Shallow Thoughts

Of Cima, Sand and Melons

Morningstar Mine

Our first goal of the morning was Morningstar Mine, a set of abandoned mines in the northern part of the preserve.

Two wide, smooth dirt roads leave paved Morningstar Mine Rd to climb the alluvial fan, but the quality of the roads gradually deteriorate over the short distance to the mines.

Morningstar Mine turns out to be a private, going concern, fenced off with NO TRESSPASSING signs. But there are plenty of older, abandoned mines nearby. Very few buildings or mine shafts, but lots of rusting cans and other trash. Really, not much to see, and Dave was in a hurry to move on, so we did.

The Contentious Memorial

Down on Cima Road near the Teutonia Peak trailhead, I wanted to see the famous WWII monument, about which a Supreme Court case is currently raging. (The monument is a cross, a religous symbol, which federal law says should not be supported by government funds or stand on government land.)

I couldn't find anything on the web that gave the location of the monument, so we had to look for it. It turns out that it's easily spotted from the road, atop one of the granite outcrops on the north side of the road, just east of the Teutonia Peak trailhead. (Or see the GPS waypoint file linked at the end of this article.)

In fact, we'd almost certainly seen it before, and shrugged it off as another of those weird inexplicable things you see in the Mojave. The upper part of the cross is currently covered with a box, so it looks like a small sign that says nothing. Several people have put up small flags nearby.

Jackass Canyon -- not to be

The next goal was Jackass Canyon, down in the south part of the preserve west of Kelso.

For quite a while the road is in great shape, hard packed and not badly washboarded. There are lots of curious red anthill-like formations right in the road that turned out to be built not of sand but of some sort of dried plant matter. (Did I mention the curious things you see in the Mojave?)

But then the road descends into a wash full of deep sand with occasional buried rocks. After smacking our undercarriage a couple of times on hidden obstacles while fishtailing around in the sand, we decided retreat was the better part of valor. We'll try Jackass Canyon from the south some time -- maybe it's easier from that direction.

Mojave Rd from 17-Mile Pt to Aiken Mine Rd

Returning to Kelbaker Road, we proceeded a few miles west to 17-Mile Point, where we'd exited the Mojave Road a few days ago, and turned north to complete a section of the Mojave Rd. we hadn't done yet. From Kelbaker to Aiken Mine, the road is quite sandy, with lots of fishtailing, but not a problem for the Rav.

Aiken Mine Rd

This was our second time on Aiken Mine Rd, one of our favorite routes in the preserve.

The lower section of Aiken Mine, from the paved road to the lava tube, is brutally washboarded, like most park dirt roads that get a lot of 2WD traffic.

We didn't stop at the lava tube today, since we'd explored it fairly thoroughly the last time (it's lovely, and provided several of my favorite desktop wallpaper images) but continued straight past it into the basalt.

The ascent from the lower lava fields up to Aiken Mine is weird and wonderful. The road is entirely basalt cinders (Aiken mine is a cinder mine located on a large cinder cone), a mixture of black and red and a little white sand here and there. It's like driving on Mars. The ascent is steep and slightly slippery, but it looks scarier than it is -- there's really no danger here for anything with reasonable clearance, and although 4WD is probably helpful I doubt it's required. The mine, an active cinder mine, is at the top, along with some hiking trails up one of the cinder cones.

Past Aiken, the road descends into the Joshua tree forest on the side of Cima Dome, supposedly the densest Joshua tree forest in the world. ("In the world" should be viewed in light of the fact that Joshua trees don't really exist anywhere outside the Mojave desert of California and Nevada.) More fishtailing in deep sand with a high center groove. The Rav4 never bottomed, but this is definitely not a road to take a 2WD street car of normal ride height.

The melon patch

At some point, the road forks and the left fork seems to be the main one -- but it's a sham. The left fork is actually a power line maintenance road that cuts across to I-15. (We knew this because we'd gotten caught by it the last time, followed the power lines then eventually figured it out and cut back to the more interesting Aiken Mine Rd.)

A few miles afer the powerline fork the road passes a water tank and corral, goes back into sandy Joshua tree forest for a while, then comes out at a strange clearing. What's strange about it? It's a patch of coyote melons. These delicious looking, softball-sized melons apparently grow wild in the Mojave -- but I've never seen them anywhere but this spot. They're apparently all but inedible by humans ... but something eats them, because you can see broken, emptied and dessicated melon rinds lying everywhere.

