all rode a bus out to the site. The bus got a wee bit lost at the very end - at the site, Nina and Carol and I watched the bus cruise right by on the road. They completely missed the turnoff! The problem was that there were no floodlights or anything to light up the campsite's gate. I trudged back up the camp road to the highway and stood there with my flashlight until the bus driver realized his mistake and doubled back.
The girls arrived around 7:30, and it was completely pitch black at the camp site. Stuart Glen is out in the middle of a decent woodland, but the camp itself isn't all that big - there's a cool A-frame building that sleeps something like 24 people, and one tenting campsite where we were based for the weekend. Everything had to be set up - food and eating shelters, trestle tables, tents, the outdoor stove, the hot water copper - everything. The girls were great workers and super enthusiastic, but even so, we didn't pause for dinner until almost 9pm, and weren't completely set up until almost 11pm! The tents were cork tents of the same design that Jen and I had experienced at the Chiltern camp (note - the photo I just linked to there is from the Barree camp, not this weekend's - for once, I didn't take any pictures!). The cool thing about these tents is that all the pole segments are the same length, so they're pretty straightforward to put together, even in the dark. However they are canvas and really heavy and it was still a lot of hard work. There were only ten girls in the unit and the cork tents sleep five easily - so what we did was to place two of the tents end-to-end (they have doors on each end) to make one huge "barracks" for the girls. Pretty cool - and a good way to solve the "who's sleeping in who's tent" issue!
The weather this weekend was a little odd - it kept showering at inopportune moments (like the nice little downpour we had at 6am Saturday morning, when I had just woken up and was debating whether or not to get out of my nice warm sleeping bag to go visit the loo...). But at least it was warm-ish! I had sent my long underwear home to Canada with my parents, and as I was packing for the camp, I was really rather worried I was gonna freeze. Fortunately that didn't happen. Even so, it took a lot of convincing to get my body out of that nice warm sleeping bag on Saturday morning.
The theme of the camp was "Australia - Canada Friendship". Katie, one of the unit's Guiders, is also Canadian, so there were actually more Canadian leaders on the camp than Australians! The main events on Saturday focused on our first nations peoples and our explorers. We braided headbands and decorated them with feathers. Each patrol of girls (and the patrol of leaders!) made canoes out of cardboard boxes, and then after packing our backpacks with all our lunch stuff, we set off on an adventure, "paddling" our canoes through the woods! In the end we found our way to this little clearing where we stopped to make lunch.
This was really cool. Nina had been there ahead of time and dropped off four metal half-barrels and grills. Each patrol of girls had to use one of the barrels as a portable fire pit, make their own fire, and decide on their own how they were going to cook their lunches. Lunch ingredients/equipment included corn on the cob, potatoes, apples, damper (bannock) mix, newspapers, sour cream, jam, and table syrup. The leaders cooked our lunches on our own fire, strategically placed so we could keep an eye on all the girls at the same time and offer advice as needed. The potatoes were wrapped in layers of soaked newspaper and baked in the coals. We made damper and cooked it on sticks. The corn was placed on the grills and roasted over the fire, and the apples were cooked whole on sticks over the flames, and when they were nice and mushy, we rolled them in brown sugar and ate them like candy apples. Yummy! Lunch took us over two hours to do but nobody cared, it was all great fun. Then we packed everything back up, loaded ourselves back into our canoes, and "paddled" back to our main campsite.
When we returned to camp in the afternoon, we were greeted by the mysterious stranger "Madam Froo Froo", (Katie in disguise, and of course all the kids knew!), who was a fortune teller and correctly "read the minds" of the girls and predicted the messages they'd all written out for her on slips of paper. (That was a good trick and I've gotta remember to add it to my website at some point.) Apparently Madam Froo Froo's appearance is a bit of a tradition with this group - she's showed up at all their camps these past few years - but the girls still haven't figured out how she reads their minds. Ha ha!
The last part of the afternoon, the girls split into their patrols to get to work on dinner and preparing campfire. Jen and I did a good turn by completely cleaning out and re-digging the campfire pit, which badly needed some TLC. We taught some of the girls a really funny skit, which they pulled off at the campfire perfectly. The cook patrol made this delicious meatloaf over the fire which everyone inhaled - no leftovers here! Basically the whole weekend just kinda chugged along - this unit obviously had a good set of routines at camp that they'd used for years. The older girls knew what to do and the younger girls were super-enthusiastic and happy to help out.
I learned a few new things this weekend which I'm hoping to take back to my own unit in the fall. One weekend-long game this unit always plays at camp is "Camp Thief". Everyone drew a slip of paper out of a hat on Friday night, and one person would be selected in this way as the Camp Thief. Their goal throughout the weekend was to steal a small toy wolf figurine which was placed in the equipment shed, and have it reappear near the flagpole in the middle of camp without anyone noticing. Two other people in the group drew "Detective" slips, and their job was to figure out who the thief was. Sunday morning, once everything was all cleaned up, we sat down as a group and the detectives worked to figure out who the Thief was. It was great fun. The wolf figurine will be taken back to the Vermont Guide Hall, there to sit on a shelf along with all the other strange objects that the Camp Thief has stolen at previous camps.
I also really liked how this unit worked their meals. There were no tables at the campsite, just some trestles that we could use for preparing food on. So we "made" a table each mealtime by setting out situpons in a circle in the grass in the middle of the campsite. Leaders enjoyed the privilege of sitting in chairs. :-) The girls on cook patrol were in charge of serving out the food, and the girls in the "camp" patrol acted as waitresses and would take our plates from us as we sat at the "table", get them filled by the cooks, and then bring them back to us. Juice, margarine, and other items everyone would need were placed on trays which sat in the middle of the circle, and were passed around upon request. It was a BIG no-no to cross over the table during meals! Also, the leaders in this unit insist on proper table etiquette, which means that nobody was allowed to leave the table during the meal for a trip to the bathroom or to go get a jumper. And let me tell you, the table manners of their girls were fabulous!
Jen headed for home on Saturday night - she's been so tired this whole week we figured it was better if she had the chance to sleep in this morning in her OWN bed and get some work done for school. So I led the campfire all on my lonesome on Saturday night. I've definitely gotten used to leading campfires with my friends - it was sure hard on my voice (and I'm sure not nearly as funny), doing it on my own. But everyone seemed to have a good time and we sure had some tired girls by the time the fire was over. It didn't take long for everyone to climb into bed.
This morning we woke up to more rain - not a lot, but enough to wet the canvas tents so we couldn't pack them away in their proper bags. Instead, it took all of us working together to dismantle the tents and "sling" them over poles, and then hang them to dry in the workshop. Nina and Carol will have to go back out to the campsite in a few weeks' time and pack all the tents away properly (ugh). Once again the girls were super-helpful and I heard very little complaining from any of them. We did break up the work though - we'd strike a tent, then have a snack, then we struck the next one, and paused for Guides Own, and so on. And before we knew it, camp was over and it was time for everyone to head home!
I didn't get home until after 6pm and let me tell you, I was sure glad Jen had come home yesterday! She'd done all the laundry, done the grocery shopping, made me a snack for the train tomorrow, and while I was standing in the shower enjoying the warmth and great water pressure, she went out and bought us pizza for dinner. Fabulous. Needless to say I'm a little on the pooped side. The coming week's gonna be busy though - I'm off to Traralgon first thing in the morning to meet Di and Adrienne, two local Guiders. I've over the internet with Di for more than 10 years now, so it's about time we finally got to meet!
Off to bed, I'm one sleepy camper...
Thursday, April 10, 2008
More Random Musings
Well I survived trampolining but only just, and Jen managed to do something to her neck so she's really sore, and our coach Mark was so tired from all the other stuff he's got going on that we called it a day a half hour earlier than usual so we could all go home and sleep. And wouldn't you know it? I slept like a log on Wednesday night but last night, not so much. By 9:30pm last night it was all I could do to drag my butt around the house, so I gave up and went to bed. I was so tired I couldn't even read! And then when I did fall asleep, I was treated to all sorts of fun nightmares until I finally kicked off the blankets around 2am and sat up, gasping. I didn't get back to sleep again for a couple of hours. When I finally did get up this morning, I was shocked to discover it was almost 10am!! It's almost unheard of for me to sleep that late. Gah.
Apparently Jen also had nightmares last night, so we figure we'll blame the pasta bake we had for dinner and leave it at that. There really was no other reason for us to both have such a restless night.
I did have a busy day yesterday. I'm now in the process of buying all the last-minute stuff I want to bring home with me. Hopefully I'll actually have room in my bags! The purchase of the day was a hat. Not just any hat, either, it's an Aussie bush hat. I've wanted one of these since I first saw them back in September. It's made of kangaroo leather and is really beautiful - the leather has lots of "character" and isn't perfectly smooth. And yes, I got the one with the strip of crocodile skin and teeth on it. Frighteningly, it looks really really good on me! Ha ha! So no, you can't call me "Crocodile Dundee", but the hat will sure go well with my "Dragon" persona!
