si dawson

Being a busy Thurs­day, I decided what bet­ter to do than bug­ger off out of town & head to the local mountain/forest range.

(Some) locals call these "the nongs", but offi­cially they're the Dan­de­nong Ranges. It's about an hours drive east of where I live.

Any­way, they're green, and, you know, moun­tainy. That's all I care about. Thurs­day was one of those days where I def­i­nitely needed more green.

So what do they look like? Great ques­tion. I'm glad you asked, because I have pic­tures, noth­ing but pic­tures, just for you. Really, just you!

Before you enter the ranges, there are impor­tant notices to pay atten­tion to. Note the pic­ture. I was relieved my arms & legs would still be attached when I'd left. I was less sure about my head.

There are lots of these. Birds in Aus­tralia are very bright, and make par­tic­u­larly unusual sounds. I'm not sure why. Maybe because there are croc­o­diles ('crocs') here. Not the kind you wear on your feet, although they have those too. The kind that eat your feet. If I had neigh­bours like that, I'd make weird noises too.

Here's a tree that utterly cap­ti­vated me. Bizarre thing is, it's actu­ally dead (or per­haps just fak­ing it very well). It still man­aged to be incred­i­bly majes­tic. The stun­ning blue sky back­drop helped. There was a nat­ural clear­ing right next to this which seemed a great place to hang out for an hour, lying in the sun, lis­ten­ing to birds com­plain­ing about our intru­sion & watch­ing the trees sway in the gen­tle breeze.

Here's what walk­ing through the Dan­de­nongs is like. 'nuff said.

A pecu­liar­ity of Aus­tralian trees is that they nat­u­rally lose their bark in sum­mer months. This cre­ates a ton of kin­dling which helps spur bush fires in the under­growth. If the fires hap­pen reg­u­larly enough, then the forests as a whole are spared. How this evolved just bog­gles my mind, but man, it's awe­some. You can see in the above pics a whole stand of trees where the fires have come through — the trees are still alive, and the burn marks go about 20 feet up the trees.

Here's a close up — an alive tree, but the entire inside has burnt out. Crazy, crazy coun­try this.

I also saw a camo goat.

& in case you had trou­ble spot­ting the goat in the above pic, here's a close up. You're welcome.

So any­way, after walk­ing for, I dunno, 4 or 5 hours, leav­ing from a town called Sas­safras, we ended up in a town called Olinda. Umm. We were try­ing to go back to Sas­safras, hon­est. Mid­dle of the day, being pretty care­ful to back­track as accu­rately as pos­si­ble, and still ended up one town over. Sure am glad it wasn't rain­ing. Or dark. Or full of man eat­ing goats.

Turns out there's an award win­ning pie-ary in Olinda.

Oh, and if you're curi­ous (I know you are) a pie floater con­sists of pea soup, with a meat pie float­ing in it, all cov­ered in tomato ketchup. It's a lot tastier than it sounds — I had one once. My Dad used to live on them.

Not the best choice for a raw food­ist, but I fig­ured we were in pie coun­try now.

I had a salad.