Painted City

If you're a follower on instagram you may be aware that I like to snap pictures of street art in Melbourne. I've never lived anywhere before where street art is such a valued and celebrated part of the artistic culture of the place. Melbourne loves street art. In this area particularly (around Fitzroy) businesses actually go out of their way to have their buildings decorated as a kind of advertising: a woman with long flowing locks (naked) on the side of a hairdresser's building; a humanoid cat (again, naked) where once there was a cattery. Those are however two unusual examples because the art doesn't generally feature naked women/felines, but even in those cases, there's nothing graphic.

I've begun to collect images of some of my favourite pieces of art. Though I don't know who created most of them, there are two artists I'm familiar with - Kaffeine and Lucy Lucy - and I'll start with a gorgeous collaboration they did near here a few months ago.

This was all one continuous piece but it was hard to fit into one photo, so here's a collection of mine and Lachy's instagram photos of it. I'm not usually stuck in between the cow and the girl. In fact, this mural didn't last long before it was painted over by a piece I don't like at all and which hasn't been painted over since. I don't know what the ethics of painting over someone else's work is, but I'm sure it's the nature of the job and street artists know their work is temporary.

This is another piece by Kaffeine discovered in the CBD. You can see how much she loves animals, and I personally love her style. We had the opportunity to meet her at her Berry Street charity book launch and we offered her the big white wall in our apartment! (If we are lucky enough to have her paint it, I will certainly share pictures.)

These two are from the CBD and Fitzroy respectively, and quite different in scale. The ballerina is just on a wall beside a cafe, not much bigger than your hand. My picture of the skeleton is quite old and I'm not sure if he's still there, but he was about knee-high and seems to be made of paper pasted onto the wall. It's so great to be doing something boring, like walking through the CBD, and just find yourself surprised by a bit of guerilla metropolitan decorating.

This is a selection of wall-size murals around Fitzroy and Collingwood. I couldn't do justice to the top image at the time of day I was photographing it, but there is an outline of a bird's skull and beak over the woman's face, and it is painted up the side of a multi-level building; quite a sight to behold. The next two were both found while wandering around industrial Collingwood. It's a quiet area with a lot of warehouses that doubles as a giant art gallery.

These images just give you an idea of how some areas of Melbourne are saturated with art; there's nothing like walking down a laneway lit up at night in an immersive haze of colour. The last image is of a building in Fitzroy which I believe to be the studio of a few artists.

I'm a country girl at heart, but as cities go, this one is pretty beautiful.

Road Trip Recap

A couple of months ago Lachy suggested we take a road trip, just drive inwards and take a look at the outback. We've done a few forays into the mountains and along the coast, but never actually considered driving in before. We decided to go in search of some desert. Looking at Google Maps in the vague direction we were considering, we recognised one of the place names as being near a wildlife sanctuary we wanted to visit, just over the NSW border. That became the one fixed point for our five-day road trip. We were also joined by our good friend Patrick who also wanted to see more of his homeland.

We set off on a Saturday morning, not exactly early after breakfast with friends, general slow-going accompanying my hangover, and loading up one car only to move everything over into another (a 4WD we were fortunate enough to be able to borrow). We had only driven as far north as Castlemaine (the 'Maine) by lunchtime and we'd already stopped at a market for donuts. We had a couple of pastries each from Hot & Crusty, pulled out our brand new printed and bound road map (foreseeing a lack of phone signal in our futures) and tried to decide where we were aiming to be by nightfall. We knew we'd need to be in Mildura by the end of Day Two to get out to the sanctuary early the next morning, so we were aiming to get about halfway.

In the end no decision was made until I was driving us down one of the longest, straightest, emptiest roads of my life and Lachy found a national park with a campsite not too far away. He called up Parks Victoria as the webpage suggested and they had never even heard of this park. It took me a little while to get used to the idea of actually camping because I thought we'd brought the tent as an emergency backup. I don't know what else I was expecting but I'd been so busy handing in assignments etc that I hadn't even considered where we were actually going to sleep once we hit the road.

Our tarmac road turned into a dirt one and we then followed a road sign ominously announcing 'CEMETERY' to our campground. We never actually saw the cemetery, but we did startle a mob of kangaroos as we drove into Terrick Terrick National Park. We hadn't seen another car in so long it was a bit of a shock to find someone else parked there. They turned out to be day visitors who jumped into the car and drove off almost as soon as we'd arrived.

