28/3/2015
Waking up at cool 5
degrees (the temperature dropped to a low of 3 degrees in the early
morning hours) I had breakfast with Kaye's 89 year old father Sal.
Kaye had to work at the local bank this Saturday.
I found 'The Storehouse',
a fantastic coffee shop only 300 meters away from where I'm staying.
Young barista's, amazing coffees, organic and paleo food and WiFi.
Made that my designated office for the day to clear up my email
backlog, post on the blog, get some banking stuff sorted out, and
trying to book my trip to Tasmania.
The way to Tasmania is not
a problem on the ferry to take the camper van on board as well, but
the return trip is booked out until 24th May! Not good at all. So
I'll have to make a call soon to either skip Tasmania for this trip
and come back on a separate holiday (preferentially when it is
warmer!), or fly over and explore with a rental car. I'll give myself
some days to make that decision.
Greg and Kaye were keen to
show me some stunning places in the Yarra Ranges in the afternoon and
evening. We drove around quite a lot, had a look at one of the most
artistic houses I've ever seen (think there is a saying the the line
between genius and crazy is very thin) and then drove on dirt tracks
to the Ada Tree – one of the biggest trees around. About 75m high, 15m girth of the trunk chest high, 225 tonnes heavy and estimated 225 cubic meters of volume in the main trunk. Huge!
To get to the tree there
is a 3km hike through cool climate rain forest. Absolutely stunning!
The Ada Tree itself is massive, I had to agree with Kaye that it was
one of the biggest trees I've ever seen!
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| Bob's House - well, one tiny part of this whole installation! |
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| The trail to the Ada tree leads through a small valley of cold climate rainforest. Many trees have moss growing on them and there are huge ferns all around |
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| The Ada Tree |
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| The Ada Tree - and Kaye close to the trunk |
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| Some statistics: The Ada tree, a mountain Ash (Esche) used to be even higher! |
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| The Ada tree - the upper part |
We had dinner in a local
pub somewhere in one of the small villages. Greg and Kaye are
extremely good fun and we had a wonderful time.
Distance traveled: 0km in
the camper van, probably 180km in Greg's car
29/3/2015
Greg is a keen fisherman
and invited me to come along to go trout fishing in the rivers about
an hour North of here. The drive there was great: beautiful hills,
huge forests, winding roads and clear blue sky for a change!
Everything looks so much better when the sun is out.
We started at a rather
large, fast flowing river. Kaye had to untangle me a couple of times.
Greg waded to a different spot and caught a trout to keep and some
smaller ones to release.
We moved to two more
rivers afterwards, both of them very different in size, shape and to
fish. The second one was very difficult to fish for me as it was very
narrow, lots of twigs in the water and vegetation all around it.
Well, to sum it up, the only things I caught were twigs, bushes,
leaves, trees, a rock and some experience. But some smart trouts ate many worms from
my hook - I could almost hear them laughing! However, a great day of fishing!
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| Kaye and Greg |
We hit beer o'clock and
had a snack along the river. Wonderful outdoor Sunday!
All up we only got one
trout so instead of fresh fish for dinner, we went to the Thai
restaurant in Mount Evelyn. I followed the cricket final there and
then later at Kaye's place, but the match was rather disappointing –
Australia put New Zealand to the sword, they were just way too strong
and won easily. Congratulations to the Australians, must be awesome
to win the world cup in their own country and the atmosphere in the
stadium was great, there were over 93,000 spectators at the MCG!
Distance traveled: 0km in
the camper van, probably 200km in Greg's car
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