This afternoon Jen and I are heading off to camp with the Vermont Guides, and won't be back until Sunday afternoon. The weather forecast isn't looking too promising - rain and drizzle and temperature lows in the 12-14C range. (I'm gonna freeze.) Wish us luck! I'll let you know how it went on Sunday...
Apparently Jen also had nightmares last night, so we figure we'll blame the pasta bake we had for dinner and leave it at that. There really was no other reason for us to both have such a restless night.
I did have a busy day yesterday. I'm now in the process of buying all the last-minute stuff I want to bring home with me. Hopefully I'll actually have room in my bags! The purchase of the day was a hat. Not just any hat, either, it's an Aussie bush hat. I've wanted one of these since I first saw them back in September. It's made of kangaroo leather and is really beautiful - the leather has lots of "character" and isn't perfectly smooth. And yes, I got the one with the strip of crocodile skin and teeth on it. Frighteningly, it looks really really good on me! Ha ha! So no, you can't call me "Crocodile Dundee", but the hat will sure go well with my "Dragon" persona!
This afternoon Jen and I are heading off to camp with the Vermont Guides, and won't be back until Sunday afternoon. The weather forecast isn't looking too promising - rain and drizzle and temperature lows in the 12-14C range. (I'm gonna freeze.) Wish us luck! I'll let you know how it went on Sunday...
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Random Musings
I think I'm ready to come home now.
I've spent the last two days sorting through all my stuff, getting rid of a serious amount of crap, and re-reading all the letters my friends have sent me throughout the past eight months.
I've sent in my paperwork to be re-instated at the School Board. I don't know where I'll be teaching in the fall, but that doesn't really matter right now. I'm just glad I have a good paying job to go back to.
I've taken out a considerable amount of trash, which sadly had a few beloved items in it. My canvas hat, which I've had for upwards of 20 years, did not survive this adventure. I put it through the wash when I got back from the Red Centre, and alas it came out in pieces. When I tried to salvage the bandanna that's been decorating its brim all this time, it shredded in my hands. Likewise, my blue sandals have also died. I ripped one of the straps out at Uluru. They're still wear-able but only just. They won't be coming home. I'm trying to squeeze a last few miles outta them before they join the hat in the Great Dustbin in the Sky.
I've realized that my ever-planning brain has now shifted full-time to planning all the stuff I've got to do during the Canadian summer months, including buying a car, finding a place to live, moving all my stuff back to Toronto, taking canoeing courses, and of course summer camp. But even that's changed. For those of you who haven't heard yet, Vicky and I are no longer the Summer Camp Directors at Woolsey. We decided that a change of pace (and scenery!) was needed. We are returning to camp this year, but as the canoe tripping staff. This will provide me with a totally new set of challenges. Ah well! I've known all along that this would be a year of change. Guess this is just another part of that process.
I return to trampolining class tonight after a six week absence. (I'm gonna die.) With any luck I'll be able to roll myself out of bed in some sort of shape at some point tomorrow morning, but don't hold me to that.
Oh! And here's something completely random! Remember how I went on a bit of a rant about the problems that Jen and I encountered at the resorts we stayed in at Uluru and Kings Canyon? Turns out that Janet McGarry, the Marketing Manager for YHA, came across those blog entries. (And now I know how Google Alerts work, ha ha!) So she forwarded my complaints on to her associate at the resort company on my behalf. Thanks Janet! :-)
I also feel I should put a little bit of a positive plug in here for the YHA. I didn't know anything about hosteling when I came to Australia last September. Thanks to my friends Ruth and Carroll, I got introduced to the YHA and its network of hostels across the country. What with all the adventures I've been on this year, I've stayed in a LOT of hostels. Not all of them have been YHA's, and Jen and I have noticed a distinct difference between YHA and non-YHA hostels. The YHA hostels have a set of standards they must adhere to in order to maintain their accreditation, and it shows. The only hostels we've had problems in this year have been non-YHA hostels - to the point where it's become a bit of an in-joke: "Wow, you can tell this place isn't a part of the YHA!". I have preferentially stayed in YHA hostels all year long, and will definitely continue to do so in these last few weeks. So Janet, I don't know if you'll get a chance to read this, but please pass on my commendations to the YHA team. If I hadn't discovered your organization, this year might have been very different!
OK, gotta run to trampolining, trying not to think about how much I'm likely gonna hurt when I get home tonight...
I've spent the last two days sorting through all my stuff, getting rid of a serious amount of crap, and re-reading all the letters my friends have sent me throughout the past eight months.
I've sent in my paperwork to be re-instated at the School Board. I don't know where I'll be teaching in the fall, but that doesn't really matter right now. I'm just glad I have a good paying job to go back to.
I've taken out a considerable amount of trash, which sadly had a few beloved items in it. My canvas hat, which I've had for upwards of 20 years, did not survive this adventure. I put it through the wash when I got back from the Red Centre, and alas it came out in pieces. When I tried to salvage the bandanna that's been decorating its brim all this time, it shredded in my hands. Likewise, my blue sandals have also died. I ripped one of the straps out at Uluru. They're still wear-able but only just. They won't be coming home. I'm trying to squeeze a last few miles outta them before they join the hat in the Great Dustbin in the Sky.
I've realized that my ever-planning brain has now shifted full-time to planning all the stuff I've got to do during the Canadian summer months, including buying a car, finding a place to live, moving all my stuff back to Toronto, taking canoeing courses, and of course summer camp. But even that's changed. For those of you who haven't heard yet, Vicky and I are no longer the Summer Camp Directors at Woolsey. We decided that a change of pace (and scenery!) was needed. We are returning to camp this year, but as the canoe tripping staff. This will provide me with a totally new set of challenges. Ah well! I've known all along that this would be a year of change. Guess this is just another part of that process.
I return to trampolining class tonight after a six week absence. (I'm gonna die.) With any luck I'll be able to roll myself out of bed in some sort of shape at some point tomorrow morning, but don't hold me to that.
Oh! And here's something completely random! Remember how I went on a bit of a rant about the problems that Jen and I encountered at the resorts we stayed in at Uluru and Kings Canyon? Turns out that Janet McGarry, the Marketing Manager for YHA, came across those blog entries. (And now I know how Google Alerts work, ha ha!) So she forwarded my complaints on to her associate at the resort company on my behalf. Thanks Janet! :-)
I also feel I should put a little bit of a positive plug in here for the YHA. I didn't know anything about hosteling when I came to Australia last September. Thanks to my friends Ruth and Carroll, I got introduced to the YHA and its network of hostels across the country. What with all the adventures I've been on this year, I've stayed in a LOT of hostels. Not all of them have been YHA's, and Jen and I have noticed a distinct difference between YHA and non-YHA hostels. The YHA hostels have a set of standards they must adhere to in order to maintain their accreditation, and it shows. The only hostels we've had problems in this year have been non-YHA hostels - to the point where it's become a bit of an in-joke: "Wow, you can tell this place isn't a part of the YHA!". I have preferentially stayed in YHA hostels all year long, and will definitely continue to do so in these last few weeks. So Janet, I don't know if you'll get a chance to read this, but please pass on my commendations to the YHA team. If I hadn't discovered your organization, this year might have been very different!
OK, gotta run to trampolining, trying not to think about how much I'm likely gonna hurt when I get home tonight...
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Ballarat
Yesterday was really, really cool!
A while back, I'd received an email from Karen Chatto, who is the National Program Advisor for Guides Australia. She'd heard that I was in the country and looking for Guiding contacts, and wanted to meet me. Turns out she lives in Ballarat, which is an easy 1 1/2 hour train ride from Melbourne, so I invited myself out there so I could meet her and tour the town. Jen is off at camp (of all things) with her students, and even if that wasn't going on she would've been at work, so I went on my own.
I arrived in Ballarat just after 9:30am and Karen and her 14-month-old son Mitchell met me at the train station. (She was right. She was really easy to spot, what with the fantastic black-and-orange pram she has for her little boy!) Karen had already done all the hard work of finding tourist brochures for the town's various attractions so we "hit the ground running", as it were.
Ballarat has an important place in Australia's history. First off, it was the centre of the Victorian gold rush in the late 1800's, and when gold was found here, thousands of people abandoned their jobs elsewhere and converged on Ballarat's gold fields. Thousands more came from overseas to seek their fortune, including many Chinese. You can't help but feel a little bit sorry for the government of the time - Ballarat's population went from 50 to 50,000 in a matter of weeks. Can you imagine how hard keeping law and order was? Even the police were deserting their posts to go gold hunting!
In an attempt to keep control of things, the government imposed these crazy license laws, which were meant to discourage ordinary folks from abandoning their jobs and going gold hunting. The licenses had to be bought monthly and were very expensive. Needless to say, the miners didn't like this system and thought it was very unfair. Well, one thing led to another, and eventually there was rioting in Ballarat, followed closely by the famous Eureka Stockade showdown. At the Eureka Stockade, the miners barricaded themselves to fight for their rights - including the right to vote for the authorities who were making the laws (the miners up to this point didn't have the right to vote since most of them owned no property). The police and army attacked and there was a terrible slaughter. Following this incident there was a huge public outcry supporting the miners and denouncing what the government did to try and control them. Today the battle at the Eureka Stockade is widely recognized as when true democracy came to Australia.
