Jannis & Martine

Now something about the Oz food, animals, people and politics…

The last day in Bendigo (the town we did the gold mine tour Martine wrote about) ended with a not so good experience with Australian food. We had some pasta and pizza which was pretty expensive and real bad. This differed from my previous food experiences in Ballarat and most of the other gold mining towns, but I think the Bendigo food was bad, since:

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  1. it was Italian food prepared by non Italian people; this seems to happen a lot over here, resulting in a strange blend of English style prepared English pastas,

  2. the big ‘Clogs’ restaurant we ate at, is owned by a Dutchie who probably just used lots of cheap ingredients, to earn as much money as he could.

After the Bendigo food experience we tried an Italian type of restaurant one more time in the Castlemain town where we staid in a cabin for a couple of days. There we had a slightly less bad experience with English style cooked pasta, but after eating this we  immediatly left Castlemain for a visit to the Grapians mountains, and probably will now only eat self made food or the very (very) tasty Azian food.

On the way to the Grampains we found a cheap hotel in the tiny village of Elmhurst where we had a pretty long discussion with the hotels’ owner about the cause of Global Warming and other stuff. The hotel owner didn’t believe in any connection between Global Warming and the current way of living. I have learned a lot from him, since I got a pretty good insight into the kind of people that brought the anti Kyoto Howard government to power.

We also had a good talk with a sheep farmer (who was much more laid back and logical) who explained something about the type of sheep farms they have over here, together with lots of snakes and posoineous spiders. He has some 1200 sheep, 300 bulls and some snakes on 1600 acres of pretty dried out land. The sheep don’t get bitten much by snakes, since a snake can sit for a week in a small spot waiting for prey, and will only move to flee if he feels the vibrations of a big animal or human coming his way. Dogs do get bitten very often, since they tend to run very fast and a snake has no time to move out of the way.

The next day we moved out to Halls Gap which is a cluster of campsides and hostels in the middle of the Grampians area.

Here we stayed in a cabin surrounded by hundreds of kangeroos, have done some great walks into the mountains and visited the Brambuk Aboriginal centre, since the Aboriginal people have lived in the Grampains for more than 40.000 years. 

In the next post we will show some great pictures of our mountain walks, but the for me the visit to the Aboriginal centre was at least as interesting. There the story was told about an almost perfect society of 1 million people living in full balance with environment around them, and that for some 100.000 years, until they where wiped away less than 150 years ago by a bunch European invaders….

This gets you thinking about Global Warming and things like the water shortage over here…

Jannis.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 1st, 2008 at 11:11 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.