Gluttons for Punishment

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It's Mother's Day, but there are no sleep-ins or breakfasts-in-bed for Issy. Our not so kind hosts (refer previous entry) need us to move apartments this morning. We’ve been told we have to be out of this apartment by 10am on pain of death, but apparently we can't get into the second one, several kilometres away, until 2pm. So it seems we‘ll be temporarily homeless. Our hosts keep sending us emails asking us for feedback. I would have thought we gave them more than enough last night, but they're clearly gluttons for punishment. I salivate as I think about what I'm going to put in the review. Soon after we’ve moved out they ring us to tell us that they've again (?) gone out of their way to help us, and have arranged for us to have access to the second apartment by noon, thus very kindly reducing our homeless hours from four to only two. How generous. They go on tell us that they hope this will save them from a bad review. Boy have I got news for them. It certainly won't be pretty.

A few minutes later we get an email from our hosts with a bill for a small bottle of water, which we assumed was complimentary. They then follow up with a message asking us to ring them to give them our credit card details for the extra money they've kindly charged us to avoid us having to stay in a room totally devoid of windows. When we ring them back they tell us that they've managed to sort this out themselves; it seems they've managed to dredge up details of one of our cards from somewhere else. This is very worrying. I'm already anticipating a few long nights trawling through credit card statements trying to discover what other pain they might have chosen to inflict without our knowledge. Grrrrrr.

We reflect that this is right up there with our worst ever accommodation experiences, and we're very much reminded of our old friends at the "Starry Sky Charming House" in Sardinia (refer blogs from early August 2019). I've chosen not to name our Mildura hosts. I think we're probably fairly safe from Italian law suits, but I don't particularly want to risk us being dragged off to court by these clowns. I certainly wouldn't put it past them.

We spend some of our homeless hours at a downtown establishment called Moose's. The decor includes statues of Native American Indians, and mooses' heads on the walls. It feels like we've been transported to Canada. Perhaps unsurprisingly there's no shortage of red meat on the menu.

We decide to head off to the Australian Inland Botanic Gardens which are across the border near Buronga in New South Wales. As we head across the river we reflect on the fact that this is the first time we've crossed a state or international border since 2019. Who would have foreseen that eighteen months ago?

We read that the massive 150 hectare gardens were the brainchild of scientists from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), and were apparently the first semi-arid such establishment in the Southern Hemisphere. First plantings were undertaken in 1991. The site is very impressive and includes plants from semi-arid regions across the globe. It's generally very informal, the main exception being a very large and extremely formal rose garden. The soils looks very dry and sandy, and whilst most of the plants here are probably drought tolerant to some degree, there's certainly no shortage of backup irrigation. We admire the "Wow Tree", which is said to be more than 2,500 years old. Whilst we've got no reason to doubt this, it must be incredibly slow growing; it's not particularly big. A former Victorian Premier, Jeff Kennett, is listed as one of the garden's benefactors. I was fairly sure we'd left our home state when we crossed the river, and I would have thought our Jeff would have cut his right arm off before helping anything located in the great rival state of New South Wales. Maybe politicians soften a bit after they leave office.

Emma rings in from Canada for Mother's Day. She sounds a bit homesick and weighed down by her current visa issues, which have become extra complicated due to COVID. We're missing her more than ever since not being able to visit. We talk to her from seats in the garden’s outdoor kitchen. The only decoration in sight is the bottom half of a mannequin. Hmmm. I'm pretty sure it wasn't an engineer who decided on that particular form of decor.

We head back across the border via the New South Wales town of Wentworth. When COVID first arrived all the Australian states immediately started behaving like individual fiefdoms. They all had different approaches to issues such as quarantine, border closures and lockdowns. It seems that our Federal Government had very little power over all of this, which came as a bit of a surprise to most of us. Victoria hasn't had a COVID case for about three months now, yet we discovered just before we left home that if we needed to re-enter our home State at any time we'd need a permit. This was fairly easy to get on-line, and was valid for multiple re-entries within a fourteen day period, after which it had to be renewed. We then found that similar rules applied to South Australia, but not apparently to New South Wales. As we re-enter Victoria we expect to be swarmed upon by voracious border guards demanding to see our paperwork. I'm not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed by their absence.

We wander along the Mildura river front at dusk. As was the case in Echuca there doesn't appear to be any shortage of massive house boats here for hire. These ones seem to be even bigger than their Echucan cousins; some of them look to be the size of entire apartment blocks. We pass a chair sculpted by a local indigenous artist. It's said to be inspired by Gaudi, and does indeed look like something straight out of Barcelona. Headless mannequins and now Gaudiesque art in the outback Mallee; who would have thought.....

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