2010/11 Australia trip - Marysville |
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We stopped at the Goulburn River for a dinner of leftovers and drove on to Melbourne in the dark. We rolled into Mulgrave at about nine with enough time to talk about the trip and splash around in the hot tub until the early hours. I don’t remember what caught the bathers’ eyes, a passing possum perhaps.
Friday November 5th
Reluctantly we started the big cleanup, with Sandie working on the suitcases and washing while I tried to scrape six weeks of crud off the Troopie’s exterior. Fortunately the copious rain had made my job easier than on our last trip.
John spotted a hole and probably a concussion fracture in one of our front tyres, so we must have hit harder than we thought on one of those rock roads.
Saturday November 6th
Saturday was warm and sunny and John took us up to the hills around Marysville, one of the towns that was almost wiped out in the deadly fires of February 2009. First though we had a long pause at a Spotlight store, the Australian equivalent to Joanne’s Fabrics.
The areas that had escaped the fires were as beautiful as ever with the massive and straight mountain ash gums and a dense understory of man-ferns. In the burned areas the trees were sprouting new leaves for their entire length as there was no shade yet from the neighbouring trees. Many of the ferns had already grown back to their former lush layer. 
Towns like Marysville had been almost destroyed so nearly all the buildings are new. The town is coming back but it’ll never be the same as it was.
We went to Steavenson Falls, a big waterfall, much easier to see now that the surrounding foliage has been burned away. 
John took us on to Cathedral Ranges state park. Although all parks are administered by the states, state parks are not subject to the same rules as national parks, and they allow logging and hunting, similar to North America’s state forests. John and I took a muddy hike up to La La Falls, not a very dramatic falls, but worth the walk up through the ferns. A good day out.