It was only a very small park but we had the run of it. What I thought was a grassy hill shading the campsite turned out to be in fact a very large moss-covered rock. We proceeded to scramble up it and  from the summit we could see to the horizon in every direction. Nothing but trees on one side, farmland on the other. As we made our way back down again Patrick called out to draw my attention to something - a rock wallaby, grazing right in front of us. We all sat down to watch it and enjoy the quiet. I realised that my ears were ringing, and that they probably did every day, but I was so rarely in a place so quiet that I could hear it. The ringing died away as the evening drew on. I can hear trams passing and car alarms blaring all through the night from my apartment - I wonder how often my ears get treated to true silence.

We cleared away twigs and stones and pitched our tent in the campsite. We hadn't had the forethought to pack camping mats so we unloaded all our blankets and sleeping bags into the tent to deal with later. In the meantime we set to cooking ourselves a one-pot dinner with the groceries we'd bought at Bendigo on the way in. Potatoes, carrots, mushrooms and pasta all boiled together with stock cubes, and served with bread. It's amazing what you find delicious when you are out camping! We lay around, chatted and roasted marshmallows in the dark, and I started reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed with my headtorch. A beautiful place to start reading a book as adventurous as that!

We managed to arrange the blankets and all three of us into the two-man tent in such a way that we weren't too cold and uncomfortable and (amazingly) we slept. I thought we'd be up with the dawn but it was my phone alarm that woke us at 7am, and Lachy and I hiked up to the top of the stone-hill again to see the sun rising and do a bit of yoga. Well, I did Warrior 3 for about two seconds, and Lachy did a few push-ups. We boiled some water and had some hot chocolate and coffee. It was so quiet that when a crow flew past I heard every beat of its wings like it was the size of a hippogriff.

The wallaby

We drove north-west, stopping in Kerang for brunch and reaching Mildura by about 4pm. We were so exhausted from the night before that as soon as we'd found a motel to check in to we were pretty much straight into our beds reading and using our computers, taking showers and washing our dishes from the night before (there was no running water in the campsite). We mustered enough energy to drive down the road to pick up takeaway pizzas and bring them home, and were pretty much unconscious once they'd been eaten.

We got up early and restocked on groceries before heading to Wentworth, New South Wales (about half an hour away). I called ahead to the sanctuary to let them know we were coming but alas! Rain was coming in, which would turn the dirt roads to rivers and leave us stranded there for the next few days. We only had five days set aside for travelling, though, so decided not to risk it. Instead we pulled out the map again and made a contingency plan. To the south-west were both the Big Desert and the Little Desert national parks, so we'd just drive straight into them and find somewhere to camp. We stopped in Murrayville to eat our lunch of bread and hummus and enquire in one of the shops as to where we could get some chopped wood - it had been raining since we'd left that morning and wouldn't be easy to make a fire that night. We were given the phone number of a guy 'who chops wood' but decided to just buy some coals from the supermarket and figure it out.

Heading into the desert

We drove first down a wide dirt road that crossed the Big Desert, but had to turn back once we reached a sign saying it was a dry weather road only, even in a 4WD. Still, we took a break to admire the desert, though covered in scrub and not the dry dunes I had in mind, not like anything I'd seen before. We found a sealed road through the desert and finally a campsite too. Miraculously we managed to get a fire going in the rain and shoved another pot full of food into the flames to cook. While the boys kept the fire alive, I rearranged the contents of the car so that we could all sleep in the back, and it was only once I'd spent half an hour playing tetris that we realised there was no way all three of us tall young people were going to be able to sleep in there unless we had our feet or heads sticking out. We ate our dinner in the concrete hut at the campsite and repacked the car so everything was in the boot, then headed south in search of a motel.

Dinner.

The first big town we came to was Bordertown, South Australia, but Lachy mentioned that he thought someone once told him that Bordertown was a dodgy place, and that combined with the Old West name didn't put us in a great frame of mind once we arrived. We convinced ourselves that we'd be beaten up by truckers if we stayed in one of the motels, and when Lachy and I finally did get out to find there were no rooms available and ran back into the car yelling 'drive!' we gave Paddy quite a scare.

