Easter in Maleny

For me, the Easter long-weekend is all about visiting my parents at their home in Maleny. For four days I wander around town and take lazy walks, read and snooze in comfy armchairs and of course, eat and drink gloriously. So this year, Easter was the perfect opportunity to introduce my British guest to a part of Australia I dearly love.

We headed up early on Friday morning, just skipping the traffic jams. First up, after the necessary morning tea/coffee and cake, was the tour of the garden. My parents have the standard large Maleny garden and every time I visit I need to be updated on all the changes; trees have come down, shrubs gone up, new veggies have been planted and new animals have taken up residence. The big new addition this time was a native bee hive, installed to help the overall health of the garden and encourage the re-generation of native bee populations in the area.The bees are very small and sting-less so you can get up close and watch as they come and go.

The hive on a stake in the veggie patch.

Native bees flying in and out, feeding the hive.

On top of these native additions, my mother is slowly building up a private art collection in the garden. There are old school-pottery projects, wood-carved seats and Portuguese roosters hidden around corners. The newest installations were her birthday and christmas gifts; a rat with attitude and a Kiwi.

The mushroom garden.

Lemons, lemons, lemons. Now where is the gin?

Friday afternoon we took a trip to Gardner's Falls. Once it was the waterhole only locals knew about, now it is on the list of spots to visit for day trippers. On this bright sunny afternoon it was packed out with visitors. No photos, because I feel weird taking snaps of strangers in their togs. Also, I could not have taken a single photo without including a bad tattoo. I have a very low opinion of the standard of tattoos in Australia. Too many, too poorly thought out, too brightly coloured and too tacky. Sitting in the stream of the falls, watching the parade of teenagers and parents pass by, it was a pretty horrifying show. Better as few people as possible see the giant purple owl stretched across some pasty guy's sunken chest or Marilyn's face wreathed in skulls.

Taken on an afternoon walk past farmland and the Maleny Dairy.

When we woke on Saturday it had rained all night and didn't look like stopping. Nevertheless, in the drizzle and mist we set off to do the Mary Cairncross rainforest walk in the hope of spotting some Pademelons before the tourist hoards arrived. We were not disappointed and saw eight of these charming little marsupials, some of them right up close. Read about our other wildlife encounters here.

Red-legged Pademelons.

Walking through the rainforest at first light, with the chilly mist and drizzle of rain and no one else near was a little magical and made dragging ourselves out of bed worth it.

We were lucky to come home to a full continental breakfast with steaming mugs of tea and coffee, which helped the morning chill. This almost the least impressive meal of the weekend, but the only one I could sneak a photograph of. The next morning was brioche french toast with freshly stewed plum and vanilla yoghurt, but I was too busy scoffing that to pause for photography.

An introduction to Australian wildlife

One of the best things about getting even a little bit 'rural' in Australia are the opportunities to see native wildlife. Lush Maleny is a wonderful place to see an array of native species and to introduce a visitor to our squawking, slithering and hopping native fauna. Starting with those that inhabit back gardens.

My parents are great bird lovers and have taken care to put up bird boxes and native flowering plants to attract birds to their garden. They have a regular parade of King Parrots, doves, Sulphur-crested and Black Cockatoos, various lorikeet species and many others flying around the trees and shrubs.

The weekend started out charmingly enough with a Tawny Frogmouth. This one had taken up daytime residence on a post right outside my parents front door. He'd been there for three days when we arrived for the weekend and did not move except for when he/she went hunting at night.

Newly resident Tawny, doing its tree-branch impression.

Equally charming are the Butcherbirds my mum feeds from the balcony every morning. My mum has always had a soft spot for Butchies. They kill garden pests, have beautiful songs and are real little characters when you get to know them. She feeds them small quantities of raw mince. Just enough to keep them coming, not enough to substitute their normal diet. Now a regular team of four to five birds come most mornings. One in particular only has one eye, so he gets some special treatment. As long as you don't scare them, they will pick the mince off your fingers.

Feeding one-eye.

As well as the bird boxes and sugar-glider boxes (there is a difference), my parents have recently had a native bee box installed. There seems to be a bit of a fad at the moment for native bee boxes. Several restaurants in Brisbane have installed them on their rooves and there is such a demand for them that the Bee Man can't keep up. Native bees are not kept for honey, they produce at an extremely slow rate, but for the health benefits to the gardens they inhabit and busily pollinate.

