We spent a few days in the Grampians at the beginning of December. We camped at Smiths Mill campground for three nights and it was very relaxing.
We stopped at Cafe Merkama in Ballarat on the way there for lunch. It was great! Love a dairy free meal especially.
Spot Scott.
Mackenzie Falls.. now with less dead bodies. They’ve blocked it off quite a bit now so you can’t even really touch the water.
I took quite a few long exposure pictures with my ND filter but when I got home and looked at them on my computer I found out that they had really strong reflections from the camera lens. Whoops.
New Holland Honeyeater?Eastern Spinebill.Scarlet Robin.
We saw lots of birds. Scott spotted several Scarlet Robins, which we had never seen before. And we saw a lot of types of honeyeaters. I’ve got a bunch of new pictures to add to my bird album on Facebook.
Scott must read really boring books because he falls asleep 5 minutes after he starts reading. Every time.
I entertained myself with a $5 Kmart embroidery kit.
We played games of course. It was not windy at the camp site so we could even play Wingspan Asia!
There was a campground emu. At first we thought it was cool seeing an emu so close, but he turned out to be a bit of a pest. Continuously circling the area looking for snacks.
One time he snuck up behind me and I didn’t notice until his head was right beside my head. Scared me!
The emu also did several big poos right in the middle of our site.
We went to the Balconies lookout at sunset. I thought it would be busy but we were the only ones there! Very beautiful.
Need to learn how to take better sunset pictures…
We did a fun hike up Hollow Mountain. It’s only just over 1km long but it goes straight up! But it’s way more fun than like the 1000 Steps or something because you have to scramble up rocks and do some light bouldering. Some parts felt scary! But I think it’s now in my top 5 favourite hikes (don’t ask me what the other 4 are).
Then it rained the whole last evening, even though the weather report said 0% chance of rain. I failed as a Girl Guide and didn’t make a deadman in the tent that morning and my pillow got wet. Bah. Luckily it was dry out while we packed up the next morning though.
Normally I end up planning the majority of our holidays. But, for the first time ever, Scott planned this whole trip himself and I just got to show up! It was a treat!
We flew to Sydney, picked up a rental car, and drove into the Southern Highlands via Wollongong.
Fan-tailed Cuckoo.Pied Currawong.
We went for a walk in Barren Grounds NP, which was supposed to have lots of cool birds, but we didn’t see that many. Just the usual suspects. Although I’d never actually ID’d a Fan-tailed Cuckoo before so I guess that’s a new bird to me. It got cloudy and misty as we were leaving.
We had a delicious dinner at Leila’s at the Grand in Bowral. The skewers, dips, bread were all fantastic.
The next day we went to a couple waterfalls. The first was Fitzroy Falls. This is what happens when you bring your telephoto lens to a very big waterfall… you can’t even fit the whole thing into the picture. Whoops.
Then we went to Carrington Falls. Again, brought the wrong lens with me.
Caught in the act.
We had very nice pies for lunch at Robertson Pie Shop.
A quick photo stop atThe Big Potato.
And then we drove back to Sydney to see the Lonard’s! It was Michael’s 40th birthday. He had a party at the pub where we could watch Australia play in the World Cup.
The last morning we went to watch Ava play in her touch rugby Grand Final. It was very cute. She is 7.
Our friend really likes this fried chicken place so we stopped in and ordered two pieces of chicken and pickles. It actually lived up to the hype! Would recommend.
It was jacaranda season so we went to McDougall St to take some pics. Was very pretty and very busy!! They have to close the street at this time of year because there are too many idiots like us standing in the middle of the road taking pictures.
After that we went to Rae’s new house to see her family, but took no pictures. It was really nice to see her. I wish we lived in the same place because I think we would be really close friends.
And then we went back to the airport and flew home! All in all a successful and fun trip. Good planning Scott.
OK well in October I took plenty of pictures! Long post ahead!
We have been playing lots of pickleball again. I even got an upgraded paddle! We have been playing with the Bayside Pickleball Club and have been improving every week.
Another one of Scott’s (belated) #SMAJ activities was dinner at Serai in the city. It’s a fancy Filipino restaurant with a lot of stuff cooked over wood fire. It was all lovely if you didn’t think about the price. We had coral trout, broccolini, calamari, and hashbrowns with peanut sauce. The highlight for me was the dairy free dessert called Taho. It is made with soy ice cream, brown sugar syrup and tapioca pearls. The girl told us to stir it all up. Delicious!
Couple of lil’ pots.
Our friends Jen and Robert ran a private pottery workshop for a small group of friends. It was epic. We started with making some pinch pots, then did a bit of wheel throwing, and then did some large pieces where we painted coloured clay onto newspaper and then transferred it onto the slabs of clay which we layed over big molds. We got to pick what glaze we would like them to put on each piece and they are going to finish them all up for us. I can’t wait to see the results! It was a lovely afternoon.