So our unfounded fears led us to Nhill, where we spent the night in the Zero Inn run by a lovely woman with a huge cat named Pizza who at first sight I thought was a wallaby. After that we set off to drive south through the Little Desert, which fortunately has a sealed road right through but unfortunately really is very Little indeed. We did however see lots of kangaroos and hear some pretty cool birds. We drove on, listening to the soundtrack from Mad Max: Fury Road until we saw something odd in the distance. 'Is that a rock?' I asked.

Mitre Rock

Mitre Rock stands out against the landscape of farmland and on this particular day it towered up into the low clouds. We pulled up in the car park, puzzled for a minute over the signs directing us to the 'Exodus Area' and the 'Priest & Deacon Area', then climbed to the top of it. On the path were droppings so fresh that we concluded they must have come from a rock wallaby watching us from around a corner that very moment. On the way back down the cloud lifted enough for us to see a small lake right next to where we'd parked.

Lachy and Paddy having a photoshoot

We continued on until we reached the Grampians, where Lachy took the wheel to navigate us along the cliff-hugging road to Halls Gap. We stopped at the Broken Falls Lookout to... well, take a look, paused briefly in the town of Halls Gap to admire the scenery/kangaroos and conclude that we'd have to come back for a hiking trip, then drove out the other side of the mountain range. At this point I saw about six emus in a field grazing alongside sheep, and I hope that they were wild, but quite possibly they were part of a farm - at any rate they were the first emus I've seen outside of a zoo. We decided we could make it to the Great Ocean Road before dark, and we found ourselves driving through the Great Otway rainforest at dusk.

Broken Falls

We stopped in Lorne for yet more groceries and then drove east to Aireys Inlet, where Patrick has a house. We ate a curry, drank wine and watched Crocodile Dundee on video (no, really) before falling asleep. In the morning I took a walk down to the beach and finished Wild before we packed up and drove back to Melbourne. In all, the trip was around 1700km, taking in desert, mountains, rainforest and ocean, briefly passing through New South Wales and South Australia. The variety in the landscape just in that short trip was so incredible - we've already started planning the sequel. A 20,000km figure-eight of Australia. Well, probably not, but at least to Alice Springs.

The ocean!

The team

Vivid Sydney

So at the end of May we went to Sydney for the weekend. Lachy came straight out of work on Friday to the airport and on Monday morning I went straight in once we'd landed. The reason we went was actually to see a talk by Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, which turned out to be a Vivid Sydney event, which turned out to be a pretty cool festival with a lot of lights and also Matthew Weiner.

On the Saturday we actually had to get some work done in the morning (me proofreading, Lachy writing, and fellow Screenie* Jo was working on her treatment) before we could get going so we scouted out a cafe that served breakfast. Joe Black is around the corner from the Travelodge we were staying in in Surry Hills, which not only serves breakfast, coffee and milkshakes, but has WiFi and lovely staff. They let us sit there all morning (we did order a LOT of drinks) and after Lachy and I left the manager actually let Jo keep working there after he had closed, without telling her that the cafe was shut until he really needed to leave.

We wandered around the harbour, took in the opera house at closer quarters than last time, sat down for a late lunch (there was a lot of eating on this trip) and then Lachy and I took a passenger ferry out to Darling Harbour and back. If you want to see Sydney Harbour, I think this is the best way. It was something like $12 return, you stop at several harbours to pick up/set down passengers and you get to zoom across the water with the wind in your hair (if you're sitting outside, which you should be). One of the main things about Vivid Sydney is that the city gets lit up all sorts of fun colours at night, which meant that we got to see the opera house looking like this:

And that is just a still - the projections on the opera house were constantly changing. Sydney looked pretty cool all lit up, and we took the ferry out at dusk so we got to see the whole transformation from day to night from the water. There was a tourist ferry which would have done essentially the same thing, possibly with some canapes, and that was $25.

In the evening we went out drinking in Surry Hills and then some dodgier parts of Sydney with Jo, another fellow Screenie Jen and her friend Cat. We had some great Mexican food at a bar that also served coffee tequila and which I can't remember the name of.

After a slightly slower start on Sunday morning we had some brekkie at a much busier Joe Black and then headed down to the harbour again, this time heading for Manly. It's a half-hour ferry that takes you right to the mouth of Sydney Harbour and the nice little town of Manly. We took a bus up to North Head Sanctuary and wandered around up there for a bit. From one of the viewpoints at the top of the cliff we could see whale watching boats and next to them... WHALES! We could see them rolling out of the water and blowing water out of their blowholes and soon there was a whole crowd watching behind us. They were too far away to know for sure but a sign on the path suggested they were probably Humpbacks.