Did I mention "strange things you see in the Mojave"? Coming on a melon patch in the middle of the desert is one of the things I love about this place.

Alas, the melon patch is almost at the end of the road. Not long after it,, there's a house (I hear one of the rangers lives there) and an intersection, and the road suddenly turns posh for its last mile or two to paved Cima Road.

Photos and GPS Logs

Photos Track log, Waypoints

Tags: mojave, desert, 4wd, rav4, ruins
[ 09:34 Nov 18, 2009    More travel/mojave | permalink to this entry ]

Castle Peaks and Hart: California's Ozymandius

Castle Peaks hiking corridor

Our goal on Tuesday was the "Castle Peaks Hiking Corridor". The Trails Illustrated map showed a side road leading northwest from Walking Box Ranch Rd and eventually petering out to become a hiking trail that went, if not actually to Castle Peaks, at least close enough to get a good look.

Castle Peaks are the rugged spikes you see from I-15 between Mountain Pass and Primm, jutting into the skyline and giving the New York Mountains their appearance of skyscrapers which must be the reason for the range's name. They're eroded fins of eroded Miocene volcanics, surrounded by Precambian metamorphic rocks.

Walking Box Ranch Rd is easy to find off Nipton Rd -- not only is it a prominent, wide dirt road but there's even a road sign, a few miles after the eastern end of the Wee Thump Joshua Tree wilderness (on the north side of Nipton Rd). I'd like to explore Wee Thump and its impressive Joshua trees some day.

The road is good, open and well graded, notwithstanding the humorous "Road not maintained" sign you encounter a few miles in. The side roads follow the map well enough, so it wasn't too difficult to identify the Castle Peaks turn-off. It's a 4-way intersection, not 3-way as shown on the map.

The Castle Peaks road is much narrower and alternates between sandy stretches and dirt. Mostly it's nothing difficult, but the rocky sections are slow going (first gear), there's a high center rut and you cross a couple of washes that make you stop and think about the right line. There are also a couple of sections where the road splits and the higher fork leads to a washed-out chasm, so proceed with due caution.

Eventually the road deteriorated and we parked and continued on foot, along the road and eventually through the gate that marks the Wilderness area boundary. After that the trail crosses through an area of basalt breccia -- the northwestern limit of the "malpais" lava area concentrated around Malpais Springs.

The icy wind dissuaded us from trying to go all the way to Castle Peaks (the trail doesn't go there anyway) but we did get a good view of them as well as nice views of Joshua trees and the malpais.

After our hike, we retraced our steps and crossed over along smooth, good roads to the deserted Hart townsite.

Hart Site: Ozymandius in the Mojave

Hart was a mining town established in 1907. At its peak it had five hotels, 8 saloons, a newspaper and about 400 residents. And today, what you can see of the town is ... a lot of rusted cans.

That's all. No buildings. No walls. But I guess when Hart's residents departed, they left their trash behind, and scattered among the yucca and creosote you can find collections of rusted cans and a few glass bottles darkening in the desert sun.

It's sobering. What happened to all the buildings? Where are those hotels and saloons and hundreds of houses? Apparently if you search long enough, you can find a few tiny segments of walls -- but mostly, this boom town has crumbled into nothingness. And trash.

It reminds me of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandius:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away

There's no shattered visage -- just a plaque giving the history of the town, the expansive pit mine nearby, and the garbage quietly rusting away in the lone and level sands.

Photos and GPS log:

Photos
Track log
Waypoints

Tags: mojave, desert, 4wd, rav4, ruins
[ 13:03 Nov 14, 2009    More travel/mojave | permalink to this entry ]

Probing the Limits of a Rav4 on Clark Mountain

The plan

Just west of Primm and north of Yates Well lies a small, disconnected piece of Mojave National Preserve called Clark Mountain.