Knowing all this, of course the first place we stopped was the Eureka Stockade interpretative centre. The stockade itself is long gone, but the city has done a great job of explaining the events that led up to the battle in the centre. Again I enjoyed the excellent use of lighting and sound effects as I wandered through the displays, listening to clips from the protests, the battles, and the eventual trials. It was great. While I was in the centre, Karen took her little boy to the nearby playground - shaped like a stockade, I'd like to point out, and with ranks of wooden British soldiers standing guard! So cool.
From there, we drove across town to Sovereign Hill. Karen had tried to describe this place to me over the phone but I hadn't truly understood what it was. Turns out that Sovereign Hill is a Living Museum, in much the same spirit as Upper Canada and Black Creek Pioneer Villages. One big difference is that, unlike the pioneer villages I've been to in Canada, all the buildings at Sovereign Hill were purpose-built reconstructions, and not originals. Some of the steam engines and other machinery on site were authentic, though. On the other hand, given the volatility of the gold rush era, it was probably difficult to find examples of the mining buildings etc., as they would have been dismantled and moved elsewhere once the gold ran out.
Sovereign Hill was really, really, really cool. There were actors walking around in period costume. British soldiers raided the mining tent camp and demanded to see miners licenses. There was a gold stream that the public could try panning at - and yes, there was still gold to be found in the stream. I gave it a go but had no luck, but apparently the day before, someone had found a $100 gold nugget right where I was working! Wow! Stagecoaches, wagons, and horsemen rode up and down the streets. All the shops were open and selling their wares - all made in the town. The meat pies and apple pasties were GREAT.
Having recently been to Upper Canada Village, I didn't spend all that much time in the shops and homes, as these were very similar to what I'd see there. But the mining aspect of the town was absolutely fascinating. They had a tent city set up like it would have been in the late 1800's. You could look in each tent and tell a little about how prosperous the miners were by the furnishings inside. In many of the tents they had voice recordings set up on motion sensors, so when you poked your head in, you'd hear snippets of conversations from the tent's occupants. This gave a whole different perspective about life on the gold fields.
There were also two mine tours to do, and of course I did both of them. In the Red Hill Mine, we followed the ghostly voice of an old miner, as he "trained" us new "young boys" in the ways of life underground. It was cool - we'd stop at some point in the passageway, an alcove with an interactive demonstration would light up, and when that part of the show was over, a new tunnel would light up and we'd follow it to our next stop. In the other tour, we went down into a real gold mine and learned how the gold was extracted. At the end of that tour, we all got to ride on a modified ore cart train down the narrow twisty tunnels and back to the entrance. Craziness!
The absolute highlight of the day was watching the gold pour. Each hour, they do a demonstration to show how gold ingots are made. So Karen and Mitchell and I sat in the crowded amphitheater with a whole ton of (very well behaved) school kids and watched in fascination. The gold was melted in a crucible made of (I think?) iron (I can't remember!), then poured into a breadpan-shaped cast iron mold. I was astounded at how quickly the gold solidified and then cooled (after a dunking in a bucket of water) - I would say within 5 minutes of being molten metal at over 1000C, it was cool enough to touch! The ingot we saw was worth something like $95,000, and was about half the size of one of Maureen's banana breads. One lucky kid was pulled from the audience and got to hold the gold for a minute or so. Totally awesome.
By the time we'd finished wandering around Sovereign Hill, Mitchell was getting pretty tired, so Karen and I parted ways and she headed home to put him down for a nap. She dropped me off back in Ballarat's downtown, and was thoughtful enough to provide me with a brochure with a walking tour of the town's historic architecture. I wandered up and down Lydiard Street, admiring all the old buildings. I also stuck my head into Ballarat's art gallery, but by that time I was also pooped and I didn't stay all that long.
The only complaint I have about Ballarat is that there are no decent cafes within a 3-block radius of the train station! It took me quite a bit of walking (and backtracking) to find a place to grab a bite to eat before getting on the train back to Melbourne. Ah well. Can't win 'em all!
What with one thing and another, I didn't make it back to the house here until almost 8:30pm and I was pooped. Again. Then again, I realized yesterday that part of the reason I was likely so tired was because the week before, Jen and I had hopped time zones six times in six days, what with our journeys back and forth between the Northern Territory, South Australia, Victoria and of course the beginnings here of Daylight Savings Time. Gah.
Tonight I'm off to meet a group of senior Guides and Ranger Guides, and we're going to be comparing wilderness camping techniques between Australia and Canada. Should be interesting! At home, it's been drilled into me that "cotton kills, cotton kills, cotton kills"... but here in OZ cotton is the preferred fabric for hot summer weather! I wonder what other differences we'll find?
A while back, I'd received an email from Karen Chatto, who is the National Program Advisor for Guides Australia. She'd heard that I was in the country and looking for Guiding contacts, and wanted to meet me. Turns out she lives in Ballarat, which is an easy 1 1/2 hour train ride from Melbourne, so I invited myself out there so I could meet her and tour the town. Jen is off at camp (of all things) with her students, and even if that wasn't going on she would've been at work, so I went on my own.
I arrived in Ballarat just after 9:30am and Karen and her 14-month-old son Mitchell met me at the train station. (She was right. She was really easy to spot, what with the fantastic black-and-orange pram she has for her little boy!) Karen had already done all the hard work of finding tourist brochures for the town's various attractions so we "hit the ground running", as it were.
Ballarat has an important place in Australia's history. First off, it was the centre of the Victorian gold rush in the late 1800's, and when gold was found here, thousands of people abandoned their jobs elsewhere and converged on Ballarat's gold fields. Thousands more came from overseas to seek their fortune, including many Chinese. You can't help but feel a little bit sorry for the government of the time - Ballarat's population went from 50 to 50,000 in a matter of weeks. Can you imagine how hard keeping law and order was? Even the police were deserting their posts to go gold hunting!
In an attempt to keep control of things, the government imposed these crazy license laws, which were meant to discourage ordinary folks from abandoning their jobs and going gold hunting. The licenses had to be bought monthly and were very expensive. Needless to say, the miners didn't like this system and thought it was very unfair. Well, one thing led to another, and eventually there was rioting in Ballarat, followed closely by the famous Eureka Stockade showdown. At the Eureka Stockade, the miners barricaded themselves to fight for their rights - including the right to vote for the authorities who were making the laws (the miners up to this point didn't have the right to vote since most of them owned no property). The police and army attacked and there was a terrible slaughter. Following this incident there was a huge public outcry supporting the miners and denouncing what the government did to try and control them. Today the battle at the Eureka Stockade is widely recognized as when true democracy came to Australia.
Knowing all this, of course the first place we stopped was the Eureka Stockade interpretative centre. The stockade itself is long gone, but the city has done a great job of explaining the events that led up to the battle in the centre. Again I enjoyed the excellent use of lighting and sound effects as I wandered through the displays, listening to clips from the protests, the battles, and the eventual trials. It was great. While I was in the centre, Karen took her little boy to the nearby playground - shaped like a stockade, I'd like to point out, and with ranks of wooden British soldiers standing guard! So cool.
From there, we drove across town to Sovereign Hill. Karen had tried to describe this place to me over the phone but I hadn't truly understood what it was. Turns out that Sovereign Hill is a Living Museum, in much the same spirit as Upper Canada and Black Creek Pioneer Villages. One big difference is that, unlike the pioneer villages I've been to in Canada, all the buildings at Sovereign Hill were purpose-built reconstructions, and not originals. Some of the steam engines and other machinery on site were authentic, though. On the other hand, given the volatility of the gold rush era, it was probably difficult to find examples of the mining buildings etc., as they would have been dismantled and moved elsewhere once the gold ran out.
Sovereign Hill was really, really, really cool. There were actors walking around in period costume. British soldiers raided the mining tent camp and demanded to see miners licenses. There was a gold stream that the public could try panning at - and yes, there was still gold to be found in the stream. I gave it a go but had no luck, but apparently the day before, someone had found a $100 gold nugget right where I was working! Wow! Stagecoaches, wagons, and horsemen rode up and down the streets. All the shops were open and selling their wares - all made in the town. The meat pies and apple pasties were GREAT.
Having recently been to Upper Canada Village, I didn't spend all that much time in the shops and homes, as these were very similar to what I'd see there. But the mining aspect of the town was absolutely fascinating. They had a tent city set up like it would have been in the late 1800's. You could look in each tent and tell a little about how prosperous the miners were by the furnishings inside. In many of the tents they had voice recordings set up on motion sensors, so when you poked your head in, you'd hear snippets of conversations from the tent's occupants. This gave a whole different perspective about life on the gold fields.