When we got back to the city there was time for a jaunt around the Museum of Contemporary Art and a quick trip to Dymocks before the talk, and then we sat down in the Town Hall ready to be blown away by Matthew Weiner. Which we were, but we didn't realise how funny he would be!

We had dinner at Vapiano with some friends, took one last trip down to the harbour to enjoy the lights some more and headed back for an early night before our very early flight.

I have to say though, living in a planned city (Melbourne) you really get spoiled for easy navigation and public transport. But Sydney! I love it. It's green and fresh and sprawling. It looks like a city has emerged out of a forest. It's beautiful.

*Screenie n. student of Screenwriting at the Victorian College of the Arts, class of 2016

Things I didn't know were Things in Australia (Part Two)

A few weeks ago I shared a small list I'd been compiling of Things I had noticed that were Things here in Australia which aren't necessarily Things in the UK, last time I checked. Well, I guessed there would be a few more to add and I've finally finished putting together another small list of Things. So, without further ado...

Moth Explosions
Unfortunately this is exactly what it sounds like. A couple of months ago, I noticed there was a moth in the kitchen. Well, moths do exist, I thought to myself, and promptly forgot about it. The next day there were several more moths. That's odd, I thought, and I pointed it out to Lachy. 'Ah,' he said. 'Sometimes you get little explosions of moths in the pantry or wherever' (not verbatim). I noticed that a bag of almonds appeared to be moving. Moths were crawling around inside it. I threw it out. Fast forward two months or so and I'm eating my breakfast. Innocently I scoop up a spoonful of Weet-Bix (UK readers, you may recognise this bastardisation of Weetabix, but they are the same thing) and notice a little wriggly maggot-like thing on the table. By the end of the day the kitchen is flooded with moths. We find them in the rice. In the tea bags. Even in the cocoa powder. We throw everything out and buy plastic containers for all our new food. The last of the moth carcasses has only recently been swept away. THIS IS A THING.

Personalised Licence Plates
Look, my parents have personalised licence plates, so I'm not speaking as an impartial observer. But Australians really love their personalised licence plates. It's not just a fun thing you spot once in a while driving down the motorway. It's like a TECHNO or a DEALR or a 4D M4N is speeding past you every minute. Of course there are also innocent ones that are just people's names, but those are the ones you remember.

Jodhpur Boots
So this could just as easily be an Alex-being-behind-on-fashion thing than an Alex-in-a-foreign-land thing. Disclaimer.
You know these shoes?

I grew up wearing these because I got a pair that cost about £20 when I was nine years old and called them 'riding boots'. Alternatively, 'jodhpur boots'. Right? Because you wear them with jodhpurs while you're out tearing up the turf on your elderly pony? Here, everybody's wearing them. And they aren't getting on a horse any time soon (as far as I know). I'm sitting in Avalon Airport right now and a lady at the table next to me is wearing them. I was so confused the first time I saw a person wearing these in the city. I look at them and I see work boots. I can't get over it. Seriously. They're like super trendy.

Poached Eggs
I think this is a symptom of Melbourne's cafe culture, which I guess makes it a Melbourne Thing rather than an Australian Thing. Breakfast is a big deal in this city. Brunch, even bigger. Every menu has poached eggs on toast. You can get your eggs poached in twenty different places on Smith St (where we live). I never had a poached egg before I moved here. I didn't know what it entailed and I thought it sounded really fancy. Like they've been poached from the estate of a gentry family. Whatever. Now I eat poached eggs on toast like once a week. Poaching! It's going to catch on.

(Disclaimer: it's probably already caught on.)

Milk Crates
Again I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a Melbourne Thing. I just read a very funny article which describes Melbourne as 'the milk crate capital of the world'.

These crates are all over the city. Orange, yellow, green, blue, grey, black, etc. People use them for everything. Seats, bed frames, tables. Cafes use them. They love them. Guess what I've never seen in one of these crates? Milk. And stealing one is like a rite of passage. I found one on a street corner. No business in sight. So I took it. We found two more at a tram stop. We use them as a table for a potted plant, and as DVD storage.

