Outback digs

THE last time I mentioned my accommodations I was staying in a salubrious suite at Craig's Royal Hotel in Ballarat.

A sweeping staircase climbed from the hotel's lobby to the suites on the second and third floors, enormous vases stuffed with bright blooms sat on every table in the hallways, I slept in a canopy bed, and enjoyed a long soak in an enormous bath before sliding between fine cotton sheets and drifting away to Snoozeland.

For the past two nights I have been sleeping in what I can only describe as accommodations that fall somewhere up the other end of the comfort scale.

No, not a Budget Motel by a country back road, something clean and comfortable, just considerably more simple than Craig's.

I've been sleeping in a donga - the portable cabins that typically house the folks working at remote mines - in the side yard at the rustic Marree Hotel.

My donga had two single beds complete with doonas dressed in smart covers, a shower with lots of hot water, and a window that looked east to the sun rising over the dilapidated railway buildings at the old Ghan station.

Marree is 390km from Port Augusta, and just 90km from the southern edge of Lake Eyre, and today it's dust-blown hamlet that's home to just a couple of dozen people.

But between the 1880s and the 1970s, when the original Ghan ran through the settlement, this place was a thriving hive of activity with the scorched streets crowded by railway workers and their kin.

When the last train rolled down the track from Oodnadatta in 1980 the families moved away, the stately buildings began to fall apart, and now the town basically exists to support the tourists who pass through on the way to Lake Eyre.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Mr Eyre's magnificent lake

TODAY has been all about Lake Eyre.

This morning we flew over it, and this afternoon we drove to its southern edge and gazed at the silver water stretching all the way to the horizon.

I've been lucky enough to see the iconic Australian feature twice in the past 12 months, and it's amazing how much the region has changed since this time last year.

When I was here last Easter with my Dad we flew from William Creek to Innamincka, and then back to our starting point via the Warburton Groove, and got to see the Cooper Creek in flood and the water crawling into Lake Eyre.

This year North Lake Eyre is almost full -- the locals tell me it's up around 80 per cent at the moment -- but the Cooper hasn't broken its banks yet and the track is still open to Innamincka.

But what was most profound was the different colours in the Lake's water this year.

There's an algal bloom in the southern end of the lake, which has turned the water a dramatic blush colour, and the deeper water up northern basin ranges from an opaque lime green to a reflective shiny blue.

There are still streaks of murky brown, where the water is moving swiftly down the channels, and there are strong lines in the salt that mark the evapouration of last year's floods and look like a rainbow of ochre tones.

Last year the most colour was in the water flooding out of the Cooper, from a light latte hue to a deep shade that reminded me of melted dark chocolate, and the shallower water in the lake looked a bland sandy shade.

The locals are expecting Lake Eyre to be full again this year, with the bulk of the water due to arrive in June or July.

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Familiar face

IT'S a small world.

I know that's an overused phrase, but in this case I think it's very apt.

This time last year Dad and I were visiting William Creek, using the isolated country pub as a base for our aerial tour of Lake Eyre, and we got talking to an Adelaide girl who was working behind the bar.

This person, I can't remember her name, was taking a break from her studies and helping out at the William Creek watering hole during the busy season when the Oodnadatta Track was busy with tourists keen to see water in Lake Eyre and the Cooper Creek in flood.

We chatted as we drank of hydrating beverages, talking about what it was like to live and work in such an isolated place.

It seems this person enjoyed the experience because, almost 12 months later, she has returned to Outback South Australia to work at another isolated hotel.

This mystery blond, who I remembered because of the bow in her ponytail and the oversized pearls in her earlobes, was behind the bar at the Parachilna pub when I walked in this afternoon.

It seems she finished university last week and headed straight out of Adelaide to man the taps at this surprisingly chic watering hole halfway between Port Augusta and Marree.

We chatted for a minute, she took my money for the afternoon gelato I was consuming, and I told her I would see her next year at another some other Outback hotel.

The Prairie Hotel used to be just another country pub, sitting beside a long stretch of road in the middle of nowhere.

But an enterprising couple took over a few years back, did some renovations, built a handful of swanky new motel rooms, put in a couple of dining rooms and found a creative chef to work in the kitchen, and now the spot is an oasis of style on the long road to Marree.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Marree Hotel, Marree, South Australia

Going south

IT occurred to me last night that South Australia is this country's least interesting state.