There were also two mine tours to do, and of course I did both of them. In the Red Hill Mine, we followed the ghostly voice of an old miner, as he "trained" us new "young boys" in the ways of life underground. It was cool - we'd stop at some point in the passageway, an alcove with an interactive demonstration would light up, and when that part of the show was over, a new tunnel would light up and we'd follow it to our next stop. In the other tour, we went down into a real gold mine and learned how the gold was extracted. At the end of that tour, we all got to ride on a modified ore cart train down the narrow twisty tunnels and back to the entrance. Craziness!
The absolute highlight of the day was watching the gold pour. Each hour, they do a demonstration to show how gold ingots are made. So Karen and Mitchell and I sat in the crowded amphitheater with a whole ton of (very well behaved) school kids and watched in fascination. The gold was melted in a crucible made of (I think?) iron (I can't remember!), then poured into a breadpan-shaped cast iron mold. I was astounded at how quickly the gold solidified and then cooled (after a dunking in a bucket of water) - I would say within 5 minutes of being molten metal at over 1000C, it was cool enough to touch! The ingot we saw was worth something like $95,000, and was about half the size of one of Maureen's banana breads. One lucky kid was pulled from the audience and got to hold the gold for a minute or so. Totally awesome.
By the time we'd finished wandering around Sovereign Hill, Mitchell was getting pretty tired, so Karen and I parted ways and she headed home to put him down for a nap. She dropped me off back in Ballarat's downtown, and was thoughtful enough to provide me with a brochure with a walking tour of the town's historic architecture. I wandered up and down Lydiard Street, admiring all the old buildings. I also stuck my head into Ballarat's art gallery, but by that time I was also pooped and I didn't stay all that long.
The only complaint I have about Ballarat is that there are no decent cafes within a 3-block radius of the train station! It took me quite a bit of walking (and backtracking) to find a place to grab a bite to eat before getting on the train back to Melbourne. Ah well. Can't win 'em all!
What with one thing and another, I didn't make it back to the house here until almost 8:30pm and I was pooped. Again. Then again, I realized yesterday that part of the reason I was likely so tired was because the week before, Jen and I had hopped time zones six times in six days, what with our journeys back and forth between the Northern Territory, South Australia, Victoria and of course the beginnings here of Daylight Savings Time. Gah.
Tonight I'm off to meet a group of senior Guides and Ranger Guides, and we're going to be comparing wilderness camping techniques between Australia and Canada. Should be interesting! At home, it's been drilled into me that "cotton kills, cotton kills, cotton kills"... but here in OZ cotton is the preferred fabric for hot summer weather! I wonder what other differences we'll find?
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Adventures at Watarrka (Kings Canyon)
Back again! I've had a good night's sleep, the sun is shining, and although it's ridiculously cold here (currently it's a balmy 11C, now I know that's pretty warm by Canadian standards, but I've spent the last 6 weeks in 30+ temperatures, so it's DARN COLD), I'm ready to tackle the last part of Jen's and my adventures in the Red Centre - namely, at Kings Canyon.
I left off last night with us tumbling into bed the night of Thursday, March 27th, after having hiked about 19kms around Uluru and Kata Tjuta. Needless to say, we slept in as late as we could on Friday morning. It felt GREAT. However, we'd had to move from our cozy family room (since Mom and Dad had left us to fly home) and into the 20-person dorm - and although the other girls were quiet, when you have 20 different alarm clocks going off, among other things, it's hard to do some quality sleeping in.
After checking out and enjoying a lazy breakfast, we got back on the rode and drove to Watarrka National Park, which is better known as Kings Canyon. It's about 500kms from Uluru, so it took us a while to get there. The scenery was more of the same - mulga scrub, red sand, rocks, flat landscape - so the drive itself was more boring than anything. That is, until we began to notice some rather odd vegetation growing on the sides of the road. We were traveling at pretty high speeds, but I swear it looked for all the world like someone had gone along and spilled buckets of tennis balls at the sides of the road! Curious, we slowed down as we approached the next pile of "balls", and stopped to take a look. Turns out that what we were seeing were these melon-like fruits, growing on vines along the ground. But the fruits were the exact size and colour of a tennis ball. Strange!
When we arrived at the Kings Canyon resort, we had a bit of trouble checking in, as the receptionist wasn't interested in giving us our YHA discount (which was advertized in the resort's brochure and also in the YHA booklet we had). We did get that all sorted out, and eventually got a key and were on our way. I would like to point out that this resort is owned by the same company as the resort we stayed in at Uluru, so now Jen and I have complaints about both places. YHA's gonna get a bit of an earful from us! Our room, once we found it, was pretty cool - there were three single beds and a double, as well as (gasp) a TV and our own fridge. Clearly it was meant to be a family room, but the resort was mostly empty so we were pretty sure we wouldn't be sharing it with anyone during our stay. COOL! The one odd thing about the room was that all the beds were on casters and the floor was tile. Presumably this made the beds easy to move around for cleaning purposes, but it also meant that every time you so much as turned over in bed, the whole darn thing would roll! We got pretty creative with shoving things under the wheels so our beds would stay put.
There was only a teeny tiny convenience store at the resort, so when we went to see if we could pick up a few more groceries, we nearly passed out when we saw the prices! (You need to understand that the NEXT-closest store was over 250kms away, so it wasn't like we had a lot of options.) No bread or other goodies for us. Thank goodness we'd bought a bunch of pasta earlier in the trip and hadn't eaten it yet. It sure came in handy! The communal kitchen at this resort was completely empty - no pots, pans, or anything. Turns out we had to rent a cooking kit ($50 deposit, rental fee of $5). At least this meant that we had our OWN pots, dishes, bowls, and cups which we didn't have to share!
Cooking dinner still turned out to be a bit of an adventure. The stove in the kitchen was gas, but had no igniter on it - we had to light it with a match. Not that we had any matches; instead, we ended up trying with a lighter. When that didn't work, Jen got a piece of paper, lit it on fire, and then tried to light the stove. In the end the problem turned out to be that only one out of the four elements worked, which explained some of our problems. GAR!
Once we'd finally managed to cook some dinner, we packed up all our equipment and went to head to our room so we could enjoy (wonder of wonders!) dinner in front of the TV. (Among other things, there was absolutely nowhere to sit in the kitchen.) But when Jen stuck her head out to take the first load of stuff back to the room, she came back in again immediately and said, in a deceptively calm voice, "Becky, there's a dingo outside." Dingo? Yep, there was a dingo roaming around the campground! Now, we'd seen the "Beware of Dingoes" signs that were posted around the resort, but we'd figured this was somewhat like the "Don't feed the bears" signs in Algonquin - everyone understands there were bears in the area, but you're not likely to ever see one, especially if you're careful with your food/garbage. Not so much here! The dingoes were quite comfortable in the campground, and roamed around pretty much everywhere! We waited for the dingo to wander off before zipping back down to our room. We spent the rest of the evening watching TV, which was a real treat for me - I'd been on the road for 5 weeks now and hadn't even seen the news!
(I mean, really! Dingoes may look like skinny ginger-coloured dogs, but they are apparently a subspecies of wolf, and they ARE wild. We didn't want to mess with one. Craziness! After that sighting, we saw the dingoes fairly regularly around the resort - seemed they'd case the place every couple of hours to see if anyone had dropped some food. It wasn't really a problem, once we got used to them - we just made sure to keep our room's door closed, and looked both ways before heading out to the bathroom. We were never approached by one at the resort.)
Saturday we decided to tackle the challenging Kings Canyon Rim Walk, which is a 9km track around the top of the canyon. Kings Canyon is basically a giant crack between two ancient hills, so we had to climb UP to get to the top of the canyon. The first 100m's or so were basically straight up a cliff, using a narrow stairway of field rocks. The cliff face we were climbing was very, very steep - you sure didn't want to look down or lean backwards while climbing! There was a good resting ledge about a third of the way to the top; while catching my breath there I reflected that I was sure glad I wasn't doing this hike with a canoe on my head! The trail was so steep we couldn't see the top of it until we were almost there; each time we reached what we thought was the top, it would turn out to be just a ledge. Once we did reach the top, though, the view was stunning.
The Rim Walk is a pretty dangerous one, and there were all sorts of warning signs at the start of the trail to tell us about the risks. Heat stroke was one possibility; fortunately for us it was only about 27C and not warm enough for that to be a real danger. (Well, that and we know about the importance of drinking enough water and not over-exerting ourselves in the heat of the day.) The canyon's walls are riddled with deep crevasses, so we were warned to stay on the marked trail and not to take shortcuts. Apparently each year tourists die here because they get too close to the edge, their hat blows off, and when they reflexively reach out to grab it, they fall off the cliff. We knew that wasn't going to be a problem, since (a) Ruth and Carroll have taught us about cliff safety and we don't go any closer than two body lengths to the edge, and (b) our bug nets were firmly over our heads, and our hats were inside! If the hats did blow off, they weren't going anywhere. :-)
The walk along the top of the canyon was fascinating - it used to be part of an ancient sea bed so there were places where we were walking over fossilized ripples. The walk took us through this maze of weathered rock domes. Apparently these were ancient sand dunes, which had compressed back into rock. So cool! As we walked along, we encountered another dingo! This one seemed rather more interested in us than any of the ones from the resort. It approached us while we were taking pictures at one of the lookouts... not close, but close enough to be uncomfortable for us. We just slowly backed off and walked away. For a while it looked like it was going to follow us, but then it changed its mind and trotted off in the opposite direction. Jen and I both breathed a sigh of relief. Being harassed by a dingo while at the resort is one thing - at least there are other people around to call to for help - but we were on our own at the top of the canyon!