That's it for the latest instalment of Things that are Things. More will appear in due course but probably slower than this as I smoothly assimilate into Australian culture...

Things I didn't know were Things in Australia

You may think 'Australia, one-time part of the British Empire, basically Britain with sunshine and surfing'. Actually you're thinking of Gibraltar (except for the surfing). It's a fair mistake. Culture shock is a real and very serious issue for Brits moving to Oz. Here are a few Things you will encounter down under that you may not have realised are Things.

U-Turns
We all know the voice of the sat-nav woman politely asking us to 'Where possible, make a U-turn'. So you find a quiet road and perform a delicate three- or five- or seven-point turn in privacy before getting back on the road. When using the roads in Australia, be on your guard at all times. Drivers have a tendency to suddenly wheel around without warning and change direction. Even on the busiest of streets, drivers insist on their right to suddenly pull a U-ie. I saw a police car do it. Just a few days ago I was nearly knocked off my bike by a minivan which suddenly decided to go the other way. Then I locked up my bike and walked to the post office and was nearly knocked over in the road by another such incident. CONSTANT VIGILANCE!

Rounding
Australia has moved on from the Great British Pound. As a matter of fact its notes are made of plastic, but that's an issue for another time. Australia uses dollars and cents, but doesn't have 1 or 2 cent coins. However, you can still buy things that cost $2.98. The person at the cash register might tell you that you owe $3. It gets rounded up. Okay. Well, I can kind of understand not wanting those annoying tiny coins around. But why price something $2.98? Clearly to build up dollars upon dollars of extra profit from unsuspecting tourists. Then again, if it were priced $2.96, it would be rounded down, so you'd be gaining a cent. But the real issue here is why they don't just price things in multiples of 5.

Magpies
These birds are not the cute black-and-white thieves that we know and love in the UK. I think they're very cool, but I seem to be alone in this opinion. Magpies here are black and white but they are also BIG, like seagull big (the males at least). Their song sounds like a robot trying to do an impression of a bird which is a pretty bloody cool thing to hear. However, they have been known to swoop people when they're guarding their nests. The Queensland government recommends painting large eyes on the back of your broad-brimmed hat to deter magpies. So. There's that.

The Ocean
I don't mean to generalise (can't you tell from the rest of this post?) but it sure seems like Australians love the ocean. I mean, almost the entire population lives within spitting distance of the sea. And it's not just sun and surf. Yesterday it was about ten degrees, miserably rainy and very windy, and the waves at Point Lonsdale were huge. A day to snuggle up by the fire with a good book. OR, a day to whack on a wetsuit and jump into the waves as they crash against the beach wall? Yeah? Of course. (See my video on instagram.) I don't really know what to say except on a similar day in the United Kingdom NO ONE would be getting in that water. Also, almost everyone seems to be an excellent swimmer and have a lifesaving qualification. When they say 'let's go swimming in the sea', they actually mean swimming, not just paddling. Those of us who lagged behind the class in breaststroke in weekly school swimming lessons best stick to splashing in the shallows.

Seinfeld
I actually hadn't even heard of this show before I met Lachy (the Australian responsible for this culture shock) but I'm not going to blame the UK for my sheltered existence. Everyone was obsessed with Friends in the UK, but no one ever mentioned Seinfeld to me, which is similar in being an American sitcom featuring friends. EVERYONE here loves Seinfeld. Watch it all before you come out here if you want to assimilate. I still haven't. People say to me 'you know that Seinfeld episode where Elaine...' and I'm all, 'No. You know that FRIENDS episode where Joey...'

So, that's a little intro to Things you can now be prepared for when moving to Australia. Expect a part two at some point because seriously Australia is not just sunny Britain.

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!

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.

Volunteering at Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary

We were back in the UK over Christmas, which was definitely more of a social visit than travels worth documenting on this blog, but a week after we returned to Melbourne Lachy and I had made plans to head out again. You may remember that a year ago we visited Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary, a wildlife sanctuary run by the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. On the 7th of January we were due to head back out there, but a monsoon up in the north-east meant we ended up spending almost another week at home before it was possible to fly out and get picked up.