A year or two ago, Dave and I tried to explore Clark Mountain. Exiting I-15 at Cima Road, we headed northwest and looked for a small unmarked road heading east into the park. But we missed the right road and ended up on a rocky, tedious power-line road. Eventually we took a side road heading toward the mountain and ended up in a maze of unmarked roads, eventually coming to a four-way intersection with a sign:

GREEN'S WELL ROAD
Public by-pass route

Unfortunately, one of the three roads dead-ended in a "Private property: KEEP OUT" sign while the other two looked too technical to attempt so late in the afternoon. So we slunk back to the powerline road and turned right, toward Primm.

This year, we attacked Clark Mountain from the other side.

Old Ivanpah

We started from Yates Well Rd, the first I-15 exit south of Primm. Right toward the golf course, then first left toward the mountain. Our first project was to find old Ivanpah.

Ivanpah is an abandoned town over in the main part of Mojave Preserve -- but historical records show that it was moved there from an earlier location over on the slopes of Clark.

Just inside the NPS boundary, there's a network of small dirt roads forking off to the left. We parked and walked around, and eventually found the Ivanpah site: a few standing rock walls, a watering trough, a mysterious hole in the ground with a fence around it ("Private property, KEEP OUT") and a collection of ancient rusted and flattened iron cans as well as more modern shotgun shells.

Colosseum Gorge

Beyond Old Ivanpah, the road threads its way up along Colosseum Gorge, named after the spectacular open-pit mine near the top of the pass. The mine's steeply terraced walls do put one in mind of a vast spectator arena; but the only show today was the quiet pool at the bottom, the only spectators the two of us and a trio of ravens.

There's a network of interesting looking roads below the mine. Some lead up to Clark while others explore the grassy meadow below. A couple in a Landrover (the only other vehicle we saw all day) was crawling along one of the mountain roads.

Continuing on from the mine, we found the road occasionally rocky, but easy. At the bottom was an intersection with a sign aimed westward:

GREEN'S WELL ROAD
Public by-pass route

We'd made the connection! We'd been so close on our previous trip -- if only we'd known.

Clark Mountain, West

The rest of the journey would be easy! Just turn left at the right place and head south along the west face of Clark to the paved road, avoiding that awful rocky powerline road which had so sapped our energy and our time on the previous trip.

The turn-off (shown at left) is easy to miss: a fork to the left, up a steep incline, then an immediate right (fortunately shown on our Trails Illustrated map). We drove right past the left at first thinking it couldn't be the one, but as we saw our route bending right and down toward the powerline now visible in the distance, we knew we'd missed it and went back.

We climbed out of desert willow into a Joshua tree forest with a beautiful view of the valley to the north. And then the road got rocky. Just as rocky as it had been on the powerline road -- but this time it hummocked up over hills and down into washes, so the going was much more technical.

It turned out to be by far the most technical road we'd done, involving frequent stops to get out and plan routes and sometimes build ramps so the Rav wouldn't bottom out. On the tricky sections, one person got out and "spotted" while the other drove.

In the end we made it across to paved Kingston Rd with no damage to the Rav. That section only took about two and a half hours, but it felt like five. I guess it was a learning experience, certainly the most technical road we've done -- but in future we'll stay off the west side of Clark Mountain.
(At right: View of Primm and Ivanpah dry lake.)

GPS log:

Track log, Waypoints

Photos:

Photos

Tags: mojave, desert, 4wd, rav4
[ 13:44 Nov 06, 2009    More travel/mojave | permalink to this entry ]

Crossing Soda Lake on the Mojave Rd

Basin to Zzyzyx

The goal for the first day of this trip involved a slight detour on the way to our hotel: a section of the Mojave Road entering Mojave National Preserve from the south.

On most maps, the Mojave Road enters the preserve at Soda Lake, a bit east of Zzyzyx (pronounced Zye-zix, we're told, not Zizzix.) We'd been warned in the past that any hint of rain turns Soda Lake into a slippery, muddy truck-eating quagmire, so it's important to inquire first about conditions before attempting it.

But some study of Google Earth had convinced Dave that there's a road not shown on the maps going from Mojave Rd. across to Zzyzyx. All we had to do was take the Basin Rd. exit off I-15, turn onto Mojave Rd at the big metal signpost, and head north until we hit Soda Lake. If the lake surface looked bad, Zzyzyx would be an easy out.

This section of Mojave Road, it turns out, is a complex braid of dry washes of sand so deep that turning the steering wheel is more a suggestion than a control. That's great fun, as long as you're getting enough traction and not bottoming out. Occasional rock cairns tell you you're on the right track.

