2019/11 Australia trip - Stawell & Beehive Falls |
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Sunday November 24th
We had a warm and sunny start as we made our way across Melbourne and took the motorway west, the route towards Adelaide. We’ve driven 
the route twice before and it now has a lot more of the motorway sections completed.
Along the way we spotted Santa’s sleigh with his team of kangaroos!
We stopped for lunch at Mount Buangor, a state park protecting an area of forested mountain scenery. Given that the national parks are managed by the states it seems odd to have state parks too, but I guess the states can allow dogs or hunting in the state parks if they want to. It was a pretty park, as shown below, but we didn’t try any of the mountain trails.
We checked in at the motel in Stawell. The manager was a young Vietnamese lady; she was fascinated to hear that all of John’s immediate neighbours are Vietnamese too. I don’t think John’s picked up the language yet though. The rooms were good but a bit noisy with the traffic on the main road.
We drove to the Rose Gap Road and turned into the park and drove close to Hollow Mountain, which is just that, a mountain 
with a high cavern and windows that look out on the surroundings. The other mountains around seem to have the same kind of erosion, lots of holes.
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Beehive Falls (0.29) |
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We hiked to Beehive Falls. John remembered it as a short hike, but perhaps the parking lot had been moved as the walk was about a mile and the last section was steep and difficult, tough on John. The area around the falls was pretty with rocks and shrubs around a pool but the flow wasn’t much more than a dribble.
The area seemed to have had some rain though; there were plenty of different flowers along the trail. 
We ate dinner at the Hong Kong Chinese/Malaysian restaurant. Too late we discovered that it was BYOB and we didn’t have a B to bring, but the food was good. On our way back we found the town’s park and lake and a healthy population of ducks and black swans.