Hornsby Blue Gum Walk

As suggested by the name, this walk is one of the few in Sydney where you can still see the Sydney blue gum outside of plantations. These trees were big. Sydney blue gum has smooth, faintly bluish silver bark, and is a rich dark red when you cut it down for noble purposes like flooring. I have used some recycled Sydney blue gum in the past to create furniture, and do not recommend it unless you have machines to do the grunt work and don't mind blades becoming dull. It is very heavy and very hard.

There was more wildlife than usual. Immediately after leaving the road we heard laughing kookaburras, complaining cockatoos, and my favourite, the electric eastern whipbird. We also saw a red-bellied black snake, a juvenile Australian brush-turkey, and an athletic eastern bearded dragon (possibly? not good with reptiles), which entertained us by jumping around; we did not know they could do this. Photos of the latter two:

There were a few good things about this walk besides the wildlife. A friendly stream wound along it and there were a few time-gnawed sandstone overhangs. There was some variety of flora: apart from the big blue gums there were areas covered in jurrasic style ferns, and other things, we are not botanists, suffice to say Chris said it was like walking through a few different biomes in Minecraft. It was a good workout for someone of low to medium fitness.

The circuit is around 4 to 5km if you have a car, but if travelling by train it's a 7km loop from the station. There are many stone stairs leading down at the beginning, which you will regret on the way back if you are unfit. The track is well marked with little white plaques on the usual greenish wooden signposts (you can see this in the photo below beside the word 'fishponds' and 'Hornsby station'. The confusing thing is that the signs also constantly point to a rifle range in the same direction as the walk, and you're never quite sure when the walk ends and the shooting begins until it's too late?

Here is the guide to this walk on Wildwalks.

Finally, how quaint is this Hornsby council crest? It has everything. Agriculture, pulleys, pigeon, many stars of David, Indigenous person with spear jumping over river, waratahs, bottle brush, boomerang. Who even made this

Photos

Photos are progressively being added onto flickr.

4 take offs and landings

and I'm back home. After the first day of stories and saying hello to my parents and aunties and dog, reality sinks in and being back gets very disheartening so I made some (fabulous) sangria. I forgot to tell you about the other 7 countries we visited (sorry!) but may write about them later on. Check back in a month and perhaps there'll be a couple of catch-up blogs about London or Bath or Berlin, or something. It was a great trip and I have a million stories.

Oxford comma

London is a very long (and good!) story so I'll skip it for now.

We are currently having a beer in the Eagle and Child, or "Bird and Baby". It's a small quiet pub in Oxford with goodish music (KT Tunstall, Jeff Buckley, The Feeling), strange beers, a decent menu, and 900 extra awesome points for being the very pub where where Tolkien and CS Lewis hung out for decades! We were going to take ourselves on a Tolkien / CS Lewis tour but we only got as far as this which was the first stop. The brochure was badly designed so we didn't want to read it.

I'm having a chocolate flavoured beer which is... interesting. Like, in a bad way.

We are not writing any fantasy epics.

It's probably a good thing that we haven't seen much TLOTR souvenirs or you'd all be getting tacky rings of power when I get back.

We're doing a lot of sitting down and cafe/pub-ing today which is a huge relief after the rush of London.

Oxford town is beautiful. It's like a town (city?) sized version of the USYD quad area but older and grander and with less hipsters but significantly more bikes.

Next stop is Bath!

Written between 2pm and 8pm, 31 Jan. N

Virgin atlantic woe

I am writing this on the plane and will be posting it when we get to London in 7.5 hours time if I don't die before then of the malignant Trans Continental Flight Hatred that I have recently acquired. While it is interesting and a great feat of technology to think that I am sitting on a(n uncomfortable) chair in the stratosphere, travelling at 850kph over a place called Barnaul in Russia, I think I have concluded that travelling in the olden days, that is, by ship, is probably the better alternative. I have not crossed oceans by ship before but I have watched informative movies like Voyage of the Dawn Treader so I know that they have hammocks and leg room. As ships take at least a few weeks to get from Europe to Australiasia, please don't be expecting me home until sometime in May.

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Grampians: The Pinnacle

The Grampians are a series of low mountain ranges that rise out of the flat Victorian landscape about 4 hours west of Melbourne if travelling by public transport. Halls Gap is the main centre of tourist activity in the area. It has nearby bushwalks, plenty of accomodation, exorbitantly high grocery prices, and an information centre abundant in brochures. For those of you with cars, Halls Gap serves as a good starting point for driving to other walks and lookouts in the area.