Last time, as part of a big group, we'd flown direct to Broome and then in a charter plane out to the sanctuary. Easy. This time there were no direct flights, so we flew out to Perth, then Broome, took a Greyhound bus to Derby, then flew out with Operations Manager Dan Swan (Swanie) in a tiny Cessna plane. And there were a few nights spent in hotels in between (some with broken air conditioning...) when transport wasn't possible 'til the next day. It goes to show what I've become used to that the trip still felt like a breeze compared with the living nightmare of a UK-AUS flight.

Camels on Cable Beach (Broome) - the first time I'd seen them up close!

Since we'd been out the year before, we knew what to expect in terms of accommodation, so we were well prepared - except on one front. There hadn't been much rain when we came out the previous year, and this time round one road we had used now passed through a fast-flowing river. The rain seemed to have brought the flies out. I don't remember being troubled by mosquitoes last January, but this time we were eaten alive. I'm terrified of spiders, but I got used to having them in the shower with me - the mozzies on the other hand nearly drove me to an early grave.

Usually they have volunteers there in the dry season because the sanctuary is so busy with the Wilderness Camp tourists and all the wildlife surveys that are being conducted, so we were kind of out-of-season volunteers. The main task we were set to was the herbarium. Eight boxes of pressed plants to be alphabetised, catalogued and mounted (fortunately they had already been identified by experts!). We also went out on a trip collecting plants from the escarpment next to the camp and did some detective work to identify them ourselves, which was oddly satisfying. We helped out with odd jobs around the camp, like fixing stairs and making railings.

Plants!

Living in the city I've become more interested in birds than I ever was in the UK, which I put down to the fact that they're pretty much the only wildlife I get to see day to day. So I was pretty excited to find out that there's a Mornington Bird List - a list of all the birds around the camp with check-boxes - because if there's one thing I love, it's ticking things off lists. Probably the most exciting bird we spotted was a brolga, but I didn't have my camera at the time. They are huge, crane-like birds that usually wander around in pairs, but this one was alone. I had to do a double-take when I spotted it because I thought I'd seen a flamingo or something in the bush.

We also saw dingoes this time since they hang out a lot near the hut we were staying in. Hearing them howling in the night was so eerie and awe-inspiring. By day, they looked more like big-eared, scraggly dogs, but it was still an impressive sight. One morning I heard something like a door slamming, which was vaguely concerning since our hut was in the middle of nowhere, and I went downstairs to have a look. A red shape went bouncing away from the bathroom and then stopped to have a look at me. It was a wallaroo, and not the only one that we saw hanging around the hut early in the morning.

the guilty wallaroo

One of the coolest things we got to help with was setting up camera traps on the escarpment. These are really tough cameras that can survive in all weathers and are triggered by heat. We collected them up again just before we left and, though the images weren't of great value to science, we were amazed by what they had captured! We had only seen two goannas on our trip so far but we captured no fewer than three different species of them with the cameras, as well as a few selfies taken by a wallaroo and a couple of echidnas.

the explorer

We intended to do lots of walking while we were there, but the time flew by so fast that when we left we'd still only been on one walk, at a pretty poorly chosen time of day (it was HOT). It was a very valuable experience for the two of us in terms of food - we had to bring all our food with us on the plane, so we had to plan carefully. We got a bit sick of rice and pasta, but since we got back we've been much better about planning our food shopping for meals, and not running down to Woolworths three times a day. We also got to know a group of amazing people living in a close-knit and friendly community out on what is essentially an island of civilisation in the bush.

There won't be much travel this year what with our wedding coming up and lots of things to be saving for, but it isn't really travel when it's in the same country, right? Even if the country is the size of the United States? So we can go back again in the dry season without feeling guilty? Yeah? All right then. 

Al's Adventure: Part Seven

Meet Al

Hi folks, my name's Al. I've taken up residence on Alex's travel blog as I made the decision to spend my inheritance on travelling the world for a few months, and I'll document my exploits from time to time as I go. Sometimes I'll be travelling alone, sometimes with friends, and sometimes just crashing at somebody's flat (cough Alex and Lachy cough) - it's going to be interesting, as I'm not one to often leave my comfort zone. My journey starts with a tour of the US, followed by some time in Fiji, a few weeks in Australia, and ends with a brief stint in New Zealand. Let's do this.

Part Seven

Let's talk about Australia, as I do like visiting the colonies. Alex (whose blog this is) and Lachy (her fiancé/my brother from another mother) met me at the airport, holding a sign with my name on to make me feel special. We drove back to their kickass studio apartment in one of the hippest parts of Melbourne - that's right, I said hippest - where I was given a quick tour before bed.

