A Send Off from Sydney: The Highlights Part 1

For the record, I'm officially in the States and I survived immigration without a single deportation threat. Before I start my America commentary, I felt I should write a longwinded entry or two on how I spent my last weeks in Australia.



1. The Hunter Valley.

Shiraz grapes growing in the sunshine

Spending 22 years in Australia is a long time (too long...) and after a while, you begin to forget what you initially liked about the place. I spent the past couple of months trying to remind myself of the less awful sides of the country and found that they do exist, you just have to travel a few km's out of the Sydney Metro area to find them.

Before the vast majority of the area became an extension of the great lakes, my mum and I trekked to Wine Country, glorious, shiny (after a few choice vats of red it is...) Hunter Valley Wine Country. We scored a room at the fabulous Vintage Grand Mercure Apartments (thank you lastminute.com.au). Poking around our sizeable apartment (complete with humoungous bath tubs, fake fireplace, and the most uncomfortable king sized bed I've ever slept in) I uncovered the most bizarre design feature I've ever seen in a hotel (I say this because I haven't been to Vegas...yet).

The view into my bathroom...from my bedroom!

My apologies for the shocking photo quality, I'd like to see you try and take a better photo of a totally random window in the middle of the west wall of the master bedroom...whilst you're lying awkwardly on the bed, trying to fit this gigantic glass pane into the frame. Seriously though...why? What's the reasoning behind having a window that looks into your bathroom from your bedroom? It's quite, um, kinky. Naturally I found a practical use for it...since the bath takes up a nice third of the bathroom, I put my laptop on the bed, full-screened an episode of Futurama, turned up the sound and watched TV in the bath. Not featured in the photo is the showerhead...which was the size of MY head and had...practically no water pressure. Bah.

Mum and I had two items on our agenda for the next two and a half days.

1. Eat hideous amounts of food.
2. Drink hideous amounts of wine.

I want to put in a few shameless plugs for the following local businesses. Anyone thinking of going to the Hunter Valley once El Nino comes back to town and the place is no longer the Southern Hemisphere's answer to Atlantis, needs to dine at The Mill and order the honey brulee. They also need to dedicate an entire day to a horse and carriage winery tour, Pokolbin Carriage Tours is by far the best (not that we tried any of the others, but nothing could possibly top these guys). Our tour guide and all-round gentleman Frank and his trusty steed Matilda took us around five different wineries and even threw in a sumptuous antipasto lunch to boot. I am still dreaming of that roast chicken and caramelised onion. As for the wineries themselves, my favourite had to be Scarborough, which may have survived the downpour since it is perched right on top of a hill in Pokolbin (conveniently enough, it's near the starting point of the carriage tour) and has some of the most picturesque views of the Hunter. It's also one of two wineries to produce Pinot Noir (the other is Tyrells and I wouldn't waste my time going there...) and it's a corker of a red. Their '03 Chardonnay was divine as well. Also, if you're ever in the Hunter, keep an eye out for Binnorie Dairy's Labne and ANY brand of Caramelised Balsamic Vinegar, two present addictions of mine.

2. Geraldton

In order to better prepare myself for the Red States of the U.S, I travelled to one of the main regional centres of Western Australia. I'm pretty sure it's the same as Texas, except the Texan accent is undoubtedly classier than the 'Where did all the consonants go?' Geraldton brogue. You know the kind of town...lots of two-dollar stores, lots of small, blonde children, lots of people married to their distant/not-distant-enough relations. Geraldton life revolves around the beach/marina area and thanks to our purchase of an investment property right before the housing boom, we have a house that is right around the corner from the Indian Ocean. We arrived at the end of autumn/beginning of winter and the water was still warm enough to swim in and the sky was sunny and cloudless. So I spent a great many of my days working on my winter tan (failed), expanding my literary horizons (succeeded) and looking like a right bloody fool wading around in the water with my almost knee-length skirts still on (v. successful). I've been to Geraldton three times now and each time I totally forgot to check out the sun setting over the water. On my last day of what was most likely going to be my final Geraldton trip (if I have my way) I realised the sunset was approaching and I was going to miss it (again) so I raced down to the end of the block ad had just enough time to grab a photo:


...of a ship, blocking the sunset. Damn it!

