Up and Down in Victoria

After our bit of R&R with Peter and Carol, we set off from Melbourne in beautiful sunshine, negotiating the morning traffic and multiple sets of traffic lights with ease.  Now that the brakes are working properly, the pressure of driving in traffic whilst allowing double the normal stopping distance has gone.  It’s quite a novelty being able to pull up whenever necessary, without applying every bit of leg strength to the brake pedal.

Soon the urban landscape receded into the distance as we headed in a north easterly direction through the small town of Healesville then into the Yarra Ranges National Park. 

The gum trees stretched skywards and the forest floor was covered in giant ferns, some as large as trees.  Rich and exotic flora it most certainly was and Kim took photo after photo as we wound our way upwards on the narrow twisting road.

Stopping for a rest and another photo opportunity, we spotted some bull ants.  These fellows are something over an inch long and pack a mighty bite.  Fortunately they’re not particularly aggressive so we tend to keep a distance from them.

We made our way through the Yarra Ranges into the Kinglake National Park.  Perhaps an explanation of National Parks is needed for non-Australian readers.  They are usually huge, in the tens of thousands of hectares.  In the southern part of Australia they tend to be heavily forested, go north and it’s scrub and desert.  Diverse is the term that comes to mind.  Kinglake National Park was badly affected by the bush fires in 2009 and the scars are still visible today.

A dirt track lead to our chosen camping area where the sites were roughly marked out with logs and the facilities provided are what are generally known as ‘’long drop toilets’.  Basic yes but perfectly adequate.  Shower, no.  Perhaps tomorrow.

We should explain that Vin Rouge is equipped to deal with these conditions.  We have LED lighting under the awning, under the tent, inside the tent and over the cooker.  We carry our own water supply and our kitchen ‘galley’ is set up on the back door of the Land Rover.  We’re more or less self sufficient, subject to topping up with diesel to go places, for at least two weeks – although we’ve never needed to put that to the test (yet).

Twenty paces from our camp and it looks like this.

Next morning we were visited by flocks of small wrens but photographing them proved difficult as they are so well camouflaged.  However, they made for an entertaining breakfast.

Next stop, a small town called Seymour.  We knew nothing about this place but learned that it is home to several large military bases and has a memorial to those Australians who took part in the Vietnam War.  The names of over 60,000 service personnel are listed along with eleven tracker dogs.  Although quite new and far from reaching the maturity that is obviously planned, it was a moving tribute.

Bendigo was the next stop on our journey.  Gold was found here in the late 1880s and deep mining was carried out until the mid 1900s.  The Deborah Mine is accessed just a few streets from the middle of the town and we joined a tour that descended to the first level, just 60 metres.  Below us were a further sixteen levels, the lowest four now flooded.  Although designed for tourists, from the tour we learned quite a bit about the complex and hazardous processes involved in obtaining minutes amount of gold from very large quantities of quartz rock – three quarters of a teaspoonful per ton of rock if our memories are correct.

In the centre of Bendigo is what is known as a ‘poppet head’, the large structure that exists above a mine and is used for lowering the miners and raising the rock.  We climbed this for the view, and to show that we are not put off by this sort of exercise, climbed another one a couple of days later.  The views were vast.  Set high on hills, it is possible to see up to 40 kilometres on a clear day.  We were fortunate and experienced superb views of the town, then rural farmland and in the distance, hills and mountains.

Then we went on a tram.  When Bendigo was a gold town with a population of 30,000 or more, trams were the transport of choice.  Now much diminished in scale, a few trams still run along the central tracks.  All very nostalgic and rather fun – at least, that’s what we thought.

We enjoyed a couple of days in Bendigo, staying at a very civilised camp site with steaming hot showers and a brand new camp kitchen that we used instead of our own facilities.  It became quite a social centre.  On the first night we met up with a wonderful couple, Eric and Val, who, twenty years ago had cycled all the way around Australia and were still camping out in their retirement years.  At the opposite end of the age scale, we met up with a lad generally know as Jackson BT who had just won a major tennis tournament and is well on his way to a future career in the game.  We’ll be watching out for him in the next few years.  His dad Craig was as enthusiastic as his son and it was a real joy to see such dedication in so young a devotee.

The Murray River starts in the Snowy Mountains in NSW and finally reaches the sea in South Australia after 2,375 kilometres.  It’s one of the world’s major rivers, it’s Australia’s longest and it irrigates large parts of the State of Victoria.  We found a small part of it at Echuca which claims to be Australia’s paddle steamer capital.  Well they had collected quite a number of these old river boats and some provided trips on the muddy, turgid waters.  Obviously we had to go and boarded the PS Canberra, built in 1912.  We were surprised to find that the Marshalls wood fired steam engine was built in Gainsborough in England in 1923 and had been in more or less continuous service ever since. 

The Murray is short of water and is about four metres lower than it should be.  Now and again the paddles could be heard churning mud rather that water.

Today is Sunday 7^th April.  In the last few days we’ve been up high and low down.  It’s all part of the experience and we’re enjoying it.