Author Archives: Miss Penny Black

Australia: An Orange Christmas

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Luke and I departed New Zealand early on the morning of the 22nd of December. We were both looking forward to getting home but Melbourne was still a week away – first we were stopping in Orange to stay with my family for Christmas, then on to Albury for a couple of nights to stay with Luke’s family. It’s rather handy that Luke’s parents live about half way between Orange and Melbourne rather than in a completely different direction.

I have a small family and therefore our Christmases are fairly quiet affairs. There’s Mum and Dad, my brother’s family of four and me. This was to be the first Christmas at my brother’s new house and the first time he’d cooked Christmas dinner. It was also Luke’s first Christmas away from his family.

My family.

A few of my foreign friends have remarked on how strange it must be to have Christmas in summer, but fortunately this year the weather was fairly cool and rainy – Orange is almost always in drought so rain is generally something to celebrate. Michael did a fantastic job with lunch, cooking turkey breasts, pork and roast vegetables and Mum contributed our traditional jar of pickled walnuts. I don’t know how many of the people reading this are likely to have tried pickled walnuts but they’re quite an acquired taste. It took me 30 years of tasting them every Christmas before I could enjoy them but now I go through several jars a year.

The Christmas table.

Another tradition with my family is seafood. We always snack on prawns during the day on Christmas. I’m used to prawns being steamed – I was so disappointed in Louisiana when they were always served battered and deep fried. What a waste!

Mum peeling the prawns -twice the size of any we saw in the US.

We all enjoyed Christmas day, and I was amazed, as always, to see how much my nephew has grown. Izaac seems to morph into a new person every time I see him. Last time he was barely talking, this visit I could barely keep up with what he was saying. His half-brother, Ethan, becomes more and more mature by the year and is not far away from high school. There’s nothing like the growth of children to mark the passage of time.

Two cheeky monkeys.

The boys with my mum and dad.

Apart from spending time with family our trip to Orange also included a night in Bathurst visiting our friend Geoff and my annual trip to the berry farm, where I picked several kilos of strawberries. There are some things Christmas just wouldn’t be the same without, and a pile of fresh fruit is high on my list.

I hope all of our readers and friends out there had a great Christmas in 2013 and I’d love to hear about what makes Christmas special for you – especially if it’s something even more obscure than pickled walnuts!

New Zealand

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Formerly the ‘Land of the Long White Cloud’, New Zealand may as well now be renamed Middle Earth, as you can’t swing a dwarf without hitting some kind of Hobbit-based advertising or paraphernalia.

I need this sign on my gate at home.

It started in Los Angeles, where there was a decal of gold coins and hobbit feet leading to the check in counter for Air New Zealand. On the plane the safety video is hobbit-themed. Then you arrive in Auckland where everything has a touch of Tolkien. And who can blame the kiwis? Apparently the films have brought four *billion* dollars of revenue into the country.

We had plans to head to Hobbiton, but first we spent a night with our friends Lauren, Nick and their baby Annabel, who is possibly the happiest tiny person I’ve ever met. She barely stopped smiling the whole time we were with them and was a great deal of fun to play with.

Nick and Lauren had very generously offered to loan us their car so we headed out into the lush, green dairy country south of Auckland.

The Hobbiton set is about an hour and a half south of the capital city and work is currently underway upgrading the cafe and gift shop where you wait for the tours to depart. Groups leave every half hour and the price of the tour is $74. Quite steep, given that you get two hours to walk around and a drink in the Green Dragon – and that’s it. It was about the same price as our whole day at Universal Studios. We asked our guide how much it cost to keep the property running and he told us that it was about $150,000 a month. Aside from the guides and staff who man the shop there are also full time gardeners maintaining the vegetable and flower gardens.

Disappointingly, the only thing behind the door was a small empty space.

We were lucky to get a nice day but wished we’d gone with the first morning group – less people wandering into shots and the sun would’ve been shining onto Bag End rather than behind the hill. We heard very interesting stories about Peter Jackson’s attention to detail and saw a tree which has been brought in from another property and had all the leaves made of fabric and then individually attached to give the desired effect.