At the very back of the canyon, we had to descend some stairs to cross to the other side, and there the pathway branched. We followed the path which took us down to the canyon floor, to a secluded water hole called (appropriately) the Garden of Eden. It was so beautiful! Unfortunately we hadn't known that we'd be able to swim here, or we would have brought our bathing suits with us. We had to settle for soaking our feet in the cold, crisp water. It felt wonderful.
Once we were rested and refreshed, we had to struggle our way back up the stairs (which I quickly named the Stairs From Hell, since there were many of them and they were so narrow you couldn't even get your whole foot on them at a time, yikes!), and back to the top of the canyon on the far side from where we'd spent the morning. We continued around the rim and back towards the car park. Just before we descended to the parking lot, we encountered a trail marker that looked like it was leading us straight off the edge of a cliff! Ha ha! I took a picture of it. Turns out this was more optical illusion than anything; when we got closer, we realized that the trail did go downhill, but it was a perfectly fine slope. You just couldn't see this at all from more than 3 feet away.
Back at the resort, our plan for the rest of the afternoon was to do a load of laundry and spend some time soaking ourselves in the pool. Well, the laundry turned out to be a bit of a challenge. One of the washing machines in our block of rooms was out of order, and when we tried to use the other one, it ate our money but didn't turn on! We ended up having to go to reception, get more money from them, and then wander around the rest of the resort looking for a machine that worked. There were four toilet blocks in all spread throughout the dorms/campgrounds, and it wasn't until we got to the very last one that we found a machine that worked. GAH. Thank goodness the resort was mostly empty! What do these people do when the place is full?
On Sunday, we slept in (we were a wee bit tired) and then drove to the far side of the Park to do the Kathleen Springs walk. This walk was MUCH easier than the rim walk, but not nearly as pretty. It took us down a meandering path to a permanent water hole, and along the way were signs explaining the pastoral history of the area, and how at one point this water hole had been used to water cattle. There were huge flocks of zebra finches in the trees; they're so cute! They'd flush from the trees as we approached and fly further down the pathway, cheeping all the way, and settle in a new tree. This process was repeated over and over again as we continued down the path. Whey they didn't just fly off at a right angle to the path is beyond me, but the birds were so charming I didn't mind. We also startled a fairly large goanna at the water hole - it scampered off into the rocks but came out again once we'd been quiet for a few minutes. And on our way back to the car, we spotted this enormous open honeycomb, just dangling from one of the trees!
The Kathleen Springs walk was short, so we decided to also tackle at least a part of the Giles Track. This is a 22km walk that actually starts back at the Canyon and ends at Kathleen Springs. There was no way we wanted to do the whole thing, but we figured if we walked for two hours into the trail, we could then turn around and walk back out to the car again. And that's pretty much what we did. We figure we walked about 4kms along the trail before turning around. Again, the scenery wasn't all that spectacular. We did climb one low rise and had a good (but brief) view of the surrounding area, but the rest of the walk was just a scramble over loose rocks, through scrub, and not much to see. Besides, by this point Jen and I were pretty pooped and we decided not to go any further. So once again we headed back to the resort, soaked ourselves in the pool, ordered pizza for dinner, and went to bed!
And now you've been brought up to speed. On the Monday we drove out for Coober Pedy, and I've already shared those adventures with you. Ta da!
Back in the present day - this afternoon Jen and I are leading a games training for some of the local Guiders, and tomorrow I'm off to the gold-rush town of Ballarat to meet another Guider - it'll be a busy few days!
I left off last night with us tumbling into bed the night of Thursday, March 27th, after having hiked about 19kms around Uluru and Kata Tjuta. Needless to say, we slept in as late as we could on Friday morning. It felt GREAT. However, we'd had to move from our cozy family room (since Mom and Dad had left us to fly home) and into the 20-person dorm - and although the other girls were quiet, when you have 20 different alarm clocks going off, among other things, it's hard to do some quality sleeping in.
After checking out and enjoying a lazy breakfast, we got back on the rode and drove to Watarrka National Park, which is better known as Kings Canyon. It's about 500kms from Uluru, so it took us a while to get there. The scenery was more of the same - mulga scrub, red sand, rocks, flat landscape - so the drive itself was more boring than anything. That is, until we began to notice some rather odd vegetation growing on the sides of the road. We were traveling at pretty high speeds, but I swear it looked for all the world like someone had gone along and spilled buckets of tennis balls at the sides of the road! Curious, we slowed down as we approached the next pile of "balls", and stopped to take a look. Turns out that what we were seeing were these melon-like fruits, growing on vines along the ground. But the fruits were the exact size and colour of a tennis ball. Strange!
When we arrived at the Kings Canyon resort, we had a bit of trouble checking in, as the receptionist wasn't interested in giving us our YHA discount (which was advertized in the resort's brochure and also in the YHA booklet we had). We did get that all sorted out, and eventually got a key and were on our way. I would like to point out that this resort is owned by the same company as the resort we stayed in at Uluru, so now Jen and I have complaints about both places. YHA's gonna get a bit of an earful from us! Our room, once we found it, was pretty cool - there were three single beds and a double, as well as (gasp) a TV and our own fridge. Clearly it was meant to be a family room, but the resort was mostly empty so we were pretty sure we wouldn't be sharing it with anyone during our stay. COOL! The one odd thing about the room was that all the beds were on casters and the floor was tile. Presumably this made the beds easy to move around for cleaning purposes, but it also meant that every time you so much as turned over in bed, the whole darn thing would roll! We got pretty creative with shoving things under the wheels so our beds would stay put.
There was only a teeny tiny convenience store at the resort, so when we went to see if we could pick up a few more groceries, we nearly passed out when we saw the prices! (You need to understand that the NEXT-closest store was over 250kms away, so it wasn't like we had a lot of options.) No bread or other goodies for us. Thank goodness we'd bought a bunch of pasta earlier in the trip and hadn't eaten it yet. It sure came in handy! The communal kitchen at this resort was completely empty - no pots, pans, or anything. Turns out we had to rent a cooking kit ($50 deposit, rental fee of $5). At least this meant that we had our OWN pots, dishes, bowls, and cups which we didn't have to share!
Cooking dinner still turned out to be a bit of an adventure. The stove in the kitchen was gas, but had no igniter on it - we had to light it with a match. Not that we had any matches; instead, we ended up trying with a lighter. When that didn't work, Jen got a piece of paper, lit it on fire, and then tried to light the stove. In the end the problem turned out to be that only one out of the four elements worked, which explained some of our problems. GAR!
Once we'd finally managed to cook some dinner, we packed up all our equipment and went to head to our room so we could enjoy (wonder of wonders!) dinner in front of the TV. (Among other things, there was absolutely nowhere to sit in the kitchen.) But when Jen stuck her head out to take the first load of stuff back to the room, she came back in again immediately and said, in a deceptively calm voice, "Becky, there's a dingo outside." Dingo? Yep, there was a dingo roaming around the campground! Now, we'd seen the "Beware of Dingoes" signs that were posted around the resort, but we'd figured this was somewhat like the "Don't feed the bears" signs in Algonquin - everyone understands there were bears in the area, but you're not likely to ever see one, especially if you're careful with your food/garbage. Not so much here! The dingoes were quite comfortable in the campground, and roamed around pretty much everywhere! We waited for the dingo to wander off before zipping back down to our room. We spent the rest of the evening watching TV, which was a real treat for me - I'd been on the road for 5 weeks now and hadn't even seen the news!
(I mean, really! Dingoes may look like skinny ginger-coloured dogs, but they are apparently a subspecies of wolf, and they ARE wild. We didn't want to mess with one. Craziness! After that sighting, we saw the dingoes fairly regularly around the resort - seemed they'd case the place every couple of hours to see if anyone had dropped some food. It wasn't really a problem, once we got used to them - we just made sure to keep our room's door closed, and looked both ways before heading out to the bathroom. We were never approached by one at the resort.)
Saturday we decided to tackle the challenging Kings Canyon Rim Walk, which is a 9km track around the top of the canyon. Kings Canyon is basically a giant crack between two ancient hills, so we had to climb UP to get to the top of the canyon. The first 100m's or so were basically straight up a cliff, using a narrow stairway of field rocks. The cliff face we were climbing was very, very steep - you sure didn't want to look down or lean backwards while climbing! There was a good resting ledge about a third of the way to the top; while catching my breath there I reflected that I was sure glad I wasn't doing this hike with a canoe on my head! The trail was so steep we couldn't see the top of it until we were almost there; each time we reached what we thought was the top, it would turn out to be just a ledge. Once we did reach the top, though, the view was stunning.