So the situation was this: I'd hang in Melbourne with these guys for three weeks, and we'd nip out and do all sorts of activities. So I don't bore you all, I'll list the highlights of my stay.

1. We drove down to the coast to stay at Point Lonsdale (Bonus: we had his brother's dog Biv with us). We drove along the Great Ocean Road, threw stones for Biv on the beach, visited the ACTUAL lighthouse from Round the Twist, and made homemade pizzas before watching Doctor Who.

2. We took in some culture in Melbourne. I saw baby penguins being fed at the SeaLife centre, I saw the skin of the famous racing horse Phar Lap and went underneath an indoor forest at the Melbourne Museum, we saw Interstellar at the third largest cinema screen in the world, I went swimming at an open-air local pool, and ate a ton of food from quirky local restaurants (like Trippy Taco and Po Boy. Also Nandos. Although It hasn't reached the dizzying heights of quality like it has in Britain - they don't even do halloumi.)

3. We visited Healesville Animal Sanctuary so I could get my fill of Australian wildlife. Kangaroos, wombats, wallabies, dingos, echidnas, Tasmanian devils, possums, kookaburras, lyre birds, I done seen 'em all. They even have an animal hospital there to look after anything that gets injured in the bush fires. Speaking of which, this country has fire danger levels ranging from low to high to code red. Yep, code red. That's when the whole country just explodes. So yeah, it's taken me this long to realise that wombats and echidnas are two of the greatest animals on earth. Also, dingos are fluffy as hell.

4. We drove up to the Australian Alps (honestly. I'm not lying.) to stay on top of Mt Buller. This was one of the most picturesque places I saw, just endless gumtree-covered mountains stretching off into the distance - and they look blue due to the eucalyptus, little fact for ya there. There's a town of second, or third, homes on the summit, but because we went in the Australian a summer it was a complete ghost town. Very cool. On the peak there's a metal pyramid, where rangers keep an eye out for bush fires (of which you could tell there had been a fair few). While we were here, we took a walk in the humid forest below, following the river, and saw two poisonous snakes and the biggest spider any of us had ever seen. It's like Australia was putting on its best performance for me. We finished off with a balcony barbecue, a dip in the jacuzzi, [Alex note: only Lachy and Al were in the jacuzzi, with beer and nachos.] and the four of us (including Alex and Lachy's friend Tatiana) playing dungeons and dragons. Go team.

5. We went to Equitana, a big horse festival at the Melbourne showgrounds, where we saw all sorts of horseback events -including cutting, where the rider has to separate a cow from a herd and prevent it from rejoining said herd. At one point I found myself at the cowgirl riding school demonstration, and the woman on her horse said "Anyone else a D-cup?" Woahh, hello. Some people put their hands up. "Well I wear two bras, cos these bad boys will knock you out if you're not careful." Then I noticed I was surrounded by women, all murmuring in agreement. It sounds great, but then I realised I was a bit of an outsider - I don't even like horse riding, let alone have breasts.

6. A bit more "culture". We went laser-questing, bowling, served ice cream at a charity event, attended a 'psychadelic' 21st birthday party in fancy dress (two words: free bar), went to an open air cinema by the beach to watch David Bowie in Labyrinth, I saw penguins climbing on the rocks of St Kilda to feed their babies, and I ate vegetarian schnitzel. Oh yes. We also played a feck load of Mario Kart, I'm counting it as culture because I played it with Aussies.

7. One of the weirder things we did was attempt an Escape Room. The idea is you're locked in a room, and you have a time limit to solve the puzzles to escape. When the timer runs out you're just let out, so the only real worry is feeling stupid because you can't solve anything. The theme was called 'endless dream', and we were trapped in this little room full of clocks, locked boxes, a painting of a brain, and some tough-ass puzzles. We asked for like five hints, but we made it out in the end. There's thinking outside of the box and then there's THAT. Still, the five of us left as more cohesive, oiled machine of friendship or something.

8. We visited an old timey town called Sovereign Hill. Who knew Europeans settled in Australia much the same as they did in America, with wild west towns built around gold mining? We panned for gold, tried old-fashioned bowling (you have to set the pins yourself, not worth it mate), took a horse drawn carriage ride, wandered round a gold mine, mimed a shoot-out in the street, drank ginger beer at the saloon, and saw gold being smelted. Interesting fact, the gold bar they use is 19 years old and gets smelted and cooled 10 times a day. Madness. It were a grand day out, I even got one of the old fashioned police blokes to arrest me whilst he told me how sexy ankles were (in character, I hope).

