Today's posting will be brief since it has to be made on a pay internet kiosk in a funky Canberra hotel. Jayne, Fred, Ronald and I have journeyed into the interior of New South Wales and Victoria by taking a road trip to Beechworth. We started out on Monday going southwest along the National Highway, crossing the Great Dividing Range and finally getting an inkling of just how big this country is. The country started to get more and more dry, but there were still trees scattered about on the hillsides just about everywhere we went. In this regard I cannot say the countryside looked like eastern Montana. There the hills would be bare, but the trees gathered along the stretches of the creeks and washes.
Beechworth is an old gold rush mining town that still has many of its 1870s vintage buildings, including the Tanswell Hotel where we stayed the night. It also has lots of sites associated with Ned Kelly, the famous outlaw bushranger, including a pretty impressive museum display. We spent the night in Beechworth and then came here to the capital state of the country, Canberra.
We looked in vain for wildlife all during the more than 500 miles we drove, and it was not until after we checked into this motel in the suburbs of the city that we finally had success. Next to this motel is an abandoned historical theme park (history is a subject of diminishing interest in this culture, too) and we finally saw kangaroos as day slowly faded into night. We were able to approach them fairly closely before they went bounding off into the woods beyond. They behave like deer in the outskirts of Bozeman, coming in to graze in the cool of the evening and to take a few jumps in front of cars at night. We also saw Australian possums in the bushes right outside our hotel window. Our inkeeper fed them some fruit. Today we return to Manly and see how the boys are doing.
No comments:
Post a Comment