We stopped in Box Hill on the way home for dinner. We randomly picked this Uyghur restaurant called Dolan On Silk Road because it seemed to be quite busy, and it turned out to be great! We ordered this massive lamb and bread platter which had a nice flavour and lots of vegetables and sauce. Fun to try a new cuisine. Everything the people around us were eating looked great too.
My work did a Medical Imaging Bake Off and it was pretty much the best day ever. I made a lemon blueberry yogurt cake that was decent but not prize-worthy. It was so moistly that the icing sugar I sprinkled on top got absorbed almost immediately.
I tried nearly everything. Even though we took tiny slivers of each thing it still put everyone into a sugar coma.
I went birdwatching with a bunch of oldies in Corinella. It was a weekday outing so I think the age group was extra skewed towards… retired. I didn’t get any good pictures but we did see lots of birds. The highlight for me was the Crested Shriketit, as I had never see one before and they’re pretty cool looking. It was nice to get out on a particularly lovely day.
I thought the birdwatching was going to finish at 12pm like it said on the website so I didn’t bring a packed lunch. Ohhhh I was so jealous of everyone’s delicious looking sandwiches when they stopped for a picnic lunch before continuing on to site number two and three!! Instead I bailed after site two and got Maccas on the way home. This is what a burger looks like if you ask for +2 pickles. Pickle overload!!
I did a quick volunteer session on the computer at the tiny girls session of Victorian Senior Championships. Always inspiring. It rained a lot.
Speaking of rain. Snails absolutely decimated our garden. We pretty much had to start everything again after snails ate all of our seedlings (two coriander, four cucumber, three eggplant…) The snails ate $15 of marigold flowers in one night.
After that we ordered the green garden box tent and these plastic cones which have been helping. Mesh food covers also help. And every night after dark we go out and stomp snails. In one week we killed NINE HUNDRED SNAILS. Our backyard isn’t even that big!!! They were literally everywhere, all over the sides of the garden boxes, the ground, the side of the house, the fence. It’s like the grossest Easter egg hunt ever. If you want to see a disgusting picture of mass amounts of gross snails, click here.
We are possibly winning though, because this week there have only been a few every night. We’re hoping the constant rain has ended and we’ll be able to uncover stuff soon, because we also need to let the bees in for pollination.
Gardening is hard. I can’t believe the first year we basically just chucked everything in and did almost no maintenance and everything grew very well.
Expectation.
Reality.
I got quite a bit of hair cut off. It’s a bit crazy. But I re-remembered that it actually only takes like 2 minutes to blow dry my hair when it’s this short so I’ve got it semi under control again.
Doreen have me a couple snapper which I attempted to filet with my fish knife from last Christmas. I think i did ok considering they were quite small! I also learned how to gut the fish this time too.
I went to watch Scott play hockey before going to a Diwali Halloween party. Diwaloween.
I tried candy corn for the first time and I thought it was fine? I don’t get the hate. The party had a lot of delicious food.
Rosemarie mailed me some clothing and some cascatelli!!! She is the best! We had it with a sausage pasta and it really did have great forkability, sauceability and toothsinkability! If I lived in USA I would use it as my go-to pasta for sure.
A beautifully golden tourtiere.
True love is Scott making me a tiny container of gravy to go with my lunch tourtiere when he hates the stuff.
Homemade kimbap. Yum!!Lactose free ice cream with chocolate coated pretzels and a fudge ripple. I just used (expensive) lactose free cream and milk to make it.
Korean gochujang bbq short ribs. They took 4 hours in the oven!! Worth it, this was delicious. Can’t link the recipe because it’s from Nagi’s new cookbook.
Scott says I should have just stopped here.
I finished my sweater!!! It’s super warm and cozy. I just finished blocking it so I’ll take better pictures next time I’m home during the day. The forecast for this week is 25-29°C… so might not get much use out of it any time soon.
Unpictured stuff! This is the post that never ends!
I risked doing three different activities on an on call day: an online CPD seminar mostly about brain PET, afternoon weightlifting training, and post-training pizza with weightlifting pals. Thankfully I didn’t get called in and got to do everything!
That same day Scott went down to Tarwin for his cousin’s wife’s birthday bash. I enjoyed my alone-y evening.
The beach at the campsite. So peaceful. Everyone says Cape Tribulation is where the rainforest meets the ocean. You can’t swim there though, too many dangerous things in the water.
At the end of the beach there is a short trail that leads to this stunning creek. I had heard there was a four meter croc that lives in the creek but didn’t know how hard it would be to see.
Turns out NOT HARD AT ALL. I walked about another 50m down the path around that bend and saw this big boy lying on the other side of the creek!
I’m glad he was on the other side. That was my first crocodile sighting on my own ever.
Accurate signage.
I walked the last boardwalk that I hadn’t gone on yet. Still no cassowary.
I did an exotic fruit tasting. We got to try:
Bread fruit – Roasted like chips. Very potato-y. Apparently a very sustainable food.