Let me qualify that, it's Australia's least interesting state when travellers are listing reasons to plan a holiday

But that's what I was thinking last night, today I have a very different opinion.

Of course there's Adelaide and Kangaroo Island, but I've discovered another reason to visit this state is because Australia's red heart is literally at the capital city's back door.

To visit the icons of the Outback in NSW, Queensland, the Northern Territory and WA you have to fly and/or drive for long hours.

But to find red dirt in this part of the world you only need to do an hour-long flight from Melbourne, and then drive a couple of dozen kilometres from the city limits and you're walking in the footsteps of some of our greatest explorers.

So, when you think about it, South Australia is pretty unique -- underrated rather than uninteresting -- because it doesn't take long to clear the city and suburbs and see the wide-open spaces where salt bushes grow like stubble.

I'm in South Australia doing an APT tour of the state's Outback, which includes a visit to Lake Eyre and Wilpena Pound, so that's why I'm thinking so much about this place's cool rating.

I've been wanting to see the Flinders Ranges for years -- since Dad and I drove home from Perth in 2002 and gazed at the distant mountains as we motored through Port Augusta -- but now I'm here it's not at all what I expected.

I thought the feature would be more like the Blue Mountains, and perhaps it will be when we leave the bitumen and start climbing, but from the asphalt of the B83 road north its looks more like a desert out here.

Long lines of red gums mark the dry creek beds, clumps of olive green spinifex and salt bushes dot the vast stretches of red dirt, and the bald hills at the northern end of Flinders' mountains take on a nondescript grey colour as they recede to the horizon.

Today we're driving from Port Augusta to Marree and the view has been enchanting.

If you can't imagine it, think back to the last time you saw Gallipoli.

Remember the start of the movie, when Archie was still at home with his family, and he raced through the family property without shoes while a jackaroo galloped towards the homestead on his horse.

That sunburnt landscape is exactly what I'm looking out the right side of the APT bus.

Low scrub and dry creek beds, red dirt and stoic plants, and the western slopes of the peaks that make up the walls of Wilpena Pound filled my window for a couple of hundred kilometers.

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Trip #3 and #4

MY third and fourth trips of 2011 are now complete but, as I didn’t do any flying and didn’t need to show my passport, the statistics are limited to hotel stays.

Trip #3 – Victoria’s King Valley

Hotels – Lindenwarrah (Milawa), Casa Luna Gourmet Accommodation (Myarrhee).

Total number of hotels in 2011 – 10

Trip #4 – Victorian Goldfields

Hotels – Craig’s Royal Hotel (Ballarat), Fountain View Suites (Bendigo)

Total number of hotels in 2011 – 12

While I didn’t get any new stamps in the passport, or add any destinations to my country list, I did collect a whole lot of photographs which I have arranged into a couple of galleries...here are the links.

King Valley...

https://picasaweb.google.com/wordsillustrated/GoldfieldsLoResImages?feat=directlink

Goldfields...

https://picasaweb.google.com/wordsillustrated/KingValley?authkey=Gv1sRgCIO7r4G42O-SxAE&feat=directlink

My next trip will be another domestic one, to Outback South Australia on an APT tour, and I am off at the start of the new month.

Exploring the back road

I MUST have been to Bendigo and Ballarat a couple of dozen times in my life.

When I was playing netball and basketball for my town we dashed up to those rural cities a few times each year to take on the local teams, and I lived in Bendigo back in 1992 while completing my first year of university.

But every time I made the journey into central Victoria I travelled along the Calder or Western highways, and never made the journey between the two settlements through villages like Maldon, Castlemaine or Maryborough.

Until today, that is.

Today we drove from Ballarat to Bendigo, stopping for lunch in Castlemaine, enjoying an afternoon shopping stroll in Maldon, and breaking for morning tea in the hamlet of Newstead which turned out to be a real gem.

Newstead is just 15 minutes from Castlemaine, on the banks of the Loddon River, and there are two establishments that deserve a mention.

Dig @ Newstead is a cafe on one corner of the main drag which seems to be open from early in the morning and until late at night serving breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything in between.

The eatery is set inside an old building that was moved from nearby Hepburn Springs a few years back – it served as everything from a dance hall to gym during the years it was in Spa Country – and now it’s the place to get a great cup of coffee, a homemade cake or a yummy pizza.

Just across the road is The Red Store which is a classic 19^th century building full of the most delightful old treasures.

The emporium is set in the town’s original general store, which still has the original Baltic pine shelves and long counters, and today owner Elizabeth Bell attends auctions and visits old farms to collect the unique antique trinkets.

