My two-day getaway to Walhalla for my birthday last weekend was ace - one of my most memorable birthdays ever. The tiny mountain town is lovely, it was wonderful to have a weekend away with Luke and to wake up with someone special on my birthday.
On the first day we wandered around the town taking photos and then walked up to the entrance to the old Long Gully mine overlooking the town.
Me and the faded Long Gully Mine sign
We saw a fungus that looked like a boob.
We went to the "Wally Pub" that night - it looked more like a family home than a pub from the outside - and had a nice country style pub meal for dinner. Nothing too fancy, but cooked well and my T-bone was almost as big as my head. The barman wasn't too chatty until Luke mentioned football (AFL).
The Mountaineer Band Rotunda
There was nothing else doing in town after we'd finished our meals just after 8.00 pm so we went back to our room. Tis a sleepy town...but I didn't mind. Our bed and breakfast was perched up on the mountain looking down over the town. I didn't realise this when I booked it, so that was a nice surprise.
Early the next morning (early, I said!) after the birthday hugs and kisses, Luke and I pulled on our clothes and went for a walk hoping to see some wildlife foraging. It was a cool, but fine, sunny morning with a soundtrack of bird calls, including one that sounded exactly like a siren.
Our view, complete with kookas (one real)
When we got back to the BnB our host, Jason, was feeding a group of kookaburras and currawongs on the balcony overlooking the town. The tree out the front was dotted with rosellas and king parrots and there more birds, including wonga pigeons and a chook, down on the lawn. Jason had set up a table for us on the balcony and the birds kept us company as we ate a yummy cooked breakfast. One young kooka didn't budge from his spot on the balcony railing during our meal...OK, they were waiting to be fed; they were indifferent to our company. At one stage a king parrot landed on the guttering above and hung upside down to peer at us.
It was so peaceful and picturesque. I was brimming with glee. Luke gave me my present, which was the shark kite I'd asked for. Yay! Haven't had a chance to fly it yet, but hopefully I will this weekend.
After showering and packing up our room, we headed to the cemetery. It's fairly small, but spread out on the mountainside with a bush backdrop. The graves with their white and marble headstones and low rusted fences are arranged in fairly haphazard rows, jutting up out of grass and weeds. Many of the headstones are in surprisingly good shape given they date back to the late 1800s.
Treading carefully on the rudimentary paths and steps, we took photos and read epitaphs - there were a lot of men who died young and families who had buried a succession of very young children, but also the occasional person who made it to their 80s, which would have been positively ancient back then.
After showering and packing up our room, we headed to the cemetery. It's fairly small, but spread out on the mountainside with a bush backdrop. The graves with their white and marble headstones and low rusted fences are arranged in fairly haphazard rows, jutting up out of grass and weeds. Many of the headstones are in surprisingly good shape given they date back to the late 1800s.
After the cemetery Luke and I went for a ride on the goldfields railway, a leisurely jaunt in an old (but well restored) train through the bush, past tree ferns and tall, straight-trunked eucalypts, with the babbling creek always alongside the tracks.
Then, alas, it was time to head off. We made a detour to Thomson Dam, Victoria's largest reservoir and the source of Melbourne's drinking water. It's at over 40% capacity, which doesn't sound like a lot until you consider not long ago it was stagnating at 16% as Victoria endured drought. It's kinda nice to know where the water that comes out of your tap originates from.
We stopped at the general store in Erica for a pie/pastie and sauce for lunch, then hit the road for home. All in all, a wonderful weekend out of town. I'd love to go back again one day.
3 comments:
sounds like a really fun weekend.
not sure where i heard this but is it true they had to bury people standing up (ie vertically) in the cemetery because it was so steep?
Yeah, it was fun. You're right - some of the people were buried vertically in the steep places.
hi, i used one of your images on my blog. hope you don't mind... http://www.libfocus.com/2012/10/t-shaped-people-in-library-academic.html#.UGxkdK7QtIA
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