The Rim Walk is a pretty dangerous one, and there were all sorts of warning signs at the start of the trail to tell us about the risks. Heat stroke was one possibility; fortunately for us it was only about 27C and not warm enough for that to be a real danger. (Well, that and we know about the importance of drinking enough water and not over-exerting ourselves in the heat of the day.) The canyon's walls are riddled with deep crevasses, so we were warned to stay on the marked trail and not to take shortcuts. Apparently each year tourists die here because they get too close to the edge, their hat blows off, and when they reflexively reach out to grab it, they fall off the cliff. We knew that wasn't going to be a problem, since (a) Ruth and Carroll have taught us about cliff safety and we don't go any closer than two body lengths to the edge, and (b) our bug nets were firmly over our heads, and our hats were inside! If the hats did blow off, they weren't going anywhere. :-)
The walk along the top of the canyon was fascinating - it used to be part of an ancient sea bed so there were places where we were walking over fossilized ripples. The walk took us through this maze of weathered rock domes. Apparently these were ancient sand dunes, which had compressed back into rock. So cool! As we walked along, we encountered another dingo! This one seemed rather more interested in us than any of the ones from the resort. It approached us while we were taking pictures at one of the lookouts... not close, but close enough to be uncomfortable for us. We just slowly backed off and walked away. For a while it looked like it was going to follow us, but then it changed its mind and trotted off in the opposite direction. Jen and I both breathed a sigh of relief. Being harassed by a dingo while at the resort is one thing - at least there are other people around to call to for help - but we were on our own at the top of the canyon!
At the very back of the canyon, we had to descend some stairs to cross to the other side, and there the pathway branched. We followed the path which took us down to the canyon floor, to a secluded water hole called (appropriately) the Garden of Eden. It was so beautiful! Unfortunately we hadn't known that we'd be able to swim here, or we would have brought our bathing suits with us. We had to settle for soaking our feet in the cold, crisp water. It felt wonderful.
Once we were rested and refreshed, we had to struggle our way back up the stairs (which I quickly named the Stairs From Hell, since there were many of them and they were so narrow you couldn't even get your whole foot on them at a time, yikes!), and back to the top of the canyon on the far side from where we'd spent the morning. We continued around the rim and back towards the car park. Just before we descended to the parking lot, we encountered a trail marker that looked like it was leading us straight off the edge of a cliff! Ha ha! I took a picture of it. Turns out this was more optical illusion than anything; when we got closer, we realized that the trail did go downhill, but it was a perfectly fine slope. You just couldn't see this at all from more than 3 feet away.
Back at the resort, our plan for the rest of the afternoon was to do a load of laundry and spend some time soaking ourselves in the pool. Well, the laundry turned out to be a bit of a challenge. One of the washing machines in our block of rooms was out of order, and when we tried to use the other one, it ate our money but didn't turn on! We ended up having to go to reception, get more money from them, and then wander around the rest of the resort looking for a machine that worked. There were four toilet blocks in all spread throughout the dorms/campgrounds, and it wasn't until we got to the very last one that we found a machine that worked. GAH. Thank goodness the resort was mostly empty! What do these people do when the place is full?
On Sunday, we slept in (we were a wee bit tired) and then drove to the far side of the Park to do the Kathleen Springs walk. This walk was MUCH easier than the rim walk, but not nearly as pretty. It took us down a meandering path to a permanent water hole, and along the way were signs explaining the pastoral history of the area, and how at one point this water hole had been used to water cattle. There were huge flocks of zebra finches in the trees; they're so cute! They'd flush from the trees as we approached and fly further down the pathway, cheeping all the way, and settle in a new tree. This process was repeated over and over again as we continued down the path. Whey they didn't just fly off at a right angle to the path is beyond me, but the birds were so charming I didn't mind. We also startled a fairly large goanna at the water hole - it scampered off into the rocks but came out again once we'd been quiet for a few minutes. And on our way back to the car, we spotted this enormous open honeycomb, just dangling from one of the trees!
The Kathleen Springs walk was short, so we decided to also tackle at least a part of the Giles Track. This is a 22km walk that actually starts back at the Canyon and ends at Kathleen Springs. There was no way we wanted to do the whole thing, but we figured if we walked for two hours into the trail, we could then turn around and walk back out to the car again. And that's pretty much what we did. We figure we walked about 4kms along the trail before turning around. Again, the scenery wasn't all that spectacular. We did climb one low rise and had a good (but brief) view of the surrounding area, but the rest of the walk was just a scramble over loose rocks, through scrub, and not much to see. Besides, by this point Jen and I were pretty pooped and we decided not to go any further. So once again we headed back to the resort, soaked ourselves in the pool, ordered pizza for dinner, and went to bed!
And now you've been brought up to speed. On the Monday we drove out for Coober Pedy, and I've already shared those adventures with you. Ta da!
Back in the present day - this afternoon Jen and I are leading a games training for some of the local Guiders, and tomorrow I'm off to the gold-rush town of Ballarat to meet another Guider - it'll be a busy few days!
Adventures at Uluru and Kata Tjuta
OK, time to back things up a bit.
Due to the ridiculous cost of internet access at Uluru and Kings Canyon (Wartarrka), I've missed out reporting the most important parts of my Red Centre adventures. So now that I'm back in Melbourne and have free internet, I can get caught up!
I spent a good chunk of today editing and uploading photos from my adventures. Here are the links:
Cairns - my travels with my parents to the Great Barrier Reef, Kuranda and Daintree
Northern Territory - Part One - pictures from Darwin and Alice Springs
Northern Territory - Part Two - pictures from Uluru, Kata Tjuta and Watarrka
Coober Pedy - photos from - of all places - Coober Pedy
So... back on Tuesday, March 25th, Mom, Dad, Jen and I headed out from Alice Springs to drive to Uluru. It's about a 5 hour drive (going 130km/h most of the way) through flat, flat desert, mulga scrub, and brilliant red sand dunes. There is absolutely nothing on the roads between the roadhouses. I mean, intellectually I know that the land on either side of the highway belongs to one cattle station or another, but the stations are so incredibly huge that you only rarely pass fence lines, and you never see any houses or other signs of human life. It was always a shock to pull into a road house and see other cars - 'cause it wasn't like we were passing any on the road!
After we'd turned off the Stuart Highway at the Lasseter Highway and were on the last 250-km stretch to Uluru, I was paying pretty close attention to the scenery, hoping for that first glimpse of the rock. Then, way off in the distance, we all simultaneously spotted a huge... something... off in the distance. Dad thought it was Uluru, but it didn't look right to me. It looked more like a mesa than the famous photos of Uluru that I've seen. Turns out I was right - it wasn't Uluru at all, but another landmark called Mount Connor. There was even a lookout just off the highway, so we pulled over and snapped a few photos.
Continuing on our way, I know we were all getting anxious to spot Uluru and for the drive to end. Mom, Dad and I had driven over 2000kms in the past four days and were rather tired of sitting in the car. The boring road also held its surprises - at one point when I was driving, a huge perentie lizard crossed the road - taking its own sweet time - and I almost hit it! Perenties are the largest of the goanna lizards found in Australia, and the one we saw was probably almost 5 feet long! Yikes! Not the sort of critter you want to run over. We saw numerous other lizards on the road too, including smaller goannas and thorny devils.
Finally, as we rounded one of the few bends in the road, we spotted first Uluru (Ayers Rock) and then Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) off in the distance. They really were striking, even from so far away. The land around these formations is so flat that the huge rocks seem somehow like they don't belong, like they float over top of the vegetation. Even after we'd spotted them, it seemed to take us a long time to get close.
First we pulled in at the Ayers Rock resort, where everyone coming to view Uluru has to stay. The resort has all sorts of different types of accommodations, everything from campgrounds to five star hotel rooms. We were staying at the hostel. We had a bit of a hard time checking in - for whatever reason, the resort had no record of the booking Jen had done online. But she got it all sorted out and finally headed off to our room. This turned out to be a "family" room with two bunk beds, its own bathroom and fridge, which was nice. However, the cobblestone walkways that wound everywhere throughout the hostel's buildings were something else. They clearly hadn't been laid properly and the stones wobbled under your feet and clinked against each other at every step. We nicknamed the paths the "Nightingale Walk", since there was no way to cross them quietly. No sneaking around after dark for us, ha ha!
After unpacking and inhaling a quick snack, we got back in the car and drove out to Uluru - another 25 minutes past the resort - so we could watch the sun set over the rock. It was absolutely magical. Every moment, the colour of the rock changed, until at one point it was glowing a dull, burning red. So beautiful!
When we headed back to the hostel, the plan was for Jen and I to cook dinner for the four of us in the communal kitchen. WELL. Unlike almost every other hostel we've stayed in this year, the one at Uluru has a really crummy kitchen. There were four stoves/work stations in the centre of the room, which was nice, but there were hardly any pots and plates, and almost no cutlery to speak of! We had to wait for another group to finish with the one and only cutting knife. We used mugs to hold condiments (we were making fajitas) and saucers for our serving plates. There were no bowls at all. Considering this hostel can host upwards of 200 guests at a time in peak season, this was clearly unacceptable. When Jen went to reception to complain, she was basically given the cold shoulder. We're working on a complaint letter to send to both the resort's management and to the YHA, which had recommended this as a place to stay. Wednesday morning we struggled through breakfast again - what with the lack of dishes and all, it was a real challenge to eat cereal and toast - and then we were off again to Uluru.
