Monday, January 21, 2008

L'Orange

This weekend I travelled some different roads, which is always an achievement given there are only about three or four roads out of Canberra. My destination was the Central West of New South Wales for a pleasant trip in the country. Let me first start by telling you about summer in Australia, where pretty much non-stop rain and temperatures struggling to reach 20C on Saturday flew in the face of all that overconfident and boastful marketing of theirs! Where the bloody hell are ya? At home in front of a nice cosy fire, that’s bloody well where mate!

The rain did stop for about 10 minutes in the town of Cowra, a site semi-famous for a suicidal breakout of Japanese prisoners-of-war during WW2. There is much to commemorate this strange and sad story, not all of which is entirely tasteful but the Japanese influence lingers on and it must be the only small country town in Australia boasting a Japanese restaurant. There are some very beautiful Japanese Gardens perched atop a hill resonating calm and tranquillity in stark contrast to the events of 1944

An hour later through more rain was the considerably soggy town of Bathurst where I rendezvoused with two friends from Sydney, Caroline & Jill. Obviously we needed somewhere distinctive to meet, although the big gold panner was somewhat less distinctive than I was hoping. Certainly quite a low key big thing.

Bathurst has some old buildings and the like but is probably most famous for its motor racing circuit, Mount Panorama, which hosts some famous Aussie race every year. You can drive round the track, frustratingly at a speed limit of 60kph and in either direction. It was very un-Australian of me to drive the incorrect way round, but that’s more a result of naivety than anything else!


Further west is the town of Orange, claiming to be the fruit capital of Australia though not, as you would expect, specialising in oranges. It’s more apples, cherries and quite a few vineyards. This was our home for a couple of nights, staying in a wonderfully fake wood panelling and brown lino floor styled cabin. Fittingly we ate dinner in “Fare Dinkum”, claiming to be a true Aussie experience but really just like a Harvester with a few paintings on the walls. The boy who looked a bit like an Australian Napoleon Dynamite settled up our bill and told us there was nothing else to do in Orange, so an early night it was!

You may have figured by now this was more of a ‘quirky’ weekend than a classic scenery and adventure blockbuster, visiting the kind of places Bill Bryson has probably written about far better than I can. On a brighter Sunday we headed even further into the interior to Parkes and, nearby, the big dish. This actually isn’t another one of those stupid big things but an impressively functional giant telescope type dish. It was here, in a quiet part of nowhere, that the pictures from the moon landing first hit this planet of ours and then were beamed to around one half of the world’s population watching Neil’s one small step. It also provided the subject for a movie called ‘The Dish’, based on those events and one to watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon in the future.




Moaning about the weather was put into some perspective by a visit to a Lavender Farm near Parkes, where no harvest had been forthcoming for a couple of years thanks to the big dry which at one point lowered the local dam levels to 5% capacity. Still, a knowledgeable and friendly host was happy to show us some dried lavender things and contaminate the car with the smell for the rest of the day!

Back near Orange and smelling like old ladies, we visited a vineyard for some lovely tastings and worked off the mini-hangover with a trip up Mount Canobolas – the highest point west before you get to Perth!



By this stage of the day there was a nice big patch of blue sky, so making hay whilst the sun shined, we had a BBQ back at the caravan park. Fortunately we had the car park all to ourselves to spread out our brown plastic chairs and feast on a T-Bone and some veggies outside number 7.

On Monday I drove back to Canberra, mostly along the same roads that got me here so little excitement along the way. I stopped at a windfarm viewing area which was mildly diverting and a small cute village called Coarcar. It was absolutely dead and slightly creepy but I’m sure on weekends it is a bustling little place full of tea shops and craft fayres, negating the banjo plucking gun toting sofa on the veranda atmosphere of a dull Monday morning.



With few other options I stopped in Cowra again to pick up some food and made my way back along the Yass Valley, the sight of the Telstra Tower the beacon of homecoming, symbolising an afternoon of R&R before a four day week and another long weekend coming up for Australia Day.

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