A tiny hobbit hole to use for optical illusions. There were over 40 house front on the property.

The most famous hobbit hole of them all.

If you’re a Lord of the Rings nut then it’s worth the trip but I’m not sure I’d recommend a visit to everyone.

The path to the Green Dragon. The drinks you get there are only available on site and are brewed in NZ.

We spent the night in Rotorua, where hot springs bubbled in the middle of town, and then drove up the eastern prong of the north island – the Coramandel Peninsula. We stopped for a delicious lunch in one of the many pretty little towns along the way and arrived mid afternoon at Hot Water Beach. Two hot springs run beneath the sand, so during low tide it is possible to dig your own spa right on the beach.

We arrived to find a horde of people concentrated in the optimal positions and so we just walked around a bit, dipped our toes in various pools and laughed at people getting splashed with cold water when the tide started to come in.

After a while all the digging to provide a place to relax started to seem counter-productive.

There was one spot where the water was boiling up through the sand, bubbling quite merrily. While a group of people were standing around watching it, a woman blithely walked right into it and scalded her foot.

Strangely there were many signs warning of rips and dangerous currents in the sea but none warning of the steaming water under the sand.

That little rough patch to the left of the sign is the bubbling sand.

We didn’t spend all that long on the beach as we didn’t feel like getting wet, so we drove back to Auckland that night and stayed with Lauren and Nick for our last two nights. I’m afraid they must’ve thought us rather dull company as we had no ideas about what to see or do and were perfectly happy to sit on the couch and organise our final bits of travel for when we got back to Australia.

They did manage to prise us off the couch to visit some markets and gardens, go out for a delicious brunch and on our last night we took a box of fireworks Nick had been hoarding and let a few off in the park over the road. It’s only legal to buy fireworks for three days a year but you can let them off any time you like – within noise restriction times, I suppose. Annabel coped pretty well with the fireworks and didn’t seem at all perturbed by the noisy ones. It was the ones that looked like showers of sparks that caused some grizzling so we packed up and went back inside.

We had a lovely time in New Zealand – I regret to say it’s a country I’ve never been much interested in as I thought it’d be much like Australia. Turns out that in some ways it is – but in terms of scenery it’s far more dramatic and lush than much of the landscape you’d see in Oz. Next time I’ll definitely be heading to the south island to see what all the fuss is about.

Thanks for a lovely time, Lauren and Nick! We can’t wait to see the delightful Annabel again next time you’re in Oz.

Home! But Not The End!

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So we’re back in sunny Melbourne and I have many, many thoughts to write on the joys of being home, and a half written post about New Zealand – and everything in between. The blog is certainly not done and dusted, although goodness knows how many people will keep reading now our journey is officially done. Although we’ve not spent much time on it over the last 3 weeks or so, what with all the moving from place to place, we’re both feeling quite motivated to keep going. Think of Christmas to New Year’s as a small hiatus for us but we’ll definitely be back, I’m hoping at least once or twice a week. I’d like to record my thoughts about Melbourne and all the things we do here (for the sake of our new and old foreign friends who might be interested), and, for the sake of dispelling rumours, how very infrequently we even see spiders, snakes and sharks, let alone are consumed by them*. There’s also documenting the process of going back to work after a year off and then we’re hoping to do a bit of travelling around Victoria. Not to mention the fact that Luke still has many months of video to edit. Africa is up next!

So don’t abandon us just yet – there’s plenty of people to meet, places to go, and life-sized cardboard cut- outs to admire. You’ll see!

*My friend Sarah went to the beach with her mother the other day and, she tells me, they were both pursued vigorously by a pinchy  crab but it was less than hand sized so it really doesn’t count. I’ve barely seen any spiders at all in the week I’ve been back. Barely any!

California

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Oakland probably wouldn’t register on many people’s radars when it comes to must-see places in the USA, but we spent almost a week there, venturing across the bay into San Francisco twice. We were staying with my friend Robert, whom you may recall we met in New York several weeks ago. He grew up in the area and knows a great deal about the history of Oakland and the Bay area.

