Country Victoria

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Originally uploaded by BLP.

We left Melbourne Saturday morning and headed roughly in the direction of Bendigo in central Victoria. We took a detour through Mt. Macedon and stopped at Hanging Rock where we stretched our legs, had coffee and muffins, and met Snowy the huggy kangaroo.

We then proceeded to Daylesford, somewhat of a country village for yuppies, where we had a pleasant lunch at a hip little place full of the aforementioned yuppies, looked with skepticism at the hotel advertising "city views" (not much of a city, and not much of a view), and openly ridiculed the "Double Nut Villas", for obvious reasons. Although this makes us sound like really obnoxious tourists, we actually liked Daylesford - it was nice in its own little way. We just couldn't find a reason to stick around.

We moved on through Castlemaine, where we stopped at the visitor center, largely to take advantage of their restrooms. Although to Victoria's credit, they've got tourist information buildings all over the place. Any little village with more than 500 people, and you can find as many maps and suggestions for spending money as you like.

We made it to Bendigo around 5:00 pm, and found ourselves saying, "um. . . is this it?". Bendigo is advertised as a jewel of the Victorian countryside, chock full of classic Australian architecture, etc. We were not blown away. The city has an impressive cathedral, various other historic public buildings, a pleasant central park, but it didn't really present itself as a destination in itself. In fact, given that everything was closing about the time we arrived, we were at a loss simply to find something to do.

We ultimately spend an amusing/annoying 45 minutes searching for someone who could successfully guide us to a movie theatre. Everyone knew exactly where Bendigo's theatre was, but it took three tries to find someone who could provide us with sufficient directions to guide us the approximately. We found this rather surprising given that we were never more than 200 meters away from the theatre. We started to suspect that the theater was invisible to non-Bendigo natives. The theatre was eventually located, we bought tickets, but then had about two hours to kill, which we killed in one of the few cafes in Bendigo which was open beyond 5:00pm. After our movie, we retired to our hotel, The Fleece Inn, which is a story in itself.