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26th Nov 2005
Blowhard and Bright
Saturday, 26th November, 2005
Up and out of here as fast as we could get and under way by 8 o’clock. It’s a dull grey start and not looking at all promising for a motor traverse of the high tops.
We got as far as Bairnsdale and found a really nice café diner come deli and wine seller.
Bacon and eggs and a couple of Lattes soon cheered things up and we bought a bottle of wine just in anticipation of getting into a BYO restaurant in Bright this evening.
It’s a long quite slow slog into the hills and the weather did not make it any more enticing. Grey skies and occasional spit and spats of rain. As we climbed higher there was the odd glimmer of the prospect of it getting slightly brighter. We stopped very briefly in a town called Omeo, which appeared to be almost universally ‘shut’! which was a bit of a shame. It had a frontier feel to it but very clearly mid spring is not the time to visit these places. Once we got to the top, to Mount Hotham village there was even less on offer, empty car parks, stacks of dismantled ski-lift chairs, mothballed machinery and empty chalets. We were at about the level of one or two rather forlorn snow patches.
We took a walk out along Razorback ridge towards Mount Feathertop, for an hour or so. One or two flowers on show but the woody remnants of what had been there in the past was all that remained from some intense bushfires and the views all the way up the road and around showed miles of dead eucalypt stems above a carpet of emerging re-growth. At this altitude, it will take decades to recover.
I took a few re-takes following the path of the re-photographers of the Diprose motor journey from 1933.
One of the most interesting re-takes was at Blowhard and this came from a turn-of-the-century image of a stagecoach rounding Mt Blowhard … careful scrutiny of the possibilities eventually revealed a stone which appeared on the original image and was one a of a few stones remaining in an old retaining wall below massive reconstruction and enlargement of the road.
Just on the Bright side of Blowhard was the location of the St Bernard’s Hospice and once again there was an early image of this. No time for the re-take, which wasn’t an easy roadside re-take.
We descended to Bright for the night and after a tour through the village settled on a Motor Inn near the entrance to town. Anne went in to discuss the room .. while I sat outside. As I was sitting there, I read the bottom line of their street advertising, which said ‘wireless internet’ – the first one I’d seen in Australia!
Anne came out and said that she’d told them we’d go on – she wasn’t sure about the room and it took a little bit of persuading to get her to change her mind. Got the laptop registered when I signed in and then spent the next half hour or so downloading e-mails and checking through the bank account.
Our plan for the evening featured a restaurant that Anne had read. Unfortunately, the town is full of wedding parties ... the third week of November in Australia is like our third week of May in Britain; one of the most popular times for a wedding and consequently Simone's was full. Our second choice was also only serving people who had booked. But the third, the Liquid Am-bar had a table – more like a perch really but comfortable enough. It was a fun and lively place and the food was good.
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