Robert took a couple of days off and we went on several excursions out of the city. The first one was to Muir Woods, a well known patch of the giant redwood trees that California is famous for. The trees here weren’t the largest in the state
but they certainly looked big enough to us. We went for a walk and enjoyed the deep silence and tranquil atmosphere of the forest. Although there were a few other groups about it was a week day so no hoards of tourists. The weather was also cold
enough for our snow jackets.

Towering trees!

After our walk we stopped in at a very cosy diner for a late lunch and I had my first chowder (turkey and vegetable) and reflected on how nice the American dining experience can be. They seem to have a lot of these kind of places around – where the comfort of an English pub is combined with the quality of food you’d get in a good restaurant but you can sit at the bar or in one of the many booths. Sitting at a table with chairs is always an inferior experience to sitting in a booth – and for people eating by themselves a bar seat is superior. It’s a real shame we just don’t have anything like this at home. Plus they facilitate the consumption of cocktails with breakfast, which can’t be a bad thing.

During our driving on this day we were passing some lovely scenery and drove around a bend to see a cyote walking along the side of the road. We passed it so quickly that we barely had time to register while it was still in sight. Robert said that he’s never seen one by the side of the road before. Our animal-spotting luck from Africa continues, apparently.

Our second day excursion with Robert was a drive south towards Santa Cruz and another forest where we saw some even larger trees and walked through a forest famous for banana slugs. Apparently these slugs are quite long and neon yellow but we didn’t see any.

Robert and Luke in a redwood trunk. The tree was still alive.

The forest was very beautiful though, and so was the drive to Santa Cruz. We managed to get to the beach just in time for sunset and a quick look through the rock pools. The sky was streaked with light clouds that turned orange and pink in the fading light. We spotted dozens of large and small anemones in the pools and watched the waves crash against the rocks.

Santa Cruz tide pools.

On the days when Robert dragged himself to work Luke and I went into San Francisco. A relatively fast bus ride (although a little expensive at $4.20 each) across the bridge and then we used Uber cars to get around. Uber is a business whereby you use their website to book and track cars who come and pick you up. You enter your credit card details once and then the fare is calculated by the minute and then deducted from your card so there’s no need to carry cash. The drivers use their own, unmarked cars and work whenever they want. Taxi drivers aren’t too impressed with this new system and Uber drivers operate in something of a grey area legally. We found them all very prompt and friendly – it’ll be interesting to see if this takes off in Australia.

In San Fran we walked around the northern end of the city, checking out views of the bridge. We walked up Haight Street which was, as promised, full of hippies. There were some great clothing stores – and definitely the best steam punk clothing store I’ve seen in the US. We saw some Creatura clothing (an Australian label) and a lot of clothes that wouldn’t be out of place at Rainbow Serpent Festival. It was nowhere near as good as Camden Markets in London – though the prices were better.

This shop had every kind of tie dye you could imagine. No photos allowed inside, unfortunately.

One of the nicest things about San Francisco is the architecture. The houses are mostly weatherboard and many are painted in a very detailed fashion. They look almost like wedding cakes.

These houses are known as ‘painted ladies’.

A corner in Haight-Ashbury.

Luke and I agreed that we hadn’t really seen everything San Francisco had to offer, but that just means more to see next time!

Nearly Home

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I could write about being in Oakland but instead it’s just hit me this morning that our travel days are now down to single digits. One more night in Oakland, two in LA, four in NZ and then we’ll land in Sydney. Mum has arranged to fly us back from Sydney airport to Orange. It’ll save us hanging around in Sydney all day and having to get across the city then spend 4 or 5 hours on a bus back. The plane takes less than an hour so we’ll be in Orange by 5pm.

My housemate, Jess, just posted to Facebook a picture of my dog sitting on her bed in my empty bedroom and all of a sudden I could smell the familiar smells of home and feel the boards under my feet and just couldn’t wait to be there. It’s a wonderful luxury to travel for so long that home is an exciting destination.

I wish I’d thought to take a few photos of my house and my family with me when I went travelling. People are always interested to hear about how others live. Hence the popularity of blogging, I suppose. Right now I am looking forward to everything familiar with a longing I haven’t felt in over a decade.

I wonder how long the newness of being home will last?

Penny!