Dave Orchard's Blog

We spent a fabulous 3 weeks in Australia and our pictures are online. We started in mid January in Melbourne, then 5 days in Tasmania, drove southern "Great Ocean Road" drive, drank in Barossa Valley, swam around Heron Island, and finished off in Sydney. The trip highlights were successfully driving on the opposite site, seeing giant sea-turtles hatch, swimming with sharks and rays, Tasmania's beaches, tree ferns and giant eucalyps, Kangaroos, Wallabees, the visit to Rusden Vineyard, Surfing, and Sydney Opera house.

Melbourne
Melbourne is a truly wonderful city. We had a tremendously good time there. It reminds us a lot of Vancouver - friendly people, great restaurants, climate. It is different in many ways as well: a tram system, less ethnic diversity, a bit distanced from it's water. We loved the zoo with it's Aviary and Butterfly Apiary. We thoroughly enjoyed A Midsummer Night's dream in the Botanical Gardens, and I also got to do an hour of sailing on Albert Lake. I never thought our last summer sailing lessons would come in handy so quickly. We experienced a great sunset in St. Kilda's on the beach and one of our favorite meals was at Viang Viang(Malay/Thai/Vietnamese fusion), with incredible sambal chicken and prawns. Sadly, most of my pictures from the Melbourne Penguins didn't turn out.

It turns out that the first wine store we went into in Melbourne had by far the best deals and most knowledgeable staff. They recommended the Kay Brothers and Sanguine Heathcote that we loved. They charged $39.95 for the Kay brothers, and the Australia Wine Store in Sydney is charging $79.95. Likewise, the Torbreck Run Rig - Parker rated 99 - is $250 in the store, $250 at Torbreck, and $350 at Aussie wine co. We would have bought more there if we had only known that there was such a discrepancy in prices.

Tasmania
Tassie is many diverse areas all in one medium sized island. Many parts of it reminded us of parts of home. Hobart felt like St. John's Newfoundland with it's working port and lengthy history. We did like the wide streets though! The quality of the meats, veggies and cheeses and some of the Tassie wines was outstanding. The dry interior reminded us of the Okanagan valley - there's even the grumpy teenagers who want to get out. The coast reminds us of the Gulf Islands with their incredible views, b&bs, vineyards and specialty produce. And the northern coast reminds us of Newfoundland with the windswept trees and some crashing surf.

Eucalyptus Regnans
A quick trip inland to Mt. Field gave us 3 awesome sites. Russell Falls is a stunningly beautiful falls set in a tropical climate. We then walked through the tall trees of the Eucalyptus Regnans. These trees can grow to more than 100 metres high, and are the tallest hardwoods in the world. Then we drove to the alpine area of Mt Field. Imagine, alpine areas with skiing in Tassie. We were really floored by being in flat alpine as the West coast always has large mountains for alpine. We saw an alpine Wallaby and alpine Eucalyptus as well.

Down the Huon wine trail led us to some gorgeous scenery and our great first food/wine find: The GrandvEwe cheesery and winery. We also stopped at the Hartz mountains alpine area for some stellar (and very hot) hikes.

Freycinet National Park
Freycinet Peninsula contains Wineglass bay, voted one of the top 10 remote beaches in the world, and for darned good reason: it's drop-dead gorgeous and it's a 2 hour hike to get to it. We spent some time on the beautiful Richardson's beach and exploring Sleepy Bay and whitewater walls. We highly recommend the Freycinet Lodge and a cabin overlooking the beach. We did a wine-tasting of Tassie wines and food pairings. Yum. Our favourites are the Stefano Lubiana sparking wine and the Freycinet Oaked Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

Logging
The Tassies have got a real problem with overlogging. We saw 8 logging trucks in about 20 minutes on our drive back towards Hobart. They seem to have very few regulations, replanting or control. They are down to roughly 13% of the old growth forest lefts, and they are losing jobs as the raw logs are exported. I guess it's harder for the tree-huggers to get to Tassie, but I wish they could.

Birthday
Australia is 19 hours ahead of Vancouver, which obviously meant that I got 2 birthdays: birthday on Aus time and then birthday on back home time. It started off with the best run of my life: a loop to wineglass bay, across the isthmus to Hazard's beach, then back on the coast. While running, I also received a number of congratulatory emails for 2 amazing beaches on opposites of a peninsula in 1 run, wow! We traveled most of the day from Freycinet to Hobart then flew to Melbourne, and then the next day I went surfing in Torquay. As a wonderful pressie, Deanna managed to catch me on-camera upright on the board ! A wonderful afternoon and evening finishing in Apollo Bay.

