Victoria trip Monday 14/1/08
Saturday, 26 January, 2008
This is our Warragul day.
Our gracious host had given up her room and her bed for me and Liwen, and taken a mattress into the lounge room instead. Luckily this is the sort of house where all the rooms have doors so she can still have some privacy. My concerns about disturbing Liwen (as I'm only used to sharing a bed with Ben) are unfounded; she's a solid sleeper, and her ability to doze off not long after her head hits the pillow astounds me and makes me envious.
We're supposed to rise by 8:30—and Liwen does (she has the sort of inner body clock that wakes her up). But I don't rise until 10 (I kept thinking someone would wake me. But my friends are too polite for that.) The house is empty. I'm a bit confused by this but figure that Liwen and Anita have gone out to the shops or something. I make myself a cup of tea and go out into the backyard to scribble, but they are soon back with supplies.
In the kitchen, Liwen has filled a bowl with pomegranate seeds. I have never seen pomegranate seeds in my entire life, and am so fascinated, I take half a dozen shots of them:
I think I understand a little bit more about the myth of Persephone, daughter of Demeter who was goddess of making things grow, who was abducted by Hades, King of the Underworld, because he liked the look of her. He takes her to his abode where she cries, refusese to eat and calls for her mother. In turn, Demeter takes her case to the head honcho of all the Greek gods, Zeus, who says that Hades must cough her up and let her return from the world of the dead (provided she hasn't eaten anything). Unfortunately, by this stage when the good news is delivered, Persephone, being the greedy glutton, succumbed to temptation and ate six pomegranate seeds (well, they were pomegranate seeds in the version I read!) So Zeus decreed that she had to spend six months of the year at Hades' side as his wife, and six months with her mother. And Demeter mourned by creating autumn and winter—when the earth turns cold and little can be yielded from the soil.
Pomegranate seeds are shaped like corn kernels. When you eat them, the juice just explodes into your mouth. It's sweet but it also has that acidic taste that apples and citrus fruits have. I couldn't take a handful and eat them the way Liwen was urging me; I could only eat them one or two at a time. But I did enjoy them.
Anita makes us a smashing breakfast, consisting of eggs Benedict and hash browns:
As there's no dining table, we make ourselves comfortable on the floor and eat with the food on our laps, washing down the feast with Real Juice Company apple and mango juice with a hint of lemon.
Liwen and I wash up, and then we all get ready to go out, hop in the car and drive out across the picturesque Warragul countryside which is punctuated by sycamores and cypresses and hay bales scattered like pez across the landscape:
Anita makes an executive decision and takes us to Noojee, a town devoid of Bec (okay, that was a lame joke; I must be turning into a total dad ... “Noojee” actually means “valley of contentment or place of rest”). We are just past the trout farm when we encounter a fox on the road. It looks like it's been hit. We stop the car and get out, intending to move it so it won't bother other motorists, but as we get nearer to it, we realise it's still breathing. Its legs twitch and try to get at the flies who are starting to congregate around its eyes and mouth, and the blood congealing on its head. We don't quite know what to do; we're three females from the city who have no experience with this sort of thing. “Is there some injured wildlife hotline we can call?” I ask. No one knows. And anyway we're not getting mobile reception in this area.
Several cars drive by, their occupants looking at us curiously (guess you don't get “ethnics” like us in the country!) One of them stops and asks if we're all right. We tell him about the fox. (He doesn't seem that interested; he probably thinks, “Shoot the rotten thing!”) He tells us that there might be someone at the Noojee post office who can help. He has the Australia Post logo on the side of his car so we believe him, hop back in the car and go on to Noojee, where we go to the Noojee General Store/Post Office and the lady looks up the area's wildlife officer's number and calls them.
Then we headed across the road to the Red Parrott Café where Anita told me I had to try a horchata. The internet tells me that it's a rice-based drink served over ice, but that's not what I had; what I had tasted of vanilla and caramel, it was hot and sweet, and it looked like this:
Liwen, who can't have sugar, had Earl Grey in the most beautiful of teacups:
We were sitting inside on the comfy lounges but then decided to move outside because it was such a nice day and it was rather dark inside.
