Castlemaine and Bendigo

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October 31st 2012

Published: October 31st 2012

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The Imperial Hotel

A wonderful old building in Castlemaine

On our second day here, we began with breakfast at The Pancake Kitchen in downtown Ballarat. Scott and I both ordered the Country Breakfast which featured eggs, stewed tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms, pancakes, and “an entire rasher of bacon,” which, as it turned out, is more bacon than I could even finish!

From the lovely Pancake Kitchen we headed out of Ballarat, hitting the highway towards Bendigo, another gold mining town about the size of Ballarat two hours away. On the way we stopped for water at Castlemaine, a small town with some cute stores (these small towns remind me of the small towns in the mountains of Colorado – quaint, old, funky). Not surprisingly, we found a store with Tibetan and Nepalese imports. Castlemaine also had a wonderful old building called “The Imperial Hotel” with impressive wrought iron work (btw, “hotels” in Australia are pubs, or bars).

From Castlemaine, we drove to Bendigo. While Bendigo is the same size as Ballarat, there is one important difference: during the Gold Rush, many Chinese came to

Aged

Need I say more?

work in the mines. When the mines closed down, many of the gold mining towns drove the Chinese out, but in Bendigo, the Chinese community stayed, and there is now a flourishing Chinese Australian community there. We spent time at the Dragon Museum which tells the history of the Chinese community, viewed the water gardens, and sat and meditated for a while in the Kuan Yin Temple.

The Dragon Museum is next to the Botanical Gardens where a colony of bats (refered to as flying foxes) live. We strolled through the gardens, again marveling at the variety of plants, the colors of the birds – and the bats. On a hill in the Gardens is a tower that you can climb to get a panoramic view of the area. At the top of the tower is a large brass compass, pointing out specific sites in the town. I was particularly taken by the arrow pointing out the location of the “Benevolent Asylum.”

About a fifteen minute walk from the Dragon Museum is the Bendigo Woolen Mills. It’s basically a factory mill with a yarn store attached, so of course I had to go! I was amused by the

Australia

This is the statue sitting atop the tourist information building in Castlemaine. I loved the traffic cone hat.

sign at the gate that warned of the presence of forklifts – somehow that seemed so Australian to me. Yarn stores in the US can sometimes be so frilly and, well, precious. In Australia, the yarn stores warn you to be on the look out for heavy machinery.

One of the interesting things about these provincial cities is that restaurants aren’t open all day long. They tend to close between lunch and dinner, so we had to look hard for an open restaurant by the time we got around to eating our late lunch. We finally found an open place called “The Wine Bank,” which was basically an old bank turned into a wine store with an attached café. We had a really lovely lunch, but the coolest part about it was the restroom – the toilet sat against the back wall. Sitting right on top of the toilet tank was the sink. When you flushed the toilet, the tap automatically started running into the sink – and as you washed your hands, that water filled the tank for the next flush (there’s a picture of this). In a country that has experienced so much drought (every town we

Bendigo

View towards the municipal building from the Botanical Gardens

drove through had signs that say “Maximum Water Saving in Effect”), this is a brilliant solution.

On the drive home, we asked our friend Brian if we could just pull over out in the country and get out of the car. The air was fresh; we were surrounded by canola fields in full bloom, catching the rays of the sun as it was setting. Beautiful.

That evening we drove back to Ballarat and went out to a Spanish/Mexican style restaurant – but because it was past 8:30 pm, and it was Monday night, the kitchen had already closed. However, they offered us nachos, chicken fajitas, and calamari (have I mentioned that Australia has THE best calamari ever? Large, meaty, slices – nothing like the rubbery small bits that you get in the US), so despite the closed kitchen, we had quite a nice feast.

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