Holly had to give a talk to a bunch of community groups about the work they are doing in the Hills north of Melbourne. It involved the newly named DELWP, which sounds like a belch but they used to be DEPI which sounds as if they are intellectually challenged. It’s a funny thing that every time the politicians in power get kicked out and a new mob come in they change the name of the environment department. Of course this involves changing all the stationary, uniforms and lots of things that I cannot even guess at. Still that’s my personal gripe out of the way back to the weekend. We went to Yarra Junction on Friday as it was an early start on Saturday and we stayed at the newish place that the uni are renting for their fieldwork. It is a vast improvement on the Barwon Downs one with three bathrooms and lots of rooms. There was the added bonus of a juvenile or at least a very tatty Rufous Fantail sheltering in the bushes, sheltering that is from the very lazy southerly wind and the horizontal rain, not a nice day for camping which fortunately we were not doing. Also worth a mention was the meal we had at the local pub we both had an Australian icon in that it was a parma though I doubt that many ocker Aussies would have an eggplant parma, in fact most wouldn’t know one pointy end to a roundy end of an aubergine. I went for the local parma and it was quite delicious.
After dropping Hol of in Lilydale, it sounds nice but it’s not, I headed of into the hills in search of the always elusive Superb Lyrebird. Acting on a tip off I headed towards Warburton and turned left up towards one of the rainforest walks. Well it certainly lived up to its name as it rained and there was a lot of trees but as I got higher up you couldn’t see the trees for the fog. But on the other hand the Lyrebirds were out in force and the first one I saw was in the front garden of one of the last houses up the hill. Unfortunately I should have taken a photo of it then because the fog closed in and although there were many LB about it was always when they were running across the road or in thick low cloud. When I say running it was a curious mix of panicked chook flapping around in a very gay manner with wings going in opposite directions while their legs are going like the proverbials. In fact they reminded me of someone having hysterics. Adding to this illusion was them calling and bubbling about in dense undergrowth. There was several other birds about including a beautiful Rose Robin and Bassian Thrushes but the weather was just deplorable so about midday I though sod it and headed for Healesville and lunch. On the way down more LB flapped and minced across the road very similar to Mr. Humphreys crossing the floor in search of a sale.
The next edible icon was the great Aussie pie so good I had two of them, a rather yummy beef and mushroom one and a chicken and corn with a flat white to top it off. So the problem is where to eat such delicacies definitely not in the car park of the local supermarket, so I headed for the back of the Healesville sanctuary in the vain hope of Helmeted Honeyeater and so it proved but there was more LB and they were in range for photos until a Dutch family suddenly burst onto the scene and scared everything but the Kookaburra away. Still the pies were good. It’s an odd thing but the place where I was had a large car park so why do people still park close to you, very annoying. So I abandoned Healesville to the plebs and headed back to Lilydale where I spent a lovely time listening to old man radio, mostly Australian Rools Footy. OMR is the ABC probably equivalent to Radio 4 with a soupcon of Radio 5 for flavour.
And so we left the delights of Lilydale and headed for the big city. Now owing to my lack of temporal awareness I actually booked a hotel for August, I think I was thinking of going to Europe rather than Melbourne, so on the Friday I had to find another which obviously cost a bit more and no breakfast option either. It’s often said that you get what you pay for well I’m not sure that holds true for hotels as this wasn’t cheap but badly needed a coat of paint and general upgrade. And it was out on the Kingsway which is a long way from where we wanted to be on a Saturday night which was the CBD.it was also peeing down with rain and cold with it so we used the hotline at the hotel to order a cab and we waited and waited and waited and still we waited. Now the show we had tickets for started at 815 and we had contacted the cab company at the end of the world at 7. Finally at 750 the interplanetary cab turned up and with the amount of traffic and the weather it was going to be close. It became closer when he dropped us 500 metres away from the venue so it was a mad dash to the town hall where we found absolute chaos. People were coming down the stairs while people were going up while some were being diverted away from the major melee into a more minor morass of heaving humanity. Somehow the diminutive organisers managed to direct all the people to where they should be going and we got to our seats just as the comedian started. Josie Long was very English and was quite funny in some places reflective in others but overall very good. And she kept up the banter for an hour which is a good effort in any language. So onto the next culinary icon the Chinese. It may seem strange to count this as an Aussie icon but trust me it is. However I made the mistake of going into a place resplendent in the name of the Chilli Fish in Chinatown. Hol had soft tofu and I went for soft shelled crab and I found out why it was called the Chilli Fish and it was nothing to do with air temperature. It was very spicy, I should have known as two other customers were having respiratory problems of their own as well as seemingly changing colour in a random pattern. It filled a hole and it was actually quite a nice bit of crab once I recognised the little red hot lumps in the batter. So we wandered off and it was easier to get a cab back to the hotel once we had told the driver where the place was. There was me thinking that cabbies were trained to know where places were or at least have a sat nav, crikey even I’ve got one of them.
Well we made it back and in the morning it was off to hunt down the last of the delicacies THE BIG BREAKFAST. This turned out to be an abject failure as the café that promised so much was totally full, to explain TBB if you can imagine snags, bacon, mushrooms etc. then you have some idea of the delight this can bring. But there are compensations in the shape of the great Aussie eggs benedict perched on top of hash browns and served up with a seared sauce. It was extremely good as it had pulled pork incorporated which worked surprisingly well. You may have noticed that the Australian icon as far as food goes is very much like the country it takes the best from everywhere and adds stuff from everywhere else.
Finally the bird of the day had to be the squabbling mob of Noisy Miners in the trees outside the hotel window, though it was difficult to see through the grime. As for the rest of the week it is getting to be a bit of a struggle but yesterday while walking the dog, Holly takes Charlie for a run while me and the old girl take leisurely walks, there was a juvenile White-naped Honeyeater in the Chinese Cemetery so odd things still turn up. Well this has been a bit of an epic so I will call this a wrap. It’s a wrap.