Poor Anita wasn't feeling too well but brushed aside our cries of, “Let's turn around and go home. One of us can drive if you don't feel up to it.” So after our beverages, we pushed on to Toorongo Falls which is a 40 min walk. The walk is very pretty:
And the falls are magnificent—obviously not a patch on Niagara Falls, but given we are in the middle of a drought, I was quite amazed at the amount of water that came cascading down:
On the way back, I found these odd berries which I thought might have been blueberries (hey, they're blue!) or blueberry-related (but Rosey says they're not; they're poisonous).
Next stop was the trestle bridge where logs used to be transported by rail. You can walk across the top of it; there are no tracks.
After the trestle bridge, we drove out to Yarragon village, a place which I recognised as a place where Ben and I have stopped for morning tea or lunch the two times we've driven down to Melbourne. We go looking in all the little shops, and stop at the teahouse for a very late lunch (it was 3 pm by this time!) with some yummy juice drinks from the juice bar.
We had a short wander around at the shops but they were all closing so we went back to Anita's house instead and had a cup of tea.
Soon after that, it was time to leave to drive to Phillip Island which took about an hour and a half. In summer, the sun doesn't seem to set in Victoria until about 8 or 9 pm, so we had a bit of time. As we drove, I had an interested conversation with Anita about things like alcohol, gambling, swearing, women preaching, authority and ethics. She majored in philosophy, so she's always interesting to talk to about those sorts of things.
As it's about dinner time, we go to the Nobbies Centre for food, hoping to find a café, but everything is shut. It's so cold! And I'm just wearing a thin dress and a polar fleece jacket. We head straight to the penguin parade place from there, and the crowds are already gathering. Anita suggests getting something to eat from there but Liwen and I aren't really hungry, so she goes off to get popcorn (yes, they sell popcorn for the penguin parade!) We wander around the gift shop for a while (me marvelling at all the penguin-related merchandise they have), and then walk down the boardwalk to the viewing area. We get a spot right down the front where we spread our picnic blankets and rug up with the extra blankets Anita had brought. Soon enough, the little penguins are making their way up the beach in their idosyncratic way—moving forward, then darting back into the water, then moving forward, then darting back, and so on. There's more of them than when Ben I went which was in the middle of winter, so I suppose by now they've had some chicks. They are as cute as ever, and we anthropomorphise them by making up dialogue to caption what they're doing: “Right! Straight ahead troops! Steady on!” “Abort! Abort, I say!” “Let's make a run for it—whee!” etc.
After a while, we get up and pack our stuff (me with the blanket wrapped around my legs) and wander back up the boardwalk where we see them by the light of the lamps making their way into the scrub, waddling up in little groups, standing still and blinking at their audience.
Then we make our way back to the car and drive back to Anita's, me subjecting Anita and Liwen to more of my music (Ys by Joanna Newsom which I thought they would like, but they weren't into it—Liwen said she couldn't work out what she was singing about—so we switched it to other things. [Yes, I knew Newsom was a gamble, but I figured it was worth a try!]) Liwen was Mistress of the MP3 player so she put on various things she recognised from my album list: the soundtrack to Almost Famous, “Hallelujah” covered by Jeff Buckley, Avril Lavigne, the soundtrack of A Room with a View (which is significant for all of us because we watched it in high school), the soundtrack to Trois Couleurs: Bleu ... (I also suggested “Bluebird” by Katie Noonan which I think is one of the most beautiful songs on the album).
It was 11:30 by the time we arrived home, and Liwen and I were hungry. After snacking on pomegranate seeds mixed in with yoghurt, a bit of muesli and a sprinkling of peanuts (which was actually really yummy!) and a hash brown, and me reading them a bit of The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, we went to bed.
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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For future reference… you can call ‘Wires’ when you find hurt animals. My sister happens to be a member and is often looking after a variety of injured birds/kangaroos/wallabies. I’m afraid I would have had a similar reaction to locals in this situation tho. Foxes are pests in Australia - they kill chickens and wildlife and farmers often shoot them.
Thanks Sarah! That’s good to know.
The pomegranate seeds look like glass beads - the ones with the metallic barrels.