Soursop – Fruit salad flavour, cotton wool texture.
Yellow mangosteen – Extremely tangy like sour candy. Yum.
Ice cream bean – Soft fluffy mild fruit. The beans grow to like 1 meter long!
Black sapote – Mild chocolate pudding, v creamy.
Turmeric – Spicy carrot.
Cacao – Slimy nice fruit around a bitter seed that you can eat
Mamey sapote – Kind of the texture of avocado, but sweet.
Nagami – Like a mini-orange but you can eat the whole thing, peel and all. Delightful!
Yellow sapote/canastelle – Like a cooked yam.
Abiu – Watery, sweet, nice.
Overall very cool. All of them were pretty nice, probably the Yellow mangosteen and the Nagami were my favourites. And I didn’t get itchy!
That night I did a nocturnal tour. It was a semi-interesting tour… we saw a few sleeping birds (cute little balls of floof), another Forest Dragon (much further away), a cool triangle-shaped spider, and a few other things. The guide was a little strange, very dry humour which was hard to interact with. I didn’t take any pictures because I don’t really have the right equipment for that, but I did learn a bit about spotlighting and I would like to do that again.
Day 6:
I did one last cheap crocodile cruise because why not and also I thought it might be another chance to see some fun birds. We did see quite a few crocs but surprisingly not a single bird. The boat captain looked about 95 years old and I was not entirely sure he could see ANYTHING, but he did point out all the crocs somehow!
Then I drove to Port Douglas. I stopped on the way for a scoop of mango sorbet, and did another quick lap of the Jindalba boardwalk, but still no cassowary.
I booked snorkeling for the next day and had a fancy lady late lunch in Port Douglas. But I got overwhelmed by how busy it was everywhere so I just grabbed some groceries and headed back up the squiggly road to the Tablelands.
The van. Organising and charging stuff.
Day 7:
More snorkeling! #YOLO. The boat was much bigger so even though the weather wasn’t great again, it was slightly more comfortable for the much longer trip.
We went to three different spots on the Agincourt Reef.
The first one was much deeper than the other day. The coral was not as colourful and the current was much stronger. I saw one very massive fish that both me and my snorkel buddy immediately looked at each other and were like WHOA BIG FISH in sign language.
The second one was two “underwater mountains” you can snorkel all the way around, however the current was very strong on one side and it was quite hard work. Didn’t really enjoy.
The third one was the best one!! No currents! It was deeper, and had these massive coral walls. There was one spot we went in that was almost 360 degree bowl of amazing coral all around us, but then the guy in the safety boat told us we had to go out of there because soon the tide would be down too far and we might get stuck. We saw lots of interesting fish: long skinny yellow ones, ones with unicorn horns, ones that bury themselves in the sand. It was nice and relaxing where you could just float in one spot and just spend some time looking around at everything.
Proof of life photo.
Super low King tide. Even the guides were surprised to see so much coral sticking out of the water. It can’t be good for the coral. But also it must be fine because this is a thing that happens every year. And aren’t ocean levels rising?
I didn’t really talk to many people on my whole trip so I think this is my only non-selfie picture of me, lol. But my snorkel buddy ended up being quite interesting, even though initially I didn’t really want a snorkel buddy. I’m not sure how we started on the topic but he was actually a big board game enthusiast and we spent the whole boat ride back talking about games.
Day 8 (Last Day):
Went to a mango farm in Mareeba to try mango wine. I wasn’t a big fan of the wine but I found the farm interesting. Apparently December is when everything just goes bonkers and there’s tons and tons of (delicious) work. I want to live there.
I quickly stopped in to Barron Falls for a last ditch attempt to see a cassowary. I’m pretty sure this is where MEP saw one!! I did not.
I had a quick sushi lunch and visit to Birdworld in Kuranda. There were indeed a lot of birds in there but zero educational info, which I found to be a bummer. Also I don’t think people should touch birds.
I came back to Cairns and cleaned up the van. I had a bit of extra time so I went to the Esplanade again. Even at low-tide, and only in about 20 minutes, I saw a lot of humongous mud crabs, a Masked Lapwing, Sacred Kingfisher, and a Scaly-breasted Munia. I was quite pleased. Apparently you can see even more when it’s high tide because the water pushes all the birds closer.
I had to drop off the van at 4pm, and couldn’t really do anything more since I had my suitcase so I just went to the airport, even though my flight wasn’t until 8pm, which got delayed to about 10:30pm. Got a lot of knitting done, the first time I’d gotten it out all trip. I got back to Melbourne at 1:30AM, yuck. Took an Uber home and collapsed in bed and slept for ages.
Overall the trip was 10/10 amazing. I spotted 71 different types of birds. Saw impossible looking insects. I learned about rainforests and mangroves and other nature-y things. I learned new birdwatching and spotlighting techniques. I got to do so many fun activities and also relaxed a lot. I read 1.75 books. I sweated. I’d go back any time!!