You will find stacks of old leather suitcases, lace tea tray clothes in antique shoe boxes, children’s toys, knives with bone handles, and heavy steel watering cans.

It’s not like me to linger in an antique store – I have my own old junk, I don’t need to add to that collection – but The Red Store is a charming spot and more like a chic home-wares store that just happens to sell things that are far from new.

Imagine this

I HAVE a vivid imagination, especially when I’m visiting places of historical significance.

When I was exploring Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna I pictured Maria Theresa’s brood playing in the palace’s long hallways, when I was standing on the patch of Vietnamese land that once accommodated the Khe Sanh camp I could see swarms of helicopters filling the sky, and when I was in Buenos Aires I imagined Eva Peron gliding along the Recoleta footpaths.

My imagination doesn’t just work in far-away lands, and it’s been known to kick into high gear even when I’m a stone’s throw from home.

I’m in Ballarat today, taking a trip through Victoria’s historic Goldfields, and when I was walking the rural city’s streets looking for shops and galleries to write about I could easily picture the characters of the gold rush.

So you can imagine my excitement when I discovered I would be staying at the very historic Craig’s Royal Hotel, and the thrill of actually checking in and opening the door to my grand suite on the top floor.

Craig’s Royal Hotel was built in 1853, just two years after the first nuggets were found in nearby Clunes and one year after prospectors starting arriving in Ballarat, and in 1855 the Eureka Stockade Royal Commission sat in one of the posh pub’s rooms.

The hotel has retained many of its bygone features, including a lazy lift that only works once those inside have closed two heavy doors, and the rooms are decorated with the same style of furniture that would have greeted 19^th-century guests.

And there have been some famous guests over the years.

Mark Twain stayed at the hotel in 1895 when he was in town to speak at the Mechanics’ Institute, Dame Nellie Melba sang from the Reading Room balcony in 1908, and Horatio Kitchener crashed there when in Australia establishing our military.

More recently Donald Bradman and Robert Menzies were guests, as were King George V and Queen Mary when they were simply the Duke and Duchess of York.

So, as I drifted off to sleep in my canopy bed, I pictured elegant ladies and handsome gentlemen gliding around the dance floor in the ballroom, scruffy miners checking in after striking it rich in the nearby diggings, and the notables who may have occupied that very same room in years gone by.

This valley is king

VICTORIA’S King Valley is a favourite with the tourists.

Melbourne holiday makers dash up the Hume Highway to Milawa and Oxley when they can string a couple of vacation days together to eat, drink and be merry in the land of wine and cheese.

But I have discovered there’s another King Valley hamlet that deserves a moment of consideration when planning a King Valley escape.

Whitfield, which is a 30-minute drive from the start of the Snow Road at Oxley, is a village with just a couple of hundred residents but a handful of vineyards and a lot of good wine.

Back in the old days the settlement was known as White Fields, with inspiration for the name coming from the tiny flowers that grew in the farmer’s paddocks, but somewhere in history a lazy bugger dropped a letter and merged the two words to come up with the modern title.

Tobacco was traditionally the money-making crop in this picturesque part of Victoria but, when the government started reducing quotas, the Italian migrants that settled in this region in the 20^th century had to find another way to make a buck.

The first and second-generation Australians looked to their Italian heritage and started growing grapes in the region that boasts a swag of favourable micro-climates in this one long valley.

First they planted chardonnay, riesling, cabernet and merlot but, as they became more established and their vinos attracted attention from wine lovers around Australia, they began nurturing the Italian varieties their parents and grandparents grew in the Old Country.

While sangiovese, barbera and pinot grigio are doing well, the King Valley is now considered to be prosecco country.

This white variety, which makes a delicious sparkling that’s fermented in tanks rather than the bottle like the more traditional champagne, is grown in the elevated vineyards that are surrounded by the eucalypts that have sprouted since the last bushfire blazed through in 2007.

Prosecco originally hails from a small region in northern Italy, in the foothills of the Dolomites not far from the island city of Venice, and the locals say it’s the sparking for everyday drinking while champagne is only for special occasions.

One of the reasons Whitfield is a nice place to visit is because everyone knows everyone – or should I say, everyone is related to everyone – and the locals are so friendly that visitors are made to feel very welcome.

During our visit we had lunch with several members of the Dal Zotto family and, for just a few hours, I felt like I was a member of a huge Italian family doing lots of eating, drinking, talking and laughing.

