Bitty day

30th April 2011

So, haha. We went to the Park Info Centre for the Grampians and the nice lady there gave us a photocopied list of all the mammals found anywhere in the park, told us that she had no clue where or when to be looking (“they could be anywhere, but I wouldn’t know”) and said that the park rangers wouldn’t be in during the weekend. Perhaps we could come back on Monday? No, we’re leaving on Monday.

We went on a likely looking walk at dusk today and saw not a thing. Heard some kangaroos, though.

It’s been an odd day generally. We were lucky to get accommodation here, because this weekend happens to be the annual Halls Gap Food Festival. Right up our street, so figuring we were clearly cursed as far as mammals in Victoria are concerned we paid $10 each for admission and went in. It turns out this is really a wine festival with a bit of food on the side. I’d say 75% of the stalls are winemakers, and you need to spend $30 each for the admission-including-tasting.

To me this seems a bad deal for the winemakers. If Australians are made of approximately the same stuff as the rest of us, then a good proportion of sales anywhere that free tastings are offered will be of the “well I’ve tried it and liked it, I feel like I really ought to buy one.” Making it clear to people that they’ve paid good money for their tasting eliminates this primordial urge.

Anyway, we’d have had to try far too much wine to feel that $60 was a good investment, so instead we settled for wandering around the foodie stalls feeling like the odd ones out and then leaving with a few purchases towards our self-catering. Even this wasn’t fully satisfying; there were no meat producers, no organic veggies, it was all pre-made pies, tarts and quiches.

One good thing we found at random was a leaflet for a nature lodge in the Little Desert, which would be right on our way to Adelaide. They offer night spotlighting and claim several interesting mammals might be seen. So I phoned up. They have 59 schoolkids staying for the next three nights, but there is an en-suite room available. Sigh. No thanks.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 1st, 2011 at 6:40 am and is filed under Australia. 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.