The hive, staked into the veggie patch, is on the outside just a polystyrene box. Watch it for a few minutes though and you see the tiny sting-less bees shuffling in and out with packets of pollen.

The tiny native bees flying in and out.

One of the main tourist attractions in Maleny is the Mary Cairncross Rainforest Walk. This walk, in a lush section of forest near Maleny town, is an easy 45 minute walk, accessible by wheel chair and has a cafe and ranger park for the hundreds of people who walk through it every weekend.

If you're a local, however, you know that the best time of day to go is at first light, before the birds and Pademelons are disturbed by the racket of people and hide away from sight. On Saturday morning, in the drizzling rain and mist, we got up at 7am and were in the park when it opened. We were the first and only people who were crazy enough to get up on a cold wet morning but it was worth it when we saw this guy just 2 metres away, lazily eating on the path in front of us.

 

Red Legged Pademelons. Comfortable around people but not the noise they make. 

He was the first of 8 Pademelons we had the good fortune to see that morning, along with a host of small fluttering native birds.

A Pademelon spying on us through the undergrowth.

A Bush Turkey, one of the least impressive native animals, but also one of the few willing to stay still for a photo.

However, perhaps the highlight of the trip, in terms of Australian animal experiences was on another walk through the dry rainforest near Baroon Pocket Dam. While pausing on a rock in a stream to take a photo, my visitor came toe to toe with a snake. Dark grey back, bright yellow belly. I thought at first it was a Yellow-bellied Black Snake and we both had minor heart palpitations at how close the experience was, but on returning home and consulting the guidebook, we decided it was probably a common tree snake.

The snake. Not a great photo but it wasn't up for posing.

I won't tell you the whole story, I don't want to spoil it for my guest for whom this is one hell of a story to tell everyone back home in England. The time he came This Close to a Potentially Poisonous Snake. Can't take that away from him.

Thus concludes an introduction to Australian wildlife. Some of it might kill you, most of it won't.

Next stop: the crocs at Australia Zoo!

A wet and windy day of celebration

In a brilliant flash of fore-thought, some of my friends booked an apartment up in Caloundra for the Australia Day long weekend and invited all comers to drive up and enjoy sun, surf, BBQ and beer. It would be a glorious day that would celebrate what we we love about Australia.
 

However, as we all know, the day was cold, gloomy, rain-lashed and flood-ridden. It was awful. This particularly irritated me as I and my housemate were playing host to British guest who was celebrating his first Australia Day and I wanted it to be glorious and scream AUSTRALIA. Not be borderline Scarborough.

Nevertheless, we headed up the coast in the lashing rain and proceeded to have a pretty classic Australia Day. The only thing that was missing was the sunshine.

My friend Kiki (who just launched a new blog) decorating the Pavlova nice and early, before too much beer was consumed.

Kitsch Australiana: green and gold macarons, enormous glasses and decorative flags.

Applying temporary tattoos. Because on some days, you can leave the class behind.

A weekend on North Stradbroke Island

I have a soft spot for North Stradbroke Island. All through Primary School, it was where we went for our family beach holidays and I have wonderful memories of sandy houses and quiet streets, mornings and afternoons in the surf and packets of pringles popped on the beach at sunset. Mmmm...pringles.

So when Jane offered me a long weekend at Straddie I leapt at the chance.We caught the ferry over on a Wednesday afternoon, after I had been at work for a whole three days. We were in a house on Prosperity Street at Point Lookout, right next door to about three houses I had stayed in when I was younger. Point Lookout had not changes one iota from my memories of it. The shops, the houses, everything at least seemed identical.

Prosperity Street is easy walking distance to both Deadmans Beach and Cylinder Beach. Cylinder Beach is one of the most popular beaches at Point Lookout, usually crowded out with families and tourists. Only locals and holiday makers in the know go around the rocks to Deadmans. Less family friendly but not crowded and all around a more enjoyable place to spend a few hours.

Early morning on Deadmans Beach.

 Settling in for a swim and a bit of beach reading.

A tiny piece of bluebottle stinger washed on to my hand. I hadn't been stung for years and I can put it off again for another decade at least. It looked redder in real life than in this photo.

This old gent and his dog were having a great time. He was fully clothed complete with hard working boots and thick socks. You could have put him on a sheep station and he would not have looked out of place.

It's been a long week

So why aren't I here?

A 17th-century Monastery Turned Spa on the Amalfi Coast.

Image courtesy of Vogue.com tumblr.