We spent our morning at the Anangu Aboriginal Cultural Centre, which was absolutely fantastic. The building itself was beautiful and had been designed by the Anangu people, the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land. In the mid 1980's the National Park was returned to Aboriginal ownership, with the condition that the Park be leased back to the National Park Service for 99 years. It is jointly managed by the National Park Service and the Anangu people. The Cultural Centre tells Uluru's story from the Aboriginal perspective and not the scientific, and that was just fine. I learned a lot about the Dreaming stories connected to the rock, and also a bit about the culture and history of the Anangu people. Then it was finally time to go and do a little exploring at Uluru itself.
It's hard to wrap your head around exactly how big Uluru is. The rock stands 348m above the plain it stands on, and it's a 10km walk around its base. We'd driven totally around Uluru the night before, just after the sun set, and even in the dusk it was impressive. There was no way Mom was going to be able to walk all the way around the rock, so instead we settled on doing the 1km-long Kuniya walk, which took us to the Mutitjulu water hole on the south face of Uluru. This water hole features prominently in the Dreamtime stories about the rock, and was the location of a conflict between two powerful Dreaming serpents, Liru and Kuniya. Their marks can still be seen on the faces of the rock.
After visiting the water hole, we rested and ate lunch, and decided to take a drive to check out Kata Tjuta (also known as The Olgas), a huge formation of sandstone domes about 50kms from Uluru. Although this formation is not as well known outside of Australia as Uluru is, Kata Tjuta is considered even more sacred by the Anangu. Its Dreaming stories cannot be shared with outsiders. So we had to settle for admiring its beauty from the lookout, and then we all tackled the 2.6km-long Walpa Gorge walk. This walk was quite challenging and passed over crazy rocky ground as the path rose in between two of the huge domes (the tallest dome at Kata Tjuta is 546m high - so taller than Uluru - and only 7m shorter than the CN Tower. WOW!). The view at the end was spectacular though, and we were all glad we'd done it. I'm so proud of Mom! She's had to face a number of physical challenges in recent years, and of course she broke her arm about 6 weeks before coming to Australia, so I know the walk wasn't easy on her. But she did it! Yay Mom!
After walking the gorge, we decided we all needed a drink (actually, Mom and Dad really wanted a coffee, ha ha!), so we climbed back in the car and drove back to the Cultural Centre at Uluru. While Mom and Dad enjoyed their caffeine, Jen and I went art shopping. I really, really wanted to buy a dot painting from the desert, and although I'd been looking in Alice Springs, I still hadn't found the right one. I was hoping to have better luck at Uluru itself, but no. (Hence why I was so happy to buy my artwork in Coober Pedy!)
When we returned to the resort, Dad told us he was treating us all to dinner - as this was his and Mom's last night with us in OZ. There was this cool do-it-yourself BBQ place which we'd seen the day before. You ordered your meat at the counter, then took it to one of the BBQ stations and cooked it yourself. We also had access to the all-you-could-eat salad and dessert bar - all for less than $20/person! Pretty cool! And the burgers were great. Mmmmmmm.
After enjoying the entertainment of watching Dad trying to repack all their bags in preparation for leaving the next day, we made it an early night - mostly 'cause we were up at 5:30 on Thursday morning so we could drive out to Uluru and watch the sun rise! It was chilly and I quickly found myself wishing I'd brought my polar fleece. (I am becoming such a suck. I don't know how I'm going to survive my next Canadian winter, I really don't!) If the sunset had been beautiful, the sunrise was completely out of this world! Because the land around Uluru is so flat, there's this moment, as the sun rises, where the face of the rock is illuminated and the surrounding desert isn't, which makes the rock practically glow. I'm so happy with how my pictures turned out!
Once the sun was well up in the sky, we returned once more to the resort to finish packing and eat breakfast, then Jen and I drove Mom and Dad to the local (teeny!) airport to send them on their way back to Sydney and then to Canada. It was strange saying goodbye - last time I saw them, it was Mom and Dad wishing me well as I headed off at the start of this OZ adventure! But I will be seeing them again in just over a month, so all is well.
Jen's and my plan for the day was to tackle the 10km walk around Uluru's base. The walk itself was totally flat and easy, with plenty of interesting places to explore along the way. Some of the areas around Uluru's base are sacred sites for the Anangu, and there are big signs posted asking people not to take pictures. So some of the coolest parts of the rock, I can't share with you - you'll have to go there yourself. It really irked me to see some tourists still taking photos at these sites. It's not like it was possible to miss the signs. How hard is it to show a little respect for the people who have taken care of this place for 20,000+ years?
Jen and I also chose NOT to climb Uluru, again in keeping with the wishes of the rock's traditional owners. For the Anangu, climbing Uluru is a special act of a deep spiritual nature, and not to be undertaken "just for the fun of it". Again, it really bugged me that so many people still chose to do the climb. There are signs up in the Cultural Centre, in the Park map that everyone gets upon entry, and right at the base of the climb itself, explaining why we shouldn't climb. To me, climbing Uluru without being properly prepared in the traditional ways is in just as poor taste as rappelling down the inside of a cathedral during a mass. It simply shouldn't be done, not without the proper training and permission from the rock's traditional owners. If we are to truly learn about each others' cultures, then showing respect for each others' special/sacred places is important.
Anyway.
The walk around Uluru took us less than half the time we'd expected - we completed it in just over 2 hours! We returned once more to the Cultural Centre for a drink and some well-earned fries, and took one more crack at searching for paintings. No luck with the paintings, but I did purchase a small coolamon, or bowl made out of tree bark, which are traditionally used by Aboriginal women. So at least I have one authentic souvenir from Uluru!
We still had about half the afternoon remaining, so we decided to drive back to Kata Tjuta and tackle the Valley of the Winds walk. This is a 7.5km track that climbs up to a stunning lookout between two of the big domes, and then winds its way through more domes before returning to the car park. I am so glad we decided to do this walk (although what we were thinking, doing this walk after having already completed a 10km hike that day is beyond me!). The scenery was absolutely amazing, and since we climbed quite high between the domes, we could see a long way out into the desert. Some parts of the path were really steep, but the view from the lookout was totally worth it. And as we were returning to the car park, the sun was setting, which lit the domes of rock up like fiery pillars. Beautiful.
So we returned once more to the resort, very tired, very footsore, and very happy. We were far too tired to make our own dinner, so we treated ourselves to another go at the BBQ place. In the evening we practically collapsed into our beds and slept soundly!
And on the Friday morning, we drove to Watarrka National Park - also known as Kings Canyon - for one more adventure. But it's already midnight here and we're doing a Guiding training tomorrow afternoon, so I'm gonna sign off for now - more tomorrow!
Due to the ridiculous cost of internet access at Uluru and Kings Canyon (Wartarrka), I've missed out reporting the most important parts of my Red Centre adventures. So now that I'm back in Melbourne and have free internet, I can get caught up!
I spent a good chunk of today editing and uploading photos from my adventures. Here are the links:
Cairns - my travels with my parents to the Great Barrier Reef, Kuranda and Daintree
Northern Territory - Part One - pictures from Darwin and Alice Springs
Northern Territory - Part Two - pictures from Uluru, Kata Tjuta and Watarrka
Coober Pedy - photos from - of all places - Coober Pedy
So... back on Tuesday, March 25th, Mom, Dad, Jen and I headed out from Alice Springs to drive to Uluru. It's about a 5 hour drive (going 130km/h most of the way) through flat, flat desert, mulga scrub, and brilliant red sand dunes. There is absolutely nothing on the roads between the roadhouses. I mean, intellectually I know that the land on either side of the highway belongs to one cattle station or another, but the stations are so incredibly huge that you only rarely pass fence lines, and you never see any houses or other signs of human life. It was always a shock to pull into a road house and see other cars - 'cause it wasn't like we were passing any on the road!
After we'd turned off the Stuart Highway at the Lasseter Highway and were on the last 250-km stretch to Uluru, I was paying pretty close attention to the scenery, hoping for that first glimpse of the rock. Then, way off in the distance, we all simultaneously spotted a huge... something... off in the distance. Dad thought it was Uluru, but it didn't look right to me. It looked more like a mesa than the famous photos of Uluru that I've seen. Turns out I was right - it wasn't Uluru at all, but another landmark called Mount Connor. There was even a lookout just off the highway, so we pulled over and snapped a few photos.
Continuing on our way, I know we were all getting anxious to spot Uluru and for the drive to end. Mom, Dad and I had driven over 2000kms in the past four days and were rather tired of sitting in the car. The boring road also held its surprises - at one point when I was driving, a huge perentie lizard crossed the road - taking its own sweet time - and I almost hit it! Perenties are the largest of the goanna lizards found in Australia, and the one we saw was probably almost 5 feet long! Yikes! Not the sort of critter you want to run over. We saw numerous other lizards on the road too, including smaller goannas and thorny devils.
