Friday, 24 April 2015

Sydney, in about... ten minutes

Last week Lachy and I flew up to Sydney on a Monday evening and back to Melbourne on Tuesday. We had a day's training for our new jobs, and the office just happened to be within spitting distance of Sydney Harbour! (If you're a really good spitter, anyway.)

It was a busy day but around 5.15 we ran out of the office and down to the harbour to see whether any of the iconic sights were nearby. We had ten minutes before we needed to be on a train heading to the airport, but luck was on our side.



I'll be going back to Sydney at the end of the month for slightly longer so hopefully this time I might be able to get a bit closer than postcard-distance to the city sights!

Monday, 6 April 2015

Sherbrooke Falls

Sherbrooke sounds like an invented place name for an American drama about teens growing up in a small wholesome town. In fact it's a tiny village about 50 minutes outside of Melbourne, in the Dandenong Ranges. On Easter Saturday we drove out there to get out of the city for a while. It actually took us about two hours to get there because of car troubles (after a taxi drove into us the night before) but Google Maps assures me it is only 45 minutes when traffic is light.


It's pretty cool that there is dense rainforest less than an hour's drive out of the city. Aside from my time in the Kimberley it's one of the few occasions I've really felt that I am actually in a foreign country. Cities are pretty much cities wherever you go (I'm generalising...) but walking through Sherbrooke Forest is really nothing like walking through a wood in Cumbria. The majority of trees there are Mountain Ash, the tallest flowering plant in the world. They are so tall it's dizzying to look up at the treetops and they have beautiful grey-white bark. At this point, they're probably my favourite trees in Australia, except maybe snow gums.


Our aim was to walk from the picnic ground in Sherbrooke to Sherbrooke Falls, which we came across in a flyer the tourist information centre in Healesville gave us earlier this year. That turned out to take us about 15 minutes, and since there hadn't been much rainfall the falls themselves weren't really there, so I haven't got a picture. The gully was full of debris, though, with some huge fallen tree trunks, so the falls must be something to behold when the water's really going. We spent the rest of our morning wandering around the forest along the other paths. Heard lots of cockatoos but didn't actually see any, saw a pair of rosellas and a kookaburra which perched on a splintered trunk right above us.


In sum, the walk to Sherbrooke Falls is fairly short (and busy on a Saturday) but there are plenty of tracks around Sherbrooke Forest to keep you occupied. It's a popular place to see lyrebirds, though we didn't catch any this time. If you want to feel like you're a million miles from the CBD, it's really close by and still feels like another world.