An Australian Mountain Adventure

This Saturday I was invited on a sight-seeing trip to the Dandenongs (a mountain range just to the east of Melbourne) by a family from the church I've been attending, an opportunity I gladly jumped at.

Not the greatest picture as it was taken through the window of the car, but it gets the message across.

We stopped at a few places along the way up the delightfully winding road up the mountains, including a small town with a candy store (sorry, a “lollies shop”) where I picked up a small collection of sweets to try (purely in the spirit of sampling the local culture, of course!). Another place where we stopped for afternoon tea (read: snacks) had a large flock of cockatoos hanging around, plus a few other native birds.

These birds were quite used to being fed, and not shy about hanging around in hopes of food.

…to the point of happily jumping up on the picnic table in front of me!

It was really cool and a bit strange seeing flocks of birds flitting betwixt and sitting in the eucalyptus trees, as we didn't really have many birds that did that back in California, the only ones being the vultures that liked to nest in one particular large dead tree (and didn't do a lot of flitting among the branches, for obvious reasons).

This crimson rosella was perfectly fine walking underneath my seat, making it a little hard to photograph!

In fact, the cockatoos were comfortable enough with people to jump up your shoulder in search of food!

After our tea-time adventure, we hiked to Sherbrooke Falls in the Sherbrooke Forest National Park. On the whole, it reminded me of hiking amongst the redwoods back in California, except with eucalyptus trees instead. And what eucalyptus trees they were! I'd known that certain species of eucalyptus trees are among the tallest trees in the world (behind only redwoods), and having grown up among eucalyptus trees in California I thought I was familiar with their heights, but these trees were something else entirely. It's hard to guess of course, but I felt like many of the trees I saw had to have been at least twice as tall as the tallest eucalyptus trees I'd know previously, again underscoring the similarity to hiking in the redwood forests.

It's hard to tell and I could't get it all in one shot, but this is a tall tree.

The hike to the waterfall was quite pleasant, but the return journey was an adventure. It was a nice day when we set out, but as we started back the sky became cloudy and overcast. Soon we could hear thunder rumbling in the distance, then the tops of the trees were buffeted by an increasingly strong wind. By the time we'd gotten back to the carpark the first few large drops were falling, only for us to realize that we'd returned to the wrong carpark, having taken a wrong turn at one of the several branches in the trail on the way back.

As we regrouped to the map at the trail head and figured out where we were, the rain started coming down in earnest, followed soon after by hail! Luckily there were some other people leaving from the carpark due to the rain so our driver was able to get a ride back to the car and come back to pick us up where we were huddled beneath the increasingly-inadequate shelter of the tiny structure protecting the map as rain and hail pelted the ground around.

Thankfully we made it back through the hail and storm all right (though it was coming down fast enough to have significant water on the road in places), but it certainly made for quite the adventure! A hui hou!