Finally, as we rounded one of the few bends in the road, we spotted first Uluru (Ayers Rock) and then Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) off in the distance. They really were striking, even from so far away. The land around these formations is so flat that the huge rocks seem somehow like they don't belong, like they float over top of the vegetation. Even after we'd spotted them, it seemed to take us a long time to get close.
First we pulled in at the Ayers Rock resort, where everyone coming to view Uluru has to stay. The resort has all sorts of different types of accommodations, everything from campgrounds to five star hotel rooms. We were staying at the hostel. We had a bit of a hard time checking in - for whatever reason, the resort had no record of the booking Jen had done online. But she got it all sorted out and finally headed off to our room. This turned out to be a "family" room with two bunk beds, its own bathroom and fridge, which was nice. However, the cobblestone walkways that wound everywhere throughout the hostel's buildings were something else. They clearly hadn't been laid properly and the stones wobbled under your feet and clinked against each other at every step. We nicknamed the paths the "Nightingale Walk", since there was no way to cross them quietly. No sneaking around after dark for us, ha ha!
After unpacking and inhaling a quick snack, we got back in the car and drove out to Uluru - another 25 minutes past the resort - so we could watch the sun set over the rock. It was absolutely magical. Every moment, the colour of the rock changed, until at one point it was glowing a dull, burning red. So beautiful!
When we headed back to the hostel, the plan was for Jen and I to cook dinner for the four of us in the communal kitchen. WELL. Unlike almost every other hostel we've stayed in this year, the one at Uluru has a really crummy kitchen. There were four stoves/work stations in the centre of the room, which was nice, but there were hardly any pots and plates, and almost no cutlery to speak of! We had to wait for another group to finish with the one and only cutting knife. We used mugs to hold condiments (we were making fajitas) and saucers for our serving plates. There were no bowls at all. Considering this hostel can host upwards of 200 guests at a time in peak season, this was clearly unacceptable. When Jen went to reception to complain, she was basically given the cold shoulder. We're working on a complaint letter to send to both the resort's management and to the YHA, which had recommended this as a place to stay. Wednesday morning we struggled through breakfast again - what with the lack of dishes and all, it was a real challenge to eat cereal and toast - and then we were off again to Uluru.
We spent our morning at the Anangu Aboriginal Cultural Centre, which was absolutely fantastic. The building itself was beautiful and had been designed by the Anangu people, the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land. In the mid 1980's the National Park was returned to Aboriginal ownership, with the condition that the Park be leased back to the National Park Service for 99 years. It is jointly managed by the National Park Service and the Anangu people. The Cultural Centre tells Uluru's story from the Aboriginal perspective and not the scientific, and that was just fine. I learned a lot about the Dreaming stories connected to the rock, and also a bit about the culture and history of the Anangu people. Then it was finally time to go and do a little exploring at Uluru itself.
It's hard to wrap your head around exactly how big Uluru is. The rock stands 348m above the plain it stands on, and it's a 10km walk around its base. We'd driven totally around Uluru the night before, just after the sun set, and even in the dusk it was impressive. There was no way Mom was going to be able to walk all the way around the rock, so instead we settled on doing the 1km-long Kuniya walk, which took us to the Mutitjulu water hole on the south face of Uluru. This water hole features prominently in the Dreamtime stories about the rock, and was the location of a conflict between two powerful Dreaming serpents, Liru and Kuniya. Their marks can still be seen on the faces of the rock.
After visiting the water hole, we rested and ate lunch, and decided to take a drive to check out Kata Tjuta (also known as The Olgas), a huge formation of sandstone domes about 50kms from Uluru. Although this formation is not as well known outside of Australia as Uluru is, Kata Tjuta is considered even more sacred by the Anangu. Its Dreaming stories cannot be shared with outsiders. So we had to settle for admiring its beauty from the lookout, and then we all tackled the 2.6km-long Walpa Gorge walk. This walk was quite challenging and passed over crazy rocky ground as the path rose in between two of the huge domes (the tallest dome at Kata Tjuta is 546m high - so taller than Uluru - and only 7m shorter than the CN Tower. WOW!). The view at the end was spectacular though, and we were all glad we'd done it. I'm so proud of Mom! She's had to face a number of physical challenges in recent years, and of course she broke her arm about 6 weeks before coming to Australia, so I know the walk wasn't easy on her. But she did it! Yay Mom!
After walking the gorge, we decided we all needed a drink (actually, Mom and Dad really wanted a coffee, ha ha!), so we climbed back in the car and drove back to the Cultural Centre at Uluru. While Mom and Dad enjoyed their caffeine, Jen and I went art shopping. I really, really wanted to buy a dot painting from the desert, and although I'd been looking in Alice Springs, I still hadn't found the right one. I was hoping to have better luck at Uluru itself, but no. (Hence why I was so happy to buy my artwork in Coober Pedy!)
When we returned to the resort, Dad told us he was treating us all to dinner - as this was his and Mom's last night with us in OZ. There was this cool do-it-yourself BBQ place which we'd seen the day before. You ordered your meat at the counter, then took it to one of the BBQ stations and cooked it yourself. We also had access to the all-you-could-eat salad and dessert bar - all for less than $20/person! Pretty cool! And the burgers were great. Mmmmmmm.
After enjoying the entertainment of watching Dad trying to repack all their bags in preparation for leaving the next day, we made it an early night - mostly 'cause we were up at 5:30 on Thursday morning so we could drive out to Uluru and watch the sun rise! It was chilly and I quickly found myself wishing I'd brought my polar fleece. (I am becoming such a suck. I don't know how I'm going to survive my next Canadian winter, I really don't!) If the sunset had been beautiful, the sunrise was completely out of this world! Because the land around Uluru is so flat, there's this moment, as the sun rises, where the face of the rock is illuminated and the surrounding desert isn't, which makes the rock practically glow. I'm so happy with how my pictures turned out!
Once the sun was well up in the sky, we returned once more to the resort to finish packing and eat breakfast, then Jen and I drove Mom and Dad to the local (teeny!) airport to send them on their way back to Sydney and then to Canada. It was strange saying goodbye - last time I saw them, it was Mom and Dad wishing me well as I headed off at the start of this OZ adventure! But I will be seeing them again in just over a month, so all is well.
Jen's and my plan for the day was to tackle the 10km walk around Uluru's base. The walk itself was totally flat and easy, with plenty of interesting places to explore along the way. Some of the areas around Uluru's base are sacred sites for the Anangu, and there are big signs posted asking people not to take pictures. So some of the coolest parts of the rock, I can't share with you - you'll have to go there yourself. It really irked me to see some tourists still taking photos at these sites. It's not like it was possible to miss the signs. How hard is it to show a little respect for the people who have taken care of this place for 20,000+ years?
Jen and I also chose NOT to climb Uluru, again in keeping with the wishes of the rock's traditional owners. For the Anangu, climbing Uluru is a special act of a deep spiritual nature, and not to be undertaken "just for the fun of it". Again, it really bugged me that so many people still chose to do the climb. There are signs up in the Cultural Centre, in the Park map that everyone gets upon entry, and right at the base of the climb itself, explaining why we shouldn't climb. To me, climbing Uluru without being properly prepared in the traditional ways is in just as poor taste as rappelling down the inside of a cathedral during a mass. It simply shouldn't be done, not without the proper training and permission from the rock's traditional owners. If we are to truly learn about each others' cultures, then showing respect for each others' special/sacred places is important.
Anyway.
The walk around Uluru took us less than half the time we'd expected - we completed it in just over 2 hours! We returned once more to the Cultural Centre for a drink and some well-earned fries, and took one more crack at searching for paintings. No luck with the paintings, but I did purchase a small coolamon, or bowl made out of tree bark, which are traditionally used by Aboriginal women. So at least I have one authentic souvenir from Uluru!
We still had about half the afternoon remaining, so we decided to drive back to Kata Tjuta and tackle the Valley of the Winds walk. This is a 7.5km track that climbs up to a stunning lookout between two of the big domes, and then winds its way through more domes before returning to the car park. I am so glad we decided to do this walk (although what we were thinking, doing this walk after having already completed a 10km hike that day is beyond me!). The scenery was absolutely amazing, and since we climbed quite high between the domes, we could see a long way out into the desert. Some parts of the path were really steep, but the view from the lookout was totally worth it. And as we were returning to the car park, the sun was setting, which lit the domes of rock up like fiery pillars. Beautiful.
So we returned once more to the resort, very tired, very footsore, and very happy. We were far too tired to make our own dinner, so we treated ourselves to another go at the BBQ place. In the evening we practically collapsed into our beds and slept soundly!
And on the Friday morning, we drove to Watarrka National Park - also known as Kings Canyon - for one more adventure. But it's already midnight here and we're doing a Guiding training tomorrow afternoon, so I'm gonna sign off for now - more tomorrow!
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