Just a couple. More this weekend.
Halfway up
Waiting for sunset
Somewhere between Kings Canyon and Alice Springs on the Mereenie Loop Road
On the Oodnadatta Track near Marla
Leaving Oodnadatta (The arse end of the world, in our opinion. Apart from the sandhill on the 4wd test track. That was good.)
I need to sit down and write a proper post about our trip away last weekend but probably won’t get time to do it until this coming weekend, so in the meantime here are a couple of photos and the link to more on our Picasa page ….
Saturday: Near Hotham Heights looking towards Mt Buffalo
Saturday: On the Bogong High Plains Road between Omeo and Falls Creek
Saturday: Walking up the Summit at Falls on our way to find the place where we were married
Saturday: At the little hut near Eagle Chair where we signed our marriage papers
Saturday: Looking down the Kiewa valley from Road 24
Saturday: The spot on Road 24 where we got married
Sunday: Hanging a right in the Wandiligong Hedge Maze
Monday: Fanging it on the Dargo High Plains Road from Hotham to Dargo (Jayne took that shot from the sunroof!)
More photos on Picasa.
Yesterday I had to go to Sydney for work. There are only two flights from Avalon in the morning and the second one got in too late, so to kill some time between arriving there at 7.20am and my meeting at 11 I decided to do the Bondi to Bronte coast walk.
I hopped out of my taxi at the south end of Bronte beach and made my way along the path past Tamarama and around the point to Bondi. It’s just over 3kms and it took me around an hour and a half (there are quite a few sloping sections and steps, plus I was stopping every so often to admire the view and take photos!).
It really is spectacular. All the Melbourne is better than Sydney stuff might be true on some levels but I can’t think of anything that Melbourne has within 30kms of the city that matches this walk. I suppose I got it at it’s best - calm and sunny, early morning before the tourists and the backpackers had woken up so just locals about exercising, big swell up on the ocean - but even on a bad day I’d say it would still be magnificent.
At Bondi I stopped for some breakfast at the Lamrock Cafe (also almost deserted, but good brekky and coffee) and eventually dragged myself away to Surry Hills for my meeting.
I took the camera, so here’s a slideshow. Some of the pics are a bit similar to each other but they all look good. They’re all stored on our Picasa page.
It seems like I write about this walk every weekend. There isn’t much of it left for us to do, so there’ll be something else to read about in a few weeks …
This week, apart from spending a few hours enjoying the scenery and the sea air, the point of walking was to determine whether or not we’re fit enough to walk up Mt Bogong in a couple of weeks. The original plan was to walk from Anglesea to Airey’s Inlet and back, which is a 20km return trip. But the place where we wanted to start the walk looked boring - it was a fire trail through heathland - and a closer inspection of the map showed the trail to continue like that for at least 5km. So we decided against it, drove to the other side of Anglesea and walked to Point Addis along the cliffs instead.
We’ve done this section before but I don’t think I blogged it so here are some photos.
Near the start
Disobeying the park rangers to get closer to the clifftop for a self-timer photo
The self-timer photo
An industrious ant earning his dinner
Deserted beach near Point Addis
Jayne reckons this looks like something carrying something else
More photos in our Picasa gallery.
Re the fitness experiment: this walk took around 3 hours including a stop for coffee and a rest at Point Addis. Not sure how far it is but I’d say we covered around 9-10km. The walk up Bogong is about 7km (one way), but it’s all uphill. No flat sections at all. I suggested that our effort to get up it and back would be roughly the same as walking this walk three times … so I don’t think we’re fit enough to make it at present.
We could try, but when do you make the decision that you either are or aren’t going to make it? If we only get halfway it’ll seem like a waste of time, but if we get 3/4 of the way we’d be really tempted to try to make it. I don’t think we should start a tough, potentially dangerous walk like that unless we’re properly prepared (i.e. fit), so we’ll probably walk Feathertop via Razorback instead. That’s 22km return but mostly flat and although we’ve done it once before (in 2001) it was an amazing walk so we have no qualms about doing it again. But that’s another blog post for another day.
Crappy surf conditions this morning so instead of our routine Saturday morning drive to 13th Beach we decided to walk the Jan Juc to Bells section of the Surf Coast Walk. We’ve done it before but it was good, so we decided to do it again.
The wind was really strong today (Jayne’s hanging on to her hat in the second pic) and it was a little bit overcast - but that’s just what you want on a clifftop walk.