And, if you want to sample a drop of prosecco, this is the place to do it.

Dal Zotto was the first winery in Australia to plant the prosecco grapes, and make a sparkling wine from the sweet juice that comes with a good season, with the family’s patriarch drawing on his childhood experiences to make two delightful varieties.

Otto Dal Zotto was born and raised in the Italian village of Valdobbiadene, the ancestral home of prosecco, where his relatives made enough of the “fun sparkling” every season to fill their own cellars from the grapes that grew on the steep hills outside town.

``There was no flat land in Valdobbiadene, all the grapes were up in the hills and it was very hard to get tractors up there so everything was done by hand,’’ Otto explains.

``Prosecco dates back to the Roman Empire, the Italians have been perfecting it over the years, and we put our first vines in the ground in 1999.

``I came to Australia in 1968 and growing prosecco was a way for me to connect with the old world while in my new world.’’

Today Otto looks after the vines and his son Michael is carrying on the family tradition of making Dal Zotto wine.

UK photos

I HAVE arranged the photos I took during my two-week adventure in the UK into a collection of Picasa galleries...hit the links if you're interested.

London...
https://picasaweb.google.com/wordsillustrated/London?authkey=Gv1sRgCP_stLTk0tW3aQ&feat=directlink

Windsor, Bath and Tetbury...
https://picasaweb.google.com/wordsillustrated/WindsorBathAndTetbury?authkey=Gv1sRgCLP4v-663abOrwE&feat=directlink

Oxford and the Cotswolds...
https://picasaweb.google.com/wordsillustrated/OxfordAndTheCotswolds?authkey=Gv1sRgCNv5pYGdj-OmigE&feat=directlink

Scotland...
https://picasaweb.google.com/wordsillustrated/Scotland2011?authkey=Gv1sRgCLWb4KzG0L3CowE&feat=directlink

Trip #2

SO, here are the stats for my second trip of the year.

Flights – Four in three weeks

Kilometres flown – 34,628km...MEL to AUH 11,736km, AUH to LHR 5561km, LHR to AUH 5587km, AHU to MEL 11744

Total Kilometres flown in 2011 – 42,358km

Hotels – The Dorchester (London), Winsdor MacDonald Hotel (Windsor), Hilton Bath Spa (Bath), Randolf Hotel (Oxford), Western House Hotel (Ayr), Hotel Missoni (Edinburgh), Apex Waterloo Place (Edinburgh)
Total number of hotels in 2011 – Eight

New stamps in my passport – One, a stamp letting me into the UK

New countries – Scotland was a new country for me, which takes my list to 48 countries visited

At the moment there are three domestic trips in the work diary.

I will be visiting the King Valley and Goldfields in Victoria during March, and then venturing into Outback SA in early April.

But keep checking back, I'm getting my UK photos organised into galleries and will post the links when they're in some order.

Flying high

I LOVE watching the flight tracker map when I'm on long-haul journeys.

I admit part of that is a control issue, I find great comfort in knowing where I am and what's going on, but it's also a fascination with the world and the revelation that our planet is such a small place.

As the plane soars from horizon to horizon, leaving a white line across the sky like the ones I watch enviously when I'm on the ground, I see the names of places I know from the history books and travel pages.

Today, on my six-hour hop from London's Heathrow to the long strip of concrete in the middle of the sand that marks Abu Dhabi's desert airport, we flew a big arc from England to the UAE which took us over some notable locations.

We took off into the north an did a big right turn and then flew over the English Channel going feet dry -- that's US Navy talk for the moment one flies over the coast to be above land rather than water -- at a little place called The Hague.

As we flew over this Dutch address I thought about all the nasty pasties who have sat in the dock of the world's war crimes tribunal and wondered if there would ever be a day when there would no longer be a need for that particular institution.

We flew over Hannover in Germany and Krakow in Poland -- another spot that saw its share of war criminals -- before crossing the Black Sea coast south west of Odessa.

As the map cycled through, zooming in to give a more detailed picture of our location, I noticed other intriguing locations.

Warsaw and Moscow were off our left wing, Bucharest and Sofia were out to the right, and features with names like Porcupine Bank, Gloria Ridge, Josephine Seamount, Great Meteor Tableland were way behind us in the expanse of blue that marked the Atlantic Ocean.

Cities that once sat behind the iron curtain, places I only heard about when I was watching the Olympics and some good Soviet citizen won a gold medal, were out there to the north and east.