9. Yoghurt, blueberry jam, buttermilk cookie pieces, and protein clusters - that was an ice cream flavour. If there's an ice cream metaphor for Melbourne, it's that. They were both amazing. So there we are. There was plenty of other stuff too, mainly food, drink, films and good times. Oh, and vlogging: I made three guest appearances on Alex and Lachy's book-themed Youtube blog where I pulled a load of book reviews out of my arse on camera. That sounds horrible, I just mean I made them up on the spot.


Saying goodbye to a country where I heard the phrases "far out" and "rad" used in conversation without a hint of irony, I set off to the airport with a taxi driver who asked whether the UK and the US are linked, and if you can drive between them. I had no words. I can't thank Lachy and Alex enough for having me so long, and for sacrificing their privacy for me. I only hope I acted as a catalyst for flipping great times to occur. Final stop: New Zealand.

The Victorian High Country

Over Christmas I spent about a week in the Victorian Alps with Lachy, framed on either side by a night spent in the skiing town of Mt Buller, and filled in the middle with trail riding through the mountains. I haven't got round to writing a blog post about that yet but safe to say it was one of the best adventures of my life.

Anyway, on Friday we drove up there again for a 'mental health weekend', since Lachy's about to start exam revision and I've been stressing about various things I probably don't need to stress about. We set off through Friday-evening-heading-out-of-the-city traffic which wasn't our best idea but soon enough we were driving on open highways, surrounded by grass and gum trees and grazing animals. It was a breath of fresh air. There are many things I love about living in the city (never having to order things off the internet because I can find them on my street, someone qualified to teach me anything I want to know within a short range of my home...) but sometimes that feeling of 'it never stops' can be exhausting.

Darkness fell as we drove past Mansfield and up to the mountain, and the headlights illuminated a kangaroo standing stock-still by the side of the road. It was the first wild kangaroo I'd seen that wasn't dead at the side of the highway, and I was transfixed. Ten minutes later Lachy braked when he spotted a wombat on the verge, and we reversed to get a better look at it. It stood there hyperventilating for a few seconds before sprinting back the way it had come.

The following morning we set off on our 'hike'. Since it was our mental health weekend, we didn't want to push ourselves particularly hard, so we aimed for the summit of Mt Buller. Since Buller is a very popular ski resort in Victoria there are slopes and buildings and ski lifts all the way to the top, but a path took us off around the side of the mountain so we could forget about civilisation for a little while.

As I write this, the next in a series of thunderstorms is passing over us in Melbourne. It has been roaring thunder and end-of-the-world rain all night long. Apparently, this is spring in Victoria. It was 22 degrees and gloriously sunny when we set off up Mt Buller; the chairlifts were stopped and the place was a ghost town. It was the same the last time I visited. When I finally do see the town packed with skiiers in winter it will be a real shock.

I have been becoming increasingly interested in birds, living in the city, since they're the only wildlife I really get to see on a regular basis. We saw a laughing kookaburra perched on a powerline on the drive up, and as we walked to the summit we heard the strange call of a pied currawong, and caught a raven in the process of cracking open an egg (a bird's or a snake's, we aren't sure).

Since we were so high before we'd even set off, the views from the summit were incredible. In the lower picture you can see the white of the trees that had been burned in a bushfire years before - I didn't get a decent picture of it, but there are white trees racing all the way up to the edge of the town of Mt Buller. It's frightening how close the flames must have come to destroying the town.

Mt Buller fire tower and summit

We walked along a bit of a ridge at the summit and Lachy called me over to look at something - a snowdrift. I scrambled down to it and made a snowball. It was 22 degrees - that's British summer! I was pouring sweat and yet here was a big ol' pile of snow, cold to the touch, the real deal.

In the evening we went 'possum hunting' - we took torches and walked out around the mountain a little way, searching the trees for the rare pygmy possum which survives in only a few locations in Australia (and most probably the world). Needless to say we didn't find any, but it was both frightening and exciting to feel like we were the only people on the mountain. (We weren't, quite.)

More adventures coming up soon!