11/17/18: ECHIDNA

I was in a bit of a mood Friday morning, though I’m not really sure why—not a bad mood, per se, but just feeling a bit..moody. I didn’t have a particular destination in mind when I set out, so I just followed scenic road signs for a while, then ended up on the M31 which is as close as it gets to a highway. I figured I’d get some miles on in service of my goal of getting toward warmer weather. I was listening to the Dr. Death podcast and that didn’t help my mood—it’s wonderfully reported (and the lady sounds JUST LIKE Mary Steenbergen or whatever her name is), but it’s also depressing as all heck. People DIED. People were paralyzed. People’s lives were changed forEVER, and this went on for WAY too long because the system was designed to protect this horrible man. It’s an upsetting story, though very well told.

Sooooooooo I needed gas and I pulled off in Bendalla. I asked the guy at the station if there was a café or anything nearby and he was like, there’s a McDonald’s and a KFC and I said “Are you sure? Nothing else?” and he shrugged and said no, sorry. But it turns out Bendalla has like 50 lovely places that are not chains so, gas station guy, you gotta get out more.

Someone (hi, LGK!) asked me recently how I was doing “speaking Aussie.” I am afraid the answer is, not good. I found a great place to eat in Bendalla but I had to order by pointing at the menu because I can’t bring myself to say the word “brekkie.” People DO actually say “G’day” here. I still haven’t totally figured out what counter-people are saying as a form of greeting—I think it might be something like “Going alright then?” but I can’t be sure. They also talk about “capsicum, “which I think is red pepper; they call red pepper flakes “chili flakes,” and there is something on menus called “dukkah” and your guess is as good as mine. Sometimes, just out of curiosity, I order a coffee, and inevitably I get a confused look and they say "what kind?" and I give up and say "flat white." I am slightly concerned I will get home and have a normal, real coffee and have a heart attack and die. (There are worse ways to go.) 

I was able to take my jacket liner out in Bendalla, and to switch to my summer gloves, and I think that improved my mood a lot. (I was still wearing extra-warm long unders and kept the liners in my pants AND had a wool turtleneck on, but I did ditch the balaclava.) Post-Bendalla I followed a couple of scenic road signs kind of at random, and then holy smokes I ended up in Beechworth, Victoria, and though it was only 2:30 I immediately pulled over to look for a room. This is the first place in Australia that I have immediately felt like, YES. It is so quaint and beautiful here and the motel lady told me I was too late to go on a tour of the jail but I could take myself on a walk around the old insane asylum and so I did. Then I walked around a gorge and a wallaby and I scared the heck out of each other and if I can find a room I would very much like to stay here for another day or two. [Update: I found a room and will be here until Monday morning.]

And yes, I’ve buried the lede: Friday got AMAZING because I got up close with an echidna.

I had previously seen one live echidna on the side of the road and, alas, two dead ones, but today I hit the echidna jackpot and found this one just doing his/her thing. I won’t admit to how much time I spent quietly stalking him/her, though I will acknowledge my attentions were such that s/he finally gave up pretending I wasn’t there and gave me full-on echidna butt until I went away.

Here is a terrible picture where I almost managed to get his/her little snout.

As I was mid-echidna stalking, a woman came walking by, and I surprised both of us by accosting her. “Excuse me,” I said, pointing at the echinda, “So sorry to bother you, but what do you call this?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “Those bushes?”

I pointed out the creature to her and she said “Oh, that’s an echidna.”

I said, “Enchida!”

She said, “Echidna.”

I said, “Eckheeda!”

She said, "Echidna."

We tacitly agreed I would not try to say that word again. We then discussed how adorable echidna are (very), how cute they are when they bobble around (extremely), and I got directions from her and she went off, not seeming alarmed at all to leave a slightly disheveled American stalking an echidna around in the bushes. As for this lil'spiny anteater, I finally left s/he alone when s/he burrowed into the hillside and gave me the butt. Message received, pal.

The insane asylum was a little underwhelming but maybe I was doing it wrong, idk. I did see some interesting birds but they were not interested in me--10/10 my usual bird photography, hitting the button just as they started to fly away. :( 

I cornered one of their kind later in the day when I took a shortcut through an alley and wow does this guy look like a bird vagrant or what?

There were also very incurious cattle, and those dudes can move surprisingly quickly. They also poop all over their tails so even though I got dