What people tell you about the Australian climate is that it’s very very hot. What they don’t tell you is that in Winter it can get really quite cold and miserable, especially in the southeast. We escaped Sydney (I’ll come back and finish Tassie at a later date) just as the weather was closing in towards the end of May, and headed out into rural Victoria, to stay with Saska’s Godmother. We arrived into Wangaratta after an 8.5 hour train journey to glorious sunshine, but this was to be about the last time I would wear shorts until we headed up north.
We were staying at an isolated farmhouse set in the wonderful countryside of the Rutherglen wine region, and made the most of it, going for frequent bushwalks, and taking advantage of being able to use a car to explore sights further afield, such as the wonderful Autumn colours in Beechworth and Bright, and the snow-capped mountains of the Alpine National Park.
Being in such a rural area there was also a lot of wildlife to be spotted, with regular kangaroo sightings and a vast array of parrot species, including the comically quiffed Gang-gang cockatoos we saw in Beechworth, and the yellow form of the crimson rosella (hard to get your head around that one) found only in the Murray basin.
We greatly enjoyed our time in Victoria, but we were hoping to gain some employment so that we could top up our bank accounts, and although we managed to work on the weekend of Rutherglen’s Winery Walkabout (think pub-crawl but with wineries) anything more permanent was harder to come by. With the exceptionally cold weather shown by the earliest opening to a ski season for some time (yes, you can ski in Australia!), and a lack of work opportunities, we eventually decided we’d just get back to travelling and enjoying ourselves, hoping we’d find a better opportunity to earn money at a later date. So off we went to Melbourne to continue the adventure!
Nature's Mark 