Beautiful Bendigo

While at the pottery, we bought a 4 attractions ticket, which included a tour of the Central Deborah mine.  We have really done enough mine tours!  But our guide was entertaining and we enjoyed the tour. 

We spent the rest of the day using the talking team to explore Bendigo, disembarking for a while at Lake Wennoora for lunch at a lovely cafe overlooking the water. The lake is man-made and small enough to walk around fairly quickly, which we did. There was a fantastic playground and several small islands with ibis nesting on them, which made Ben happy. 

On our last day in Bendigo we visited the amazing Golden Dragon museum. This is home to the world's longest dragon Sun Loong, who appears at the Easter festival - we would like to see that! It also tells of the history of the Chinese in Bendigo and their rough treatment during the goldrush (higher taxes than Europeans) and afterwards (such as a Chinese manufacturer being deemed a factory with one employee, while a European manufacturer wasn't a factory until it had 4 employees. )  There were also many exquisite Chinese artefacts that had been brought from China. My favourite was the massive jade coach, which weighs 2.2 tonnes and is intricately carved.  There was also a Chinese garden and temple. 

On our way out of Bendigo we made a small diversion to Eaglehawk to find the grave of my great great grandfather (with grateful thanks to google, and my cousin Shirley for tracking the site down and putting a stone on it). It was like my very own Who Do You Think You Are? moment to realise my family was part of the goldrush in Victoria. 

Bendigo

Wow!  Bendigo is amazing. So many outstanding old buildings from the gold rush era, and so many of them repurposed in a positive vibrant way.

Our favourite example of this so far is the old Sandhurst gaol, which is now a theatre complex. We were lucky enough to be able to wander inside, courtesy of a GRDC conference, and see the clever way the old has been conserved and the history acknowledged with interpretive signs while the building was being used for a completely different purpose. I  guess there are only so many museums a town needs.

We spent the first day wandering the city centre admiring the architecture and the street names - Pall Mall and Chancery lane were my favourites - while also going on a bookshop crawl to keep Ben in reading material. He has been reading the 39 clues and was delighted by Cahill Chambers and Cahill Street (the plot of 39 clues revolves around an extensive Cahill family).

There are a couple of lovely second hand bookstores in Bendigo, one of which featured at number one in a recent best regional bookshop newspaper article. It was a charming shop with 2 storeys of books. The other one was just as large and both had a great range of children's books.

The botanic gardens were smaller than expected, but are undergoing an expansion at the moment. They have several significant trees and some fascinating history. Not to mention a lovely play area.

Moving on to Bendigo Pottery, we enjoyed exploring the history of the working pottery, and Ben enjoyed a lesson on the pottery wheel. We are having his vase and bowl glazed and posted home.

I did also make it to Bendigo Woollen Mills, where sock yarn was bought :-) . I'm looking forward to knitting it.

Eildon

Lake Eildon is enormous. And it has an enormous number of houseboats on it. In Eildon there is a real estate agent which appears to only sell houseboats! I've always wanted to live on a houseboat, but it seems you aren't allowed to do that here.

We also drove up to see the Snobs creek waterfall which has a surprisingly close viewing platform.  Snobs creek flows into the Goulburn River right opposite our campsite.

We have had a lot of rain, and Ben did a lot of school work today, but we did manage to get that campfire going and toast some marshmallows.

Healesville to Eildon

We explored around Healesville, visiting Yarra Glen and Lilydale, pausing to admire the Tarrawarra winery. We tried to visit the nearby national park areas, but they were mostly closed due to wind damage a few months ago.

We spent a fun day at Hedgend maze, which also had an elderly mini-golf course which entertained us for a while.

I think the highlight of our stay in Healesville, apart from the sanctuary, was the caravan park, with its beautiful trees and creek. And of course, its

new amenities block!

Moving on, we paused for morning tea at Marysville, which was so dreadfully burnt in the 2009 bushfires. The bush is recovering, although you can still see a lot of dead tree tops. There are many new buildings in the town, and signs about what was there before. It sounds sad, but it was a charming town, with an excellent cafe (Fraggas) and a gorgeous park and playground. We really loved it.

Eildon was into the unknown as we had no idea what to expect. We seem to finally have gotten far enough from Melbourne - it is much less yuppy and more Aussie. The park here is lovely.  Right beside the river and we hired a fire tin and had a fire, which was fun.  It was a cold night.

Phillip Island and Healesville

A couple more photos from Phillip Island before we move on - we really had quite disappointing weather after that first day, with rain and cold blustery winds (yes while everyone at home was still in the heatwave). We visited the chocolate factory, which was fun with a sideshow alley and a cool zoetrope. On our last day we ventured out to the Nobbies at the Bass Strait end of the island to see the seal colony from the distance. As a bonus we saw a couple of penguins in their nest boxes.