We arrived around 2pm and promptly chose the longest bushwalk available considering the timeframe we had to work with (sunset wasn't til around 8.30pm). This was the walk to the Pinnacle, described by the sign as suitable for fit and energetic walkers, involving slippery rock surfaces and some rock hopping. Bring two litres of water per person. We worriedly added a bottle of grape Gatorade to our meagre 750ml each and decided that was enough. A new paragraph and a bit of caps lock is required to emphasise my next point:

2.2 litres of water between two people is NOT enough.
BRING WHAT THE SIGN TELLS YOU TO BRING.

We rationed our water and survived without any horribly worrying signs of dehydration, but I definitely won't be risking that again.

The walk begins along a pleasant shady path which climbs in a misleadingly relaxed manner. A few wandering stairs here and there, and you reach the Venus Baths. This consists of some smooth rock from which you may slide down novel distances of around 1m, propelled by whatever water there is at the time. It was a bit dry when we visited, but I imagine it would be lush after rain. The attraction of the baths is heightened by the fact that is is bordered on one side by an imposing rock slope which looks like a normal rock slope that accidentally got skewed in photoshop. You may feel tilty.


The Venus Baths

A few unremarkable kms later you reach the Wonderland Carpark, mentioned here because there is a dunny on the other side of it, with some rainwater to wash your hands (not for drinking).

After the carpark, the track gets serious about being uphill. There are steps upon steps, rock steps and metal steps and narrow steps where only one foot fits at a time. The track then split and we took the way to the Grand Canyon. The landscape changes drastically upon entering it, and we got to walk on relatively level ground for a few hundred metres surounded by great big rocks that look like compressed cake topped by crazy abseilers.


The Grand Canyon

There really were a lot of rocks. The bush and trees would frequently be interrupted by large sandstone flats, making the landscape continuously interesting. Chris said they reminded him of a mountain walk he did in Queensland, but I hadn't been in anything similar before. We agreed that the awesomeness of the area would have been breathtaking if it weren't for the fact that we could hardly breathe as it was from the aerobic activity required to walk through it. We also found as we went along that many of the signs indicating a destination and approximate distance (eg. Pinnacle .7km) appeared to be underestimating the distances written on them. This was rather discouraging but by that time there wasn't much alternative to going forward.

Much struggle and a bit of crawling later, we reached the Pinnacle! The views over the many unfenced cliffs were duly satisfying. Halls Gap, Lake Bellfield, some pinkish mountains surrounding the valley and lots of trees. We sat around admiring the view and forgetting to take photos. It was good.


This photo is only a part of it and does not depict the view at all, and has been posted because the people in it give a good idea of the scale.

We got lost on the way down and deviated a bit from the track because of insufficient yellow arrowing. Luckily we hit an alternative route down and we continued on our way. The walk down was a breeze by comparison, though perhaps a bit long. We arrived back at Halls Gap by 8.

Quick notes about the Pinnacle track:
• The walk (to both the Pinnacle and Chatauqua Peak) begins at Halls Gap carpark near the swimming pool. Walk past that, then across the little bridge to your right, turn left into the tennis courts, and walk through the botanic gardens. You'll find signs from there, and yellow arrows will be painted on the rocks later on to direct you.
• If you have a car, you can start the Pinnacle walk at the Wonderland carpark, which will cut about 5km from your travels.
• Grippy shoes and sunscreen are a MUST.
• Bring 2L of water per person!

More Grampians photos on flickr

Ballaarat: additional notes

The landscape visible from the train to Ballarat from Melbourne is dry, flat, and featureless but for the occasional cow. Do not fret about sleeping during the journey, as you will not be missing much. (nb. I slept through it, so don't take my word for it being all dry, flat, and featureless.)

Leave a lot of time for your exploration of Sovereign Hill. Aside from what was already mentioned by Chris, the streets are lined with various 1800s businesses and buildings, including shoe makers, blacksmiths, phrenologists, dodgy magic shows, candle makers, saddleries, a masonic lodge, apothecaries, and pubs. All of them have been recreated with meticulous attention to detail, and many come with live demonstrations. The walls are plastered with letterpressed posters.



Sure it's not packed with high density excitement, but the experience is believeable and refreshingly devoid of glamourising 21st century bells and whistles.

Things you can buy for yourself at Sovereign Hill are:
• a parasol
• cold ginger beer
• a miniature bugel
• gold jewellery
• a portrait of yourself in period clothing
• a cast iron shovel

For $9, I bought myself pen and ink, as well as a book entitled A Catechism of the Rudiments of Knowledge, Specially Adapted for Australian Beginners. It's kind of funny in what I hope is a satirical way. Here's a page of it:



Ballarat the town has some cool things in it too. I particularly liked the antique store on the way to Bakery Hill which stocked some extremely valuable Beatles memorabilia and first edition Spiderman comics, as well as boxes of aged Australian postcards and photographs which you could purchase for a dollar each. The town is worth at least a morning's stroll, so don't leave that out of your planning!

Our Ballarat photos on flickr.