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Heavy Plant

Walk past a "Heavy Plant" warning and wonder vaguely if the trees thought it was for them; if whoever put it up had enough imag...

2007-01-11

Wot I dun on my holidayz

Dredging

Sand dredging off Lakes Entrance

It was a very un-australian Christmas Day in Queenscliff where we spent it. It only reached 14 Celsius all day and there was rain and hail. Queenscliff is just south of Melbourne which has a reputation for the least predictable weather outside of New Zealand.

On the drive down we took a quick detour to Canberra to meet the Cheetahs at the nearby zoo. They actually let you in the cage with them. They have one hell of a purr and genuinely appear to like human attention. More pictures when I've dragged them off Em's camera.

We drove back along the coast after a quick stop in Melbourne to watch England lose the ashes and a detour via the Yarra Valley wine region. I like wine. I like drinking it when someone else is driving me between vinyards. Unfortunately this is the most expensive way to do this as you end up buying far too much of it. We were relatively restrained and bought no more than three bottles at each place.

New year was spent at a guesthouse/hotel just North of Wilsons Promentory on Australia's South Eastern corner. The isthmus is a huge national park and a designated wilderness for a large part of that. It is also beautiful, but there are snakes, bad snakes.

The drive up the coast was also stunningly beautiful despite the bushfires. We stopped at a couple of places worthy of note. Raymond Island has a huge Koala population for the size of the place, we counted 19 in an area about half the size of a football pitch. You can get really close to them and remarkeably they were sitting up and paying attention. Koalas don't normally do anything at all.

Montague Island is another national park reserve and a place of great significance to the local aboriginal people. A lighthouse was built on it 125 yrs ago from granite blasted from the Island itself. The boat ride out was fairly interesting, it was not a calm day.

I'm not sure I'm ready for a new year. I wasn't quite finished with 2006 and now it's gone.

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