Our next stay is Healesville.  The park is very nice, with a stream running through it. It also has the most amazing amenities block I've ever seen, boasting in floor heating and rainfall showers. I'm tempted to go and take some photos and start a new blog on ammenities blocks around Australia :-)

Naturally our first day was a trip to the Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary.  What a fantastic place!  We had a wonderful day learning about the sanctuary's work to prevent the extinction of the 20 most endangered species in Victoria.

We were reading the sad tale of the Marysville Leadbetter possum colony and watching the cute possums darting about in their red lit enclosure when we also got to watch a team from Totally Wild filming the possums and the bilbies being weighed. Sorry, I didn't get photos - it was very dark in there.

There were two excellent shows, one focusing on platypus, and the ubiquitous bird show.  The barking owl was the star of the bird show, flying so close to the audience it felt as though it was going to catch us for dinner.

A beautiful environment, and a wonderful, educational day out. Well worth a visit.

Phillip Island

We left Wilsons Promontory on Friday morning, completely unaware of the huge cruise ship which broke down off shore. That would have been worth seeing, but we didn't :-). We stopped on the way out to do a nature walk which promised kangaroos, wombats, emus and wallabies. With no great hopes of seeing any of those, we set off anyway. It was very like being on a stroll through a paddock.  But we did see a couple of grey kangaroos with coloured collars and some ravens, and a wombat burrow, and some ants.

We stopped at Inverloch for lunch and saw four stingrays swimming around the jetty.  A lovely looking town, that would be lovely to explore further.

Phillip Island is way larger than we thought! Our park is nestled behind a sand dune on the land side of the island, with a lovely beach. It seems a popular weekend getaway for Melbournians and there are many international tourists on the island as well.

With bad weather heading for us, we decided to go on a cruise to seal rocks AND book in to see the penguins on our first full day.  The seal cruise was fabulous, with hundreds of seals on rocks and many swimming around the boat. There were small pups just learning to swim in the water as well.

No photos were permitted of the penguins, although they did give us a photo opportunity with a stuffed one.

The penguins were adorable and we had excellent views. But it was very crowded and there were some very pushy tourists who tried to elbow their way in front of us and talked loudly in their own language while the ranger was trying to give a talk. Others were taking photos even though we'd all been told not to, and there were signs up with lines through cameras, which should have been understandable in any language.  But it was still worth seeing the cute Little Penguins waddling up the beach to their nests.

Exploring the prom

We have had almost every possible weather type at the Prom - rain, cold wind, warm wind and now just plain hot. Yesterday we explored the three nearby beaches, Whiskey, Picnic and Squeaky. The ocean was gloriously blue and pristine but the wind was whipping up the 'sand sharks' (as Ben calls the flying sand that slashes across your legs), making the beaches a not so pleasant place to wander. We had a lovely time exploring though. I think Whiskey bay was my favourite of the three, but Squeaky had the most people.  We enjoyed seeing a pacific gull catching and eating a crab, although Ben wanted to save the crab and make the gull eat vegetables instead.

Today, after a hot but windy night, we set off early to do the Lilly Pilly nature walk, which promised a board walk in the south-most warm temperate rain forest gully in Australia. It was a lovely walk, and we saw a wallaby by the side of the track. The rain forest was a bit disappointing, as there had been a lot of trees down and the canopy was quite open in places.

On the drive back we drove up Mt Oberon to the saddle, the start of a number of overnight walks. Then back to Tidal River for a swim. The ocean was crystal clear and rather chilly, but it was good to cool off after our hot walk.  No wind today!

Well, Wilsons Promontory isn't being very nice to us so far. The rain has stopped but it was replaced by strong winds. My phone weather app described them as 'breezy' but I think that was an understatement. Our trusty annex has stayed up in some pretty strong winds, but we decided these breezes were too much for it. Taking it down in high winds was a challenge, but we were glad we had when the winds got stronger and the whole van was being buffeted. Several tents were packed up in a hurry before they blew away, but quite a lot seem to have weathered the storm.

I spent a restless night, imagining that our little Avan would be blown over, but, as usual, I was overreacting, and we are, thankfully, still safe and sound this morning.

On the other hand, some trees were not so lucky. I'm glad we weren't in a tent.

Wilsons Promontory

After a very rainy night, we ventured out to explore Tidal River. This is a massive camp ground, with what seems like hundreds of sites. There are only 20 powered sites, but they aren't all occupied at the moment.


There is a quite comprehensive general store, which we were amused to see sells tents along with groceries and souvenirs. I guess that fits with the sign warning that the resident wombats will rip tents open in search of human food!

Our walk took us down to the beach and back up the river, then back along the Loo Errn boardwalk beside the river.  It is very beautiful.

Norman Beach

 Tidal River footbridge

View from Loo Errn track