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Before I start

I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who’s sent me messages over the last few weeks either checking I’m OK, or telling me that they’ve been missing my updates, or that they’re looking forward to more! So, here it is, and don’t forget, you asked for it (well some did!) and there’s quite a lot of it, split into a few entries, but this gets us all caught up.

Back to Australia

I had toyed with the idea of calling this section “Return to Oz” but I’m sure my family will all remember the nightmares I had after seeing that film, so thought better of it! I still don’t get why she had so many heads, or why those monkeys had wheels and could fly! Anyway, thankfully my return to Australia hasn’t resulted in any such nightmares!

Canberra

I took a day trip down from Sydney to the national capital, Canberra. It’s a few hours’ drive but once you get out of Sydney, it’s fairly scenic and quite a nice drive. On the way we stopped off for morning tea at a town called Berrima. Once we got top Canberra we toured briefly around the city then headed to the museum, parliament house and national war memorial for a tour of each before heading up to a lookout point over the city on Mount Ainslie and then back on the road to Sydney. During our tour round the parliament building, some of our group wandered off and got lost - the driver was wondering if he could maybe get away with leaving them!!

Canberra seems like a really nice little city, and I wish that I’d built some time into my itinerary to be able to spend a few days there. When Australia’s states and territories were all coming together as a federation, there was a dispute between Melbourne and Sydney as to which should be the national capital. It was eventually decided that neither would be, and that was when Canberra was created, sort of halfway between the two.

Wine, Cheese and Chocolate in the Hunter Valley

I also took a trip from Sydney into the Hunter Valley - we were on a wine, cheese and chocolate tasting trip. We stopped off at a wildlife park on the way where we patted kangaroos and a koala. I’m not sure the kangaroos were very impressed by our group - normally people have bags of feed for them, but we didn’t have any, so these kangaroos who are roaming free and are obviously very used to people coming into the park, were coming over to us, looking at us expectantly and then hopping off in disgust when they saw we had nothing for them!

After that we had a stop off at Wollombi to try Dr Jurg’s Jungle Juice which came about when many years ago, the owner of the local pub, accidentally filled the wine casks with petrol; the pub burned down and apart from some brandy and some port, the town was dry: disaster!! So, the enterprising Dr Jurg decided to mix the port and the brandy, and the rest, as they say, is history. It’s now pretty much an obligatory stop on each tour into the Hunter Valley. I quite liked it - although probably the thimbleful I had was enough - I don’t think you could drink a lot of it! Come to think of it, probably nobody really drinks the stuff, they just pass it out to the gullible tourists like me who’ll believe anything their told!!

Another stop before we reached the Hunter saw us going for a bush walk and seeing some local plants, animals and beasties. My first Aussie bushwalk!

We made it to our first winery for tastings before lunch. It was the Oakvale winery. We tasted so many different wines, and they were very generous with the samples for tasting! I had been expecting just to have a thimbleful of each if you were lucky. I think I liked a couple of them. I’ve never been to a winery for a tasting session before so wasn’t really sure what to expect. It was really good though - she gave us lots of information about the wine and what grapes were used and oaking and other things that went a bit over my head (remember, I’m not usually much of a wine drinker, so when I buy wine, it’s based on the pretty bottle or the pretty label!). We had a sheet listing all of the different wines and we were meant to mark them as we tasted them. I adopted a variation of my recipe grading system (I didn’t have my packet of red and gold stars with me) so my system consisted of: X or ?. There were more Xs than s, but it was still good fun to try them all.

Our lunch was very good - it was at our next winery, and was matched with 4 wines to complement the food. We had the option of going for some beer tasting at that winery after lunch but we all ended up just sitting around and chatting and before we knew it, it was time to go on to the next winery.

The 3rd winery saw us tasting wine and cheese which had been chosen to complement one another. That was my favourite: I found wine that I quite liked and tasted some pretty good cheeses. My favourite was labna which I have seen in one of my books and think I’ll be trying to make that myself when I get home. My next favourite was a feta but instead of being made from sheep’s milk as is traditional, this was made from cow’s milk - tasted pretty good - who says traditional ways are always the best!

Our final tasting session was at the chocolate shop where we had some nice chocolates and their speciality, the chilli chocolate, which kind of hits you just as you finish saying “I don’t taste the chilli”!!!

After that, we headed back to Sydney, and while most people dozed I chatted to our driver/guide Phil and quizzed him about driving in Australia and about the Great Ocean Road, where he had been a guide for a few years and where I will be heading to in a few days time. He also treated us to a recital of “The Man from Snowy River” the famous Banjo Paterson poem.

The next stage

It goes without saying, Australia is a huge country - it is only just a bit smaller than mainland USA, so there’s a lot of ground to cover!

I am going to take the Indian Pacific train which is one of the world’s great scenic transcontinental journeys. It runs from Sydney on the east coast to Perth on the west coast, travelling over 4,000km and takes around 60 hours. Thankfully you don’t have to do the whole journey all in one go: I am taking the train from Sydney to Adelaide in one trip and later on will finish up the journey by going from Adelaide to Perth - let’s hope the seats are nice and comfy!!

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