Diary of a travel-a-holic

We've had quite the run of long weekends recently, sadly now come to an end...sniff sniff. Anyway, one of the many benefits of this run of extra relax time is that I have been able to finally finish off my Vietnam holiday diaries. This is a personal project I was definitely going to finish by the end of 2011, then definitely by Easter. So 2 weeks after Easter isn't that bad.

I'm a bit of a diarist. I try to keep one – a proper, written, what I did and how I felt diary – every day but it is a lot more work than you might think. On holidays though, I'm much better at it. There is that gap in time pretty much every day when you've got back to your apartment / room after a long day out and you're having a rest before heading out again for food or drink of whatever it is you're getting up to, that is just perfect for writing about the day. So much happens on the typical holiday day and I find that you forget almost all of it within a few months. If you have a diary though, written on the day to record all those conversations and sights and meals and anecdotes, you have a physical memory repository you can pull off the shelf at any time and remind yourself of an amazing day.

 

This is actually a habit I picked up from my Dad who keeps an amazing record of every holiday he takes, and one of my favourite things to do used to be to pick a family diary off the shelves and read al about what we did when I was 5 in Spain or the Christmas in Germany when I was 12. It helps me to recall even the vaguest of memories.

So, I finally finished my Vietnam diary. Held up by the fact that 2 days into our three week trip my little iPaq died and I had to take notes or hand-write the whole thing, then translate to computer doc etc. I printed all my photos, I bought a couple of scrap books and voila! Here is the final result:

The two finished diaries. Not for public consumption.

I would be fibbing if I didn't say I wasn't a little proud of myself. It costs a lot of time and a bit of money to make even just these two (big) books. But then in 20 years time they will still be sitting on my bookshelves, where ever I happen to be, and I can pull them down and flick through them and remember our walk through the valley near Sa Pa and the amazing street food in Ha Noi as if it was yesterday. That makes it worth every moment and every cent.

12 diaries and a lot of memories.

Does anyone else keep a diary? Even just for holidays?

The May Day long weekend

I love long weekends. So much better than ordinary ones because there is extra time to do all the things you want to do: one day for having fun, one day to relax and one day to catch up on life's jobs.

This long weekend, however, I had plans to do very little to make up for a recent hectic run of fabulous weekends. For instance, Saturday, all I have to show for Saturday was this photo of a cake I made. It doesn't look very exciting but it's a German recipe by ex-boss gave me, it was simple and it's delicious. As usual I got too impatient to eat it to bother with icing.

On Sunday Chuck and I headed out to Cleveland to enjoy the sunshine on Moreton Bay. There were markets on, a mix of farmers and craft and it was an absolutely perfect day to be by the sea.

 At the street markets.

 

 Looking out over Moreton Bay to Stradbroke.

Brunch under the lighthouse. 

After Cleveland we headed a little way north to the mouth of the Brisbane River to visit Fort Lytton. I had never heard of Fort Lytton until a couple of weeks ago when Chuck mentioned it.

Fort Lytton is a small collection of installations, guns and museums that looks out over the mouth of the river towards the airport. Built in 1881, during WWI and WWII it was a key defensive base for both sea and air attacks on Brisbane, a major training facility and played a significant part in the South Pacific Campaigns as a signal relay station.

The site is more extensive then you might imagine and you are free to walk around the museums and guns as much as you wish. Only open on Sundays, it is looked after by ex-military men who greet you, take you on tours around the site and are very happy to chat about the Fort and its role in Queensland's military history. You can bring a picnic and fire up one of the BBQs. Even if you're not into military history, it's a lovely spot to spend a beautiful Queensland Sunday.

Even as far back as the 1890s Brisbane residents would travel to Lytton to see the spectacular military parades and ceremonies performed for the public. Even today, on special occasions Fort Lytton puts on its ceremonial garb and the public are invited to watch re-enactments, including the firing of the large 64-pounder guns out into the mouth of the Brisbane River. On the upcoming Queen's Jubilee long weekend, on both Saturday and Sunday there will be re-enactments of military battles, starting with the Romans and culminating in the firing of the guns. We were told it's a great family day out.

 The 'disappearing gun'. The recoil would make it disappear into it's undercover shelter.

 

 Navigation for the disappearing gun.

Sunday night was of course the start of MasterChef 2012, a near sacred night in our house. I'm almost more excited that I one of my favourite blogs, It Lacks Acidity, is now up and running again, with it's daily dose of MasterChef sarcasm and vitriol.