Anyway, in terms of excitement and cuisine, Geraldton's not exactly the most happening of spots. Your best bet is to hire a car and drive north to the cliffs of Kalbarri to catch the beautiful ocean views (and maybe even see a pot of dolphins), head east to check out the Chapman Valley Wine Country or south to Greenough to check out the convict settlement. Thankfully when I was there I had the blessed child Neo Ripley (please note that I am not responsible in any way for the naming of the blessed child) to keep me occupied. What an adorable little tyke...I'm not a huge fan of toddlers, or babysitting or children generally but this one is special. Just over a year old, curious about everything, very rarely cries and has the most evil cackle I've ever heard. When I wasn't hooning around, complaining about my hayfever (I spent most of my time wandering around half-blind from all the dust) or sunbathing, I was running around trying to convince Neo that my laptop was of no interest to him and his greasy fingers.

Most restaurants are way more expensive than they should be, the service is generally rude and the food is usually Modern Australian (whatever that means) seafood and isn't too bad but for the price you pay, you're not exactly wowed. The best place is Conversations by Indigo which serves wanky, upmarket, expensive food to match the wanky name but at least the service is attentive and the garlic prawns are fabulous.

One of my most memorable parts of the trip, cute golden-haired children aside, was heading down to Greenough Hamlet (that aforementioned convict settlement about half an hour's drive out of town) for a ghost hunt. About five years prior to this trip, I'd gone down to Greenough and had a curious experience in the back room of one of the settler's cottages...walked into the room and suddenly became so dizzy I had trouble standing up and couldn't see straight. The only cure for this bizarre attack was to make my way out of the room...once I was out the dizziness faded, my shoulders felt less heavy and of course, I flatly refused to go back in. So this time, I decided to ask the owners of the settlement (a delightful British couple) if they had any good ghost stories.

Amityville and Greenough seem to have a lot in common.

Some of the better stories I heard (and it may be useful to check out the latter half of this photo album to get an idea of what the places are like, plus I threw in the longer versions of these stories in the captions/comments) included: the fat ex-priest of the Catholic church who will shift the altar sideways so he can get out into the pews, the curtains on the stage in St Catherine's hall which mysteriously open and close themselves during the end of Harvest Festival social season (the curtains would be symbollically closed after the festival concert as a way of ending the season back in the days of the settlement...the festival itself is no longer celebrated but clearly someone doesn't want the tradition to end) and my favourite - the little girl ghost who hangs around a hill just outside the settlement area when the moon is full, looking for her lost cat. Apparently some miners who were contracted to work in the area caught her running around and she stopped to greet them. They, in turn, had the daylights frightened out of them and promptly ended their contract. Aww. I probably would've just said hello. She still haunts the area so whenever the moon is full (I missed it by two days) all the local kids hang out on the hill waiting for her to show up, but she tends to appear only to individuals.

Was I visited by any ghosties this time around? Not as such. Although, I did walk into another cottage and could swear I caught the scent of fresh flowers in the front room. I was alone in the house and was not wearing perfume or scented shampoo or anything of the sort, so when I questioned the owners about the cottage I was informed I'd been standing in the front room of the undertakers' house, where they arranged the funeral wreaths and coffins in preparation for burial. Hmmm...

The other most memorable moment was viewing The Pinnacles on the drive down to Perth. About a kilometre from the ocean in the middle of nowhere, these huge limestone rocks randomly sprung up from the Earth (er...they explain the phenomenon better on Wikipedia) in this even more random patch of desert which is right near a lake containing the oldest forms of life in the world...naturally I thought they were rocks and accidentally stepped on them. Christ, what a genius. I could show you a photo I took that has the desert in the foreground and the ocean in the background, but instead I'm going to upload this one, because I'm a child:

heh heh heh...

If you want a bit of audio to go with that photo, open this link and fast forward to the 2:15 mark once it has loaded or this one and go to the 2:58 mark and ignore the word 'turnip' in both parts. Then you should watch the rest of the episode because it's hilarious.

Part 2 coming soon...