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27th Nov 2005
Mt Buffalo, Australian Alps
Sunday 27th November, 2005
Checked e-mails again this morning and got a couple of diaries uploaded. It’s a beautiful day; clear blue skies and clean air. We packed and checked out and went down to the village for breakfast at Food, Wine and Friends, which apparently has the best coffee in town. We sat outside and as it was in the shade it was enough to send me back to the car to get a couple of fleeces.
We took a wander round the town and then drove the very few miles to Mt Buffalo National Park. It’s quite a long climb up through the gum forests, the higher area of which have also been burned to a crisp by bush fires. We saw some interpretation at some point, which indicated that a massive fire had gone through in the eighties … and if that’s the case, the recovery is indeed slow.
The road climbs for several miles up hairpins and switchbacks … it was only reading the wildlife signs here and checking with the brochure proffered by the National Park Ranger that we realised that half the signs we’d been looking at before referred to wombats and not koalas (Anne: well what does a wombat look like? The answer is it looks like a koala on all fours ... at least on the road signs!)
We turned off to have a look at the Mt Buffalo Chalet a fairly amazing building built a hundred years ago, set slightly back from the edge of the cliff. The gardens are at their peak just now with wall to wall rhododendron blossom. Based on experience, the first thing we did was to take a stroll round the inside of the chalet and sure enough there was a display of old pictures and thereby the opportunity for some re-takes.
I took one of the front of the building, which wasn’t too successful due to the prolific rhodies, and then we moved on to the Parks visitor centre and walked out to The Monolith a perched granite tor with a Victorian ladder up it to permit access to its top. I’d found a picture taken in the early 1900s of a group of Victorian ‘climbers’ all posing on the steps and was keen to set this in contemporary context.
It’s a climb up through burned gum and some of the charred trunks we passed had a massive girth; they had to have been a couple of hundred years when they burned; clearly there had been no massive fire event for a long time.
Got the re-take, but disappointingly, the lower steps of the ladder had been removed by Parks Victoria in order to meet with their health and safety requirements; it was interesting how they’d tackled the issue. They’d removed five steps to make it very difficult, but not impossible, to scale the ladder. I would guess that this is sufficient to absolve them from the antics of anyone who really wanted to get the Victorian experience. I was thinking that its unlikely our thought police would allow that possibility; the what-if joker would probably be played and the whole historic feature removed.
We moved on to another of the famous landmarks this time called The Horn another kilometre and a half walk and evidence of further health and safety considerations. This time a handrail and steps actually cut in the granite. It was a remarkable bit of engineering – slightly intrusive, but you know, on balance, we saw all ages and abilities of people managing the walk and it provided such a security net to them, its well worth it. I took a re-take of the old shelter near the car park and we moved on to Dixon’s Falls for another walk; this time 4km. It’s about the most exercise we’ve had for a month or so.
Anne had taken photography to heart today and managed to fill two memory cards with pics of plants and other bits and bobs, so there was a certain amount of downloading and sorting as the day progressed.
Anne was keen to have a look at the wine and gourmet drive on the way back to Canberra and so we decided to stay out another night and found our way after a couple of false starts to the motel at Milawa.
Its been a beautiful day in the Australian Alps, with only a brief lapse in the mid afternoon, the skies have been clear and blue and the late afternoon / evening light glorious. We booked into the Lindahwarra Country Hotel for dinner and sat watching the various parrots flying past to roost over the vineyard.
Back at the motel we put in a mobile phone call back to Scotland to Julia, standing out under clear, unpolluted almost frosty skies. She’s meeting the boys for lunch and we arranged to speak tomorrow back at Stuart and Di’s.
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