Revelling at the Margaret River Wine Festival 2012

This weekend just past I disappeared for a long weekend. A friend of mine who I met on international travel adventures invited me over for the Margaret River Wine Festival. He informed me it would be the fourth and final time he ever went, so with that as mu inventive, I impulse purchase airline tickets and got on a red-eye flight out of Brisbane for my first ever trip to W.A.

I can give no comment on Perth except to say that it is probably a really lovely city. I landed midnight on Thursday and was whisked away 7:30am Friday before I even finished my coffee to collect a few more festival buddies for the drive down the coast.

The Margaret River region, as opposed to the Margaret River township all of itself, is a 2.5 – 3 hour drive south of Perth. Having never been to W.A. and not really thought about it, I was surprised at how dry the land looked. Which isn't to say it wasn't beautiful; sparse red-earthed farm country dotted with beautiful old eucalyptus.

Deep Woods Vineyards.

The main festival was on Saturday, so on Friday our host-with-the-most had decided on a day of cellar door visits (six in total) followed by lunch at his favourite winery in the region – Hay Shed Hill. As you can probably tell from the photos, it was a glorious afternoon.

At Hay Shed Hill Winery.

The lunchtime crew, come from all over the country to enjoy the wine.

Venison chorizo pizza and Sangiovese.

The vines and scenes at Hay Shed Hill.

Our afternoon of deliciousness was finished off with a trip to The Pour House (haha) in Dunsborough, just around the corner from our rented beach house, and a sampling of some of the wines we'd all purchased that day.

All in all there were 10 of us, most of whom had never met but we had a friend of a friend. What we did have in common was that with the exception of our hosts, we had all flown across the country to attend this festival. Brisbane, Sydney and Canberra were represented. Later in the afternoon we were joined by three new friends, a couple of guys from Bunbury and a new friend from Adelaide. So our full festival team numbered 13.

Walking along the Dunsborough foreshore on Saturday morning.

Saturday was the official FESTIVAL DAY! Yes, we were so excited it warrants CAPS. The festival itself had been re-located from Margaret River to a winery close to the centre of Dunsborough – Palmers Winery. Our full team caught the shuttle bus in from town and arrived at the dot of 11:03, three minutes after open time.

There were some 38 vineyards with over 300 wines to taste, plus an assortment of art sellers, food stalls and of course, live jazzy music. I'll gloss over the day itself, because between 11 and 5:30 when I got back on the bus I made new friends, I learned to love my 24-hour-old friends and I drank a lot of wine. Before lunchtime was devoted to whites, then careful lining of the stomach and then the reds; my luscious, luscious favourites – the reds. Margaret River is known for it's Sauvignon Blanc Semillions and Chardonnays, neither of which I particularly enjoy, and its Cabernet doubles – Sauvignon, Merlot, Shiraz – which I cannot get enough of.

Inside the main tent at the start of the day.

I was very strong and refrained from purchasing any wine, having reached my carry-on luggage limit the day before. Some of my friends were not so sensible and the next morning there was some confusion as we tried to figure out who had bought that bottle and why on earth had someone bought the $75 Cabernet Shiraz – good as it was, why?!

With friends old and new.

Sometime around 2:20 while I was sunning myself with a new friend discussing Estonia, our host ran past yelling “4 minute warning, this is your 4 minute warning!” 4 minute warning for The Rose Challenge. The Rose Challenge is apparently a tradition stretching back years. One does the white circuit, then the red – so as not to ruin the palate and then when we're all nice and toasty, you get on to the rose. The only rule is that the sellers cannot know that you are doing The Rose Challenge and the winner ... is never quite decided, really. My Rose buddy Tim and I definitely won though. We even got someone to mix a new Rose for us. Beat that! We did however get sidetracked by a nice looking 2004 Cab Sav that we hadn't tried yet.

The full team of 13.

I had expected the Festival to be a big event, drawing a bit of a tourist, but it was mostly locals who were stunned to hear we'd come so far. If you ever had the chance to go along I would leap at it. It is a beautiful part of the country and there is so much to see and do. The Festival is just a great excuse to visit.

Some fellow festival-goers.

Sunday was quiet as we finished off our touring with a short visit to the beautiful Bunker Bay and famous Busselton Jetty.

It sounds like a long way to go just for a long weekend, and it was - it was also worth every flight-delayed minute. Good friends and good wine are all you need to have a spectacular time.

Bunker Bay.

The famous Busselton Jetty.