Great Ocean Road
The drive from along the south coast of Victoria is the Great Ocean Road, for the most part a fairly boring drive but had some spectacular rock formations. There are the twelve apostles , the Arch, and London Bridge. While we enjoyed the sites and the towns (like Port Fairy), we thought that the Oregon Coast is more spectacular.

Wine country
We past through Coonawarra on the way to Barossa. A quick 4 vineyard stop where we discovered an Aussie secret: Sparkling red wines. We loved the Yalumba "D" Black Sparkling Shiraz which has a bit of Port to round it out. Coonawarra is a very small area, only 12ks long. Long drive from Port Fairy, Victoria to the Barossa Valley, South Australia. Some nice coastal views then full-on Canadian prairie, just want to get there driving.

Then the big day: a guided tour through Barossa with 49 wines tried in 7 vineyards; Morning was Torbreck, Seppelt's and Henschke. We really liked the Torbreck top end wines, especially the Factor and Run Rig. Seppelt's ports, tokays and muscats were another nice surprise. Afternoon was Saltram's, Rockford, Peter Lehmann, St. Hallett, and Turkey Flat. The picks were definitely the Rockford Basket Press Shiraz and the St. Hallett. Lehmann was actually quite disappointing, their top end wines didn't hold up.

The next day was the exact opposite as we went to only Rusden vineyards. I had tried Rusden 2001 Cab/Shiraz at Stella's restaurant in New Orlean's last year and was just blown away. Afterwards I found that Parker had rated the 2001 Shiraz a 97 and the Cab a 95. Naturally a visit was in order. We had a feeling that things were going to go well when Rusden didn't even have a sign out front. We then spent a wonderful 3 hours with Christian Canute. Chris showed us old family pictures, explained all the expansion from the original shed, and even ranted a bit about the "big growers" and polluting the Barossa name. I love meeting "angry young men". We finished by buying a half case of the 2002 Black Guts Shiraz out of his private stash (the thin layer at the top) that isn't in stores now. The experience got even better when I spent some time with Amy trying to get a fax working, and their daughters loved our online pictures.

We had a great lunch at Bar Vinum, which was the best of the Barossa restaurants in our opinion.

Heron Island
Five days on Heron Island were the most amazing wilderness experience we've ever had. The Noddy Terns and MuttonBirds were breeding which meant the island was covered in roughly 60 000 birds. This meant the expected amounts of guana and noise. You have no idea how much noise tens of thousands of birds can make….

We went snorkeling on Wilson island where we saw incredible coral, Cuttle fish, eels, many tropical fish and a ray. We awoke one morning to find a momma giant sea-turtle had laid her clutch almost on our deck , then turtle clutch hatched, one little guy even stopped for a tan! The hatching was probably the highlight of our trip. We saw many green and leatherback momma turtles laying their clutch - I even almost got run over by one when I was looking at the stars and she was done her business. Diving and snorkeling highlights were Pilot whales, sharks, turtles swimming, jumping rays, Giant Shovelnose ray, Cowtail Stingrays, Pink Whiprays, Manta rays, hidden rays, barracudas, amazing corals and tropical fishes and even the inspiration for finding Nemo. It seemed like every 3 hours we had an experience we'd never had before.

Sydney
Sydney was the last stop on our trip and we went all out, staying at the Shangri-la hotel. It had an incredible view that we enjoyed pretty much every night. We had a great zoo experience: pictures with Koalas, platypus in action, Tassie devils, and a great air show. What a great location for a zoo. We then went shopping on George and Oxford street where we did some serious damage to the credit cards. I let the waves beat me up again when we went to famous Bondi beach for surfing. The Sydney opera house was a great visit where we saw Tosca. A big problemo was that the opera house was pretty hot inside which distracted us from the performance. It's also comforting to know that they've kept up the tradition of offering the worst of the local wines, Deanna's Mount Adam Riesling tasted like diesel. We had wonderful dinners at BlackPool and Billie Kwong. We bought Kylie Kwong's cookbook, and made the declicous Sizzling Beef at home. We finished off our trip with arguably the best meal in our life, a 4 hour 12 course extravaganza at Tetsuya. The signature dish of the rainbow trout and trout roe on dykon with parsley oil was from Heaven.

Wines
All told, we tried over 100 different wines in 3 weeks. By the end, we think we're ready for beer for a while :-) The wine highlights of our trip are the sparkling Shirazes from Yalumba and St. Hallett, Tassie Chardonnays especially Freycinet, Kay Brothers Amery Hillside Shiraz, Rusden hospitality and wines, Rockford Basket Press Shiraz, St. Hallett Old Block, and how good the Torbreck upper end wines really are. We've been trying to get many of these wines at home and it's been quite difficult. The complete list of Australian wines tried on our trip is separate.

End of the trip
We had a wonderful time and really enjoyed Australia, a worthy vacation spot.