Australia (English)

I don't really know what I expected, but within a week, Australia has shown me the beauty, diversity and the good people of her land. Plus that the combination of the three also makes a whole lot of good food, wines and pale ales. They do makes some pilsners, but no, I've been too Belgianised to really give them credit. Sorry.

The story of my flight here will have to wait. I'm still too upset to 'be nice'. So...

The Great Ocean road is an experience no matter what age, sex, colour or creed you might be.
We (my good friends Adrian, probably the finest chef I know, and Rowan, who works in the heart- and ruthless world of advertising, but still comes across as a nice-ish person) set off from Glen Waverley in Melbourne on a crisp and beautiful Sunday morning. Before turning in at the fantastic fishing town of Robe some 12 hours and 1000 kilometres later, we'd been to Bells Bay (where the last scene in Breaking point were filmed), through cowboy country in Lavers Hill, seen the 12 Apostles, London Bridge and The Gorge, all by Port Campbell, swankered about the boutique- town of Lorne and not only turned down the surfing museum at Bells Bay, but also the shell museum (oh yes!) after lunch at Apollo Bay. We found a nice spot on the beach at Apollo Bay, opened the 'eski' (cooler box) and had a nice little lunch. Quickly joined by about 62 thousand seagulls. Ah well, I was gingerly told that if you 'feed' them Alka Seltzers, they blow up. We didn't do that, though. We're not that cruel. Or sufferers of heart-burn. Thankfully...

Unfortunately, the only kangaroos we saw the first day were road-kill. I'd never seen a roo, so it was pretty sad to see these creatures lying by the side of the road.
I've later learned that the kangaroos look at us humans as dogs. We're just like any other animal that crosses their way, as they don't really have any natural predators. So we are dogs to them. Which gives me a theory why they get run over by cars alot. They stay by the side of the road and can see a car coming in the distance. The kangaroo thinks to itself "I can make that. Easy" and then proceeds to hop along over the road. It leisurely looks over its shoulder towards the car and stops dead in its tracks. Puzzled, the roo thinks "Fuck me, there's a dog driving that car". And then gets run over.

McLaren Vale is one of the prettiest little towns I've been to, surrounded by fields apon fields of grapevines. All the wineries have 'cellar-doors', which basically is a wine- tasting if you're out to build up your wine cellar or a free piss-up if you're not. There's not only the notion of purple poo the next day, but they do some fantastic wines in the area also (and McClaren breweries make an awesome Vale Ale).
Dowie Doole has a Reserve Shiraz 2008 which is just heaven. Primo Estate has a Nebbiolo that blew us away. They have the fanciest cellar door too and brought out wines from the museum for us to taste. Primo also provided a little snack platter of home- made bread, self-produced olive oil and Parmesan cheese. The owners' daugther is married to a Norwegian, which can't be all bad either.
At Pertaringa the nice woman at their cellar door turned out to be Norwegian!!! I can tell you we turned a few heads when we started speaking IKEAn. "Fluu bee dupp i duu, de tuu te tuu. Muu blee te bluu ha pi nu beep beep beep!!". And we laughed and laughed....

One day I was in Robe, two days later, I'm IN a robe. McCracken Country Club by Victor Harbour was a magnificent place. Our room overlooking the golf course. We didn't get to play, though. We got caught up having jacuzzis and massages at the spa. Maybe next time, eh?

Being stopped by the police usually is a scary experience. Especially when you might have been driving a bit too fast. Then there's the police officer who has provided me with this conversation:
Officer: Do you have trees, cows or kangaroos in Victoria?
Driver: Eh....
Officer: No? Well, SLAADAAAWN (slow down).
Then he walked away. Good man, me thinks.

The township of Hamilton is.... eh.... Lets just say that the cockroaches and rats have already checked out and left. Our room had not been renovated since the 1960's. Beds are bed, fair dinkum, but clean the carpet, mate! The steak was ok, but the salad bar, well, you could fit all the veg in a teacup. Not a mug, a cup.They did do a brilliant vanilla milkshake- cum- breakfast at 06.45, though. That's right, I was up at 06.45, heading out of 'Dodge(y) city'. They also have redback spiders in their hotel toilets too, you see.
We decided that a proper brekkie was in place, so the Royal Mail Hotel in Dunkeld was the next stop. I think they put us down as having spent the night in a tent. We did look a bit like we'd just rolled down the volcano at Mt. Rouse by Penshurst (by the way, there's redback spiders there too, neatly tucked in under the railings).
Eggs Benedict and Eggs Florentine was good, but the best thing was the expression on the face of the woman who tried to pick up the jug of milk just as I was, when we both were making our tea. She's not accustomed to other peoples low growls apparently. Well, she is now anyway...

They put these signs up by the road here. It shows an image of a koala. So you think, 'Hey, there's koalas in these trees here' and then you start to look out the window of the car. After an hour or two of not seeing a single shape that might be a koala, I've come to this conclution:
The road signs are put up simply to get peoples attention up into the trees and away from, albeit very small spots of, crap scenery in Australia. "There's a patch of boring scenery on one side coming up, right, let's put up a koala sign and some trees on the other side. That'll fool them". Well, it didn't fool me. There are so such things as koalas. Now, you might think "Wait a minute, I've seen koalas at the zoo. They do exist". No they don't!
Koalas are lonely dwarfs in furry suits that hug trees for a living.
Amy at the koala pen at the Healesville santuary held up a brave face when I said I knew 'their' secret, even if I couldn't see the zippers, but I could see past her nervous little smile and big teeth that she knew that I'd cracked the Australian koala/ dwarf conspiracy.

And that's Australia for you, really. Beautiful (and vast) scenery, nice people, deadly spiders, flattened kangaroos, red dogs that eat babies and dwarfs in suits.

Fair dinkum to them