Kursk, Kiev, Minsk, Novgorod, Tula, Gdansk, cities I can only imagine by borrowing pictures from old editions of National Geographic which fill my head with images of soldiers turkey stepping through vast concrete parade grounds, bleak apartment buildings and centralized sports academies.

As we flew across the Black Sea Yalta was off to our left -- a settlement thathosted a significant meeting back during WW2 -- and places like Varna, Constanta, Samsun, Sochi, Batumi and Trabzon were dots on the shore. 

For a while after we left the Black Sea the clouds cleared far below and, instead of looking at a layer of cotton wool, I could see the snow-covered landscape of northern Turkey (right).

White covered everything, except the roads which looked like black ribbons laid on a piece of fabric, and I could see towns and villages because the asphalt grids stood out even from 10 kilometres up.

The creeks and rivers that started high in the mountains, and emptied into the lakes that filled the valleys, were the most intriguing feature and it looked like the same artist had poured a tub of ink over dense paper with the black liquid bleeding into the fibre.

The second leg of my long journey home, the 14-hour hop from Abu Dhabi to Tullamarine Airport on the outskirts of Melbourne, covered a lot of blue with the Airbus I was travelling in crossing the coast about an hour into the flight somewhere above Oman.

We flew parallel to the west coast of India -- Mumbai and Goa were cities that sat out to the east -- and we flew 700km from the Sri Lankan city of Colombo before crossing the Equator and aiming for Perth.

The names of more underwater features filled the flight-tracker map as we flew over the Indian Ocean -- the Carlsburg Ridge, Somali Basin, Chagos Trench, Nikitin Seamount, Ninetyeast Ridge, Chagos-Latccadive Plateau and Amirante Trench.

When it was about 11pm in London and 10am in Melbourne I looked out the window and could see a cluster of island far below, possibly a Maldivian atoll, with lights marking the outline of each piece of land.

I was thinking about sleeping, so had my eyes shut listening to my iPod, but when I opened my eyes the Southern Cross was framed by the window with that bottom star pointing at my house in Sunbury.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Going the distance

TODAY my journey was better than the destination.

I was travelling from Edinburgh to London, with my destination an airport hotel at Heathrow conveniently placed for my early departure tomorrow morning, and it was the train ride south from Scotland that was the highlight.

When I woke up in Edinburgh big flakes of snow were falling from the sky, but by the time I emerged from my hotel and made my way to the station the grey was gone and the sky was blue.

I found a window seat on the left side of the train, retrieved my iPod from the depths of my bag, and settled in to spend the five-hour journey gazing out the window at the ever-changing view.

The first hour of the trip, from Edinburgh to Newcastle, we hugged the Scottish coast and I could look across the wind-swept fields that lined the cliffs to the navy water of the North Sea as we raced between seaside villages.

The train stopped in Newcastle, after creeping by a handsome bridge that looked suspiciously like the famous one that spans Sydney Harbour, and when we left the station we passed rows of terrace houses like the ones you see in the movies.

It looked like some early town planner tipped a bucket of water down the side of the hill above Newcastle, and put the streets and lanes where the rivulets of water formed and built the uniform rows of workers cottages on those narrow roads.

The next part of the journey, another hour-long stretch from Newcastle to York, I was presented with a picture of bucolic bliss as green fields stretched towards the horizon with little clusters of red-roofed houses and stone church steeples marking small farming villages.

Moss covered gates opened to fields with green shoots pushing through the black soil, farmers on horseback cantered around their fields, and bands of children played in the yards of the small rural schools.

As we raced south jets painted white lines across the blue, marking their paths towards the pole on their journeys to North America, and train spotters armed with notebooks and cameras stood on station platforms as we cruised through.

York and Doncaster were next, we stopped at one settlement and crawled through the other, and the towns started coming closer together and spreading out further.

But there were still large plots of farmland where the paddocks, which accommodated either crops or flocks of black-faced sheep, were separated by dry-stone walls of rows of gaunt hedges.

Before too long we were in London, racing past block of low flats and then towers of high-rise apartments as suburbs gave way to inner-city neighbourhoods and I knew my journey was almost over when we passed that stadium that is home to the Arsenal Gunners.

That wasn't the end of my day of travelling, and I had to catch two more trains and an airport bus to get to my bland hotel, but I won't remember the four stops I rode on the Tube when I think back to the train journey I did on my last day in the UK.