... Until you stop seeing cairns. At some point I took the road less braided and ended up driving across sand dunes before the route finally rejoined the Mojave Rd. Fortunately the Rav4 handled the sand very competently, without ever needing its magic center-differential-lock button.

(The GPS with its OpenStreetMap-derived file was no help here -- it didn't show the Mojave Road at all. It is in the OSM database, I found out later, rendered as a red dotted line -- apparently not major enough to make it into the Garmin maps. The nice thing about OSM is that I can fix it!)

Eventually we got back on something resembling a main road, which had turned into whoop-de-doos -- endless irritating hummocks that took patience but no great driving skill as the road skirts along the southern edge of a Wilderness area: no vehicular access. Rasor Rd comes in from I-15 somewhere around here, and the area is popular with ATVers: we saw quite a few groups camping.

Zzyzyx to 17-Mile Point

Finally we got to Soda Lake. The sandy road turned to smooth hardpack as it entered the lake bed -- by far the best road we'd seen since leaving I-15, and we drove out with no hesitation. We could see deep tracks off to either side of the road -- obviously lots of people experiment, and just as obviously the surface isn't quite as good if you get off the road, but we had no trouble on this dry October day. Before long we saw Zzyzyx off in the distance on our left -- and no road going there. But if the road across the dry lake was this good, why would we want to turn off to Zzyzyx at all?

(Good thing we didn't want to, since we couldn't!)

At the far side of the lake are a couple of steep rises in deep sand -- but nothing too tricky, and much easier than the sandy sections south of the lakebed.

The rest of the trip was just normal dirt-road driving, between the more-scenic-than-their-names-suggest Cowhole and Little Cowhole Mountains, through a small basalt flow (evidence of some nice big bubbles visible in the walls), and finally back onto pavement at Kelbaker Road and north to Primm.

GPS log: Track log, Waypoints

Tags: mojave, desert, 4wd, rav4
[ 11:56 Oct 31, 2009    More travel/mojave | permalink to this entry ]

Bruny Island night life: penguins and shearwaters

After a week in Tasmania, supposedly the most wildlife-packed state in Australia, without seeing anything besides ducks (mostly mallards) and songbirds (mostly sparrows and starlings), I was getting desperate.

I had one last hope: Bruny Island, touted as the wild and unspoiled place to see wildlife ... though the wildlife touted in the tourist brochures mostly seems to involve paying for a boat ride to see sea birds and fur seals. Nobody ever talks about marsupials wandering around -- are there any? Since it's an island, how would they get there? Nobody ever mentions the intriguing spot marked "penguin rookery" on "The Neck" between North and South Bruny. After last year's tremendous experience at the Philip Island Penguin Parade, I thought it might be worth booking a room on Bruny in the hope of seeing (a) penguins and (b) other nocturnal wildlife.

We booked into the "Bruny Island Hotel", a tiny pub with two lodging units billing itself as "Australia's Southernmost Hotel" (a claim dubious claim -- we saw plenty of lodging farther south, though their actual names didn't include the word "hotel"). We were a little taken aback when we saw the place but it turned out to be clean and comfortable, and right on the bay. And the pub had some wonderful aromas from the daily curry special (which, we found that night, tasted as good as it smelled).

Since we'd caught an early ferry, we spent the day exploring Bruny, including a bushwalk up to Mt. Mangana. The narrow and overgrown trail climbs steadily through thick forest, but the adventurous part of the hike came in one of the few sunny, rocky clearings, where a quite large black snake (something between a meter and a meter and a half long and as thick around as Dave's wrist) slithered off the trail right in front of me. Then right after that, Dave spotted a much smaller snake, the size of a large garter snake, a bit off the trail. Should I mention that all Tasmanian snakes are venomous? (Checking the books later, the large one was a black tiger snake -- quite dangerous -- while the smaller one was probably a white-lipped snake, considered only moderately dangerous.)

After that our appreciation of the scenery declined a bit as we kept our eyes glued to the trail ahead of us, but we saw no more snakes and eventually emerged into a clearing that gave us great views of a radio tower but no views of much of anything else. On Mt Mangana, the journey is the point, not the destination.

On the way back down, when we got to the rocky clearing, both of our colubrid friends were there to meet us. Dave, in the lead, stamped a bit and the larger snake slithered off ahead of us on the trail -- not quite the reaction we'd been hoping for -- while the smaller snake coiled into a ball but remained off the trail. Eventually the large snake left the trail and Dave quickly passed it while I snapped a shot of its disappearing tail. Now it was my turn to pass -- but the snake was no longer visible. Where was it now? I was searching the trailside where it had disappeared when I heard a rustling in the bush beside and behind me and saw the snake's head appearing -- it had circled around behind me! (I'm sure this wasn't a strategic move, merely some sort of coincidence: I used to keep snakes and though they're fascinating and beautiful, intelligence isn't really their strong point.) I high-tailed it down the trail and we finished the walk safely.

That evening, we headed over to the penguin rookery, where it turned out that we had happened to choose the one night when there was a ranger talk and program there. I wasn't sure whether that was a good or a bad thing, since it meant a crowd, but it turned out all to the good, partly because it meant a lot more high-powered red-masked flashlights to point out the penguins, but mostly because the real show there isn't penguins at all.

The Bruny Island penguin rookery is also a rookery for short-tailed shearwaters -- known as "muttonbirds" because they're "harvested" for their meat, said to taste like mutton. Their life cycle is fascinating. They spend the nothern hemisphere summer up in the Bering Sea near Alaska, but around September they migrate down to southern Australia, a trip that takes about a week and a half including stopping to feed. They breed and lay a single egg, which both parents incubate until it hatches in mid-January. Then the parents feed the chick until it grows to twice the size of its parents (some 10 kg! while still unable to fly). Then the parents leave the chicks and fly back north. This is the stage at which the overgrown chicks are "harvested" for meat. The chicks who don't get picked off (they're protected in Tasmania) live off their fat deposits until their flight feathers come in, at which point they fly north to join the adults.

We were there about a week after hatching, while the parents were feeding the chicks. The adult shearwaters spend all day fishing while the chick sleeps in a burrow in the sand. At sunset, the adults come flying back, where they use both voice and vision to locate the right burrow. The catch: a bird that migrates from Alaska to Tasmania, and takes casual flights to Antarctica for food, is designed to fly fast. Shearwaters aren't especially good at landing in confined spaces, especially when loaded with fish. The other catch is that there are many thousands of them (the ranger said there were 14,000 nesting at that rookery alone).

So, come dusk, the air is filled with thousands of fast-flying shearwaters circling and looking for their burrows and working up the nerve to land, which they eventually do with a resounding thump. They crash into bushes, the boardwalk, or, uncommonly, people who are there to watch the show. It's kind of like watching the bats fly out of Carlsbad caverns ... if the bats weighed five kilos each and flew at 20-30mph. The night fills with the eerie cries of shearwaters calling to each other, the growling of shearwaters fighting over burrows, and the thumps of shearwaters making bad landings.

Penguins? We saw a few, mostly chicks coming out of their burrows to await a food-carrying parent, and late in the evening a handful came out of the water and climbed the beach. Penguins normally find each other by sound, and at Philip Island they were quite noisy, but at Bruny most of the penguins we saw were silent (we did hear a few penguin calls mixed in with the cacophony of shearwaters). But we didn't really miss the penguins with the amazing shearwater show.

When we finally drove back to the hotel, we drove slowly, hoping to see nocturnal wildlife. We knew by then that Bruny does have mammals (however they might have gotten there) because of the universal sign: roadkill. And we did see wildlife: three penguins, two small red wallabies, three smaller red animals with fuzzy tails (ringtailed and brushtailed possums?) and one barely-glimpsed small sand-colored animal the size and shape of a weasel (I wonder if it could have been a brown bandicoot? It didn't look mouselike and didn't have spots like a quoll).

Success! A spectacular evening.

Tags: travel, australia, tasmania, nature, birds
[ 11:24 Feb 11, 2009    More travel/tasmania | permalink to this entry ]

Tasmania Photos

I still haven't finished writing up a couple of blog entries from bumming around Tasmania after LCA2009, but I did get some photos uploaded: Tasmania photos. Way too many photos of cute Tassie devils and other animals at the Bonorong wildlife park, as well as the usual collection of scenics and silly travel photos.

Tags: travel, tasmania, lca2009, nature, photo
[ 14:49 Feb 04, 2009    More travel/tasmania | permalink to this entry ]

The Grampians

The Great Ocean Rd drive had been lovely, but now my plans took me away from the coast and north, to the national park known as the Grampians.

I didn't know much about the Grampians -- going there was a whim. My Australian wildlife book said it was a good place to see kangaroos, emus, and koalas, and that as an island of old sandstone sticking up out of a sea of younger basalt terrain, they had a lot of relict species which aren't seen much in other parts of Western Victoria. Beyond that, I knew nothing.

I didn't have much of a road map, either. Although the Grampians are more or less straight north from Warrnambool, the maps I had weren't entirely clear about how to find the highway going north to Hall's Gap. But it looked like it should be easy -- just find the highway going to Dunkeld (one of the maps even had the highway number) and if I kept going past Dunkeld, eventually I'd end up in Hall's Gap. Easy!

So I headed west out of Warrnambool, keeping an eye open for the highway numbers. Nothing for a while, then a sign for a highway heading toward Caramut. I stopped and checked the map; Caramut was the next town east of Dunkeld, so I figured the next highway would likely be my turn-off.

A few miles later, I saw another highway sign ... but it was for Hamilton, the next town west of Dunkeld. Hey, wait a minute! What happened to that highway on the map that went straight to Dunkeld?

So that's how I found myself sailing along on one-lane unmarked country roads in the pleasant farming country north of Warrnambool. It's all bucolic green rolling hills and fields dotted with big hay rolls, crisscrossed with relatively straight roads. The roads reminded me enough of California's central valley (though the Victoria terrain here was much greener and prettier) that I felt relatively sure I'd be able to find my way in the right direction eventually. (We'll just ignore for the moment my skewed sense of direction caused by the sun being in the wrong part of the sky.)

After the road narrowed to a single lane, I quickly learned the protocol for oncoming cars: slow down barely at all, edge over onto the wide, smooth left shoulder and keep driving. The other car does the same, and everything works out fine.

Gradually, I saw the tips of the rocky crags that must be the Grampians looming out of the haze far ahead. I started seeing Dunkeld signs, and after a few twists and jogs, I arrived at Dunkeld itself, a tiny but picturesque looking town in the Grampian foothills, one just large enough to have a cafe where I was able to get a latte for the road.

North of Dunkeld the terrain becomes more winding and wooded, with vaguely exotic looking trees just different enough from the eucalypts we're used to in California that it looked a bit exotic. I'd been keeping my eyes peeled for roadside kangaroos all along, without seeing one, but I did see some road wildlife -- something that looked like a big stick lying on the road, until I realized the big stick was moving -- rather rapidly -- across the road. I slowed enough to make sure I avoided the blue-tongue lizard and watched it disappear in the roadside brush. Besides the one blue-tongue and the constant presence of sulfur-crested cockatoos in the trees above, the woods were remarkably quiet.

The last part of the road to Hall's Gap follows the valley between two high ridges of upturned sandstone. In a way it's reminiscent of the drive from Banff to Jasper in the Canadian Rockies -- of course the elevation and climate are totally different, but there's the same striking sense of following the trough between two adjacent up-tilted hogbacks. You can see that in aerial photographs (my wildlife book had one illustrating the Grampians) but I didn't expect it to be so obvious from the road. (I later had excellent looks from the other end, from some of the park lookouts north of Hall's Gap.)

And before long, I arrived at Hall's Gap. I checked in to the apartment I'd booked; then since it was still quite early in the day, plenty of time for a hike, I backtracked to the park visitor's center to inquire about trails.

On the ranger's advice, I made the hike to "The Pinnacle", a relatively hike over sloping and pitted black sandstone, winding through a slot canyon and up onto a clifftop. There were lots of other hikers on this popular trail despite the steep climb and the hot weather, and everyone exchanged cheerful words of encouragement and tips ("There's a nice cool spot to rest just a little way ahead", "You're almost to the top!"). The view at the end was spectacular and well worth the climb, with panoramic views of Hall's gap, the long valley between the two upraised ridges, and the farmland stretching for miles to the east.

Happy but thoroughly overheated from the hike, I took a quick shower then whiled away the time before dinner exploring some of the park's scenic overviews, during which time the weather clouded up and began to sprinkle. By the time I got back to my room it was raining buckets. This seemed to set off a black cockatoo outside my window, who flew from tree to tree screeching incessantly.

For dinner I'd already bought a ticket to the Australia Day BBQ and aboriginal dance at the Brambuk Aboriginal Cultural Centre. The festivities had be hastily re-arranged due to the rain, so we were treated to a prevew of the evening's digeridoo while they moved the BBQ to somewhere sheltered from the rain.

The BBQ was excellent ('roo, beef and sausage) and the digeridoo I heard impressed me. I'd heard recordings, of course, and Americans blowing into 'doos they'd brought from Australia, but I'd never listened live to someone who really knew how to play. It's a whole different experience: the 'doo is very directional, and the effects of the changing sound as the player moves the instrument around gives the experience much more presence than you can ever hear in a recording. I wish I could have stayed longer ... but I had too much to do before hitting the road in the morning. On the short trip back to my room I was treated to views of herds of kangaroos grazing in the fields on the outskirts of town.

I headed out fairly early Sunday morning. I didn't have much of a plan: just drive back to Melbourne in time to check in at the college and drop off the rental car. I didn't expect to start the morning with one of the trip's great sights: herds of emu grazing in fields by the side of the road below the sandstone knobs of the Grampians peeking through the morning fog. Lovely!

Halfway back to Melbourne, I stopped to check out the town of Ballarat, but it was disappointing. Somehow I'd gotten the impression of it as a scenic and remote mining town, akin to the California desert town of the same name. But it was just an ordinary little Victoria town, with some old buildings and a main street full of pricy cafes and shops. I arrived back at Melbourne a bit earlier than planned, which was just as well since it took four or five circuits of the university before I finally found a way to sneak in to Trinity college (as another car came out). I checked in to my room, dropped off the Elantra, and joined a group of fellow conference-goers in the search for linux.conf.au registration.

Tags: travel, melbourne08
[ 12:33 Feb 10, 2008    More travel/melbourne08 | permalink to this entry ]

The Great Ocean Road

Geelong's great claim to fame is the Wool Museum. That gives you an idea of what a happenin' place this is.

Its chief attractions were that it was (1) fairly close to the beginning of the Great Ocean Road, that famous drive that everyone tells you you have to see when venturing out from Melbourne, and (2) I was able to book a reasonably priced room there online (via the very handy Wotif).

I somehow managed to get through my stay without visiting the Wool Museum, though, so someone else will have to report on that.

I wasn't originally planning to take the GOR. Not that I doubted its beauty ... but the descriptions and photos sounded an awful lot like Highway 1, the coastal road in Northern California. Not that there's anything wrong with Highway 1 -- it's a great drive -- but after going halfway around the globe, I'd like to do stuff that's significantly different from what you have at home.

But the recommendations seemed so universal, I gave in and decided to try it. Gotta follow local knowledge, right?

So is the GOR similar to Highway 1? Yes. The ocean is a different color, a shimmering aquamarine versus California's steely olive green; and the plants are different (California has lots of imported Eucalypts, but generally not on the coastal road. I did wonder whether the trees in Victoria that look so much like the Monterey Cypress of California's coast were native, or imports).

And those big white birds sailing overhead aren't egrets -- they're cockatoos.

And the sea stacks are better: I won't claim that California has anything that quite rivals the limestone majesty of the Twelve Apostles, or the even more impressive London Bridge.

It's a nice driving road; while it would have been a lot more fun in my X1/9, it was even fun in a rented automatic Hyundai Elantra. There's a section in the middle where it goes inland for a while (with an optional spur going off to a lighthouse) that reminded me of some of the great driving roads in the Santa Cruz mountains. Some of the ocean parts are less fun, mostly because they're so narrow, yet so choked with tour buses and trucks pulling trailers, none of which seem able to stay in their own lane.

All in all,, a fun but not not entirely exotic drive. Do I regret it? Not at all. I had a lot of fun driving it and admiring the scenery. I ended the drive in the pleasant town of Warrnambool, a fun name to say even if I seem incapable of remembering the spelling.

Tags: travel, melbourne08
[ 03:04 Jan 28, 2008    More travel/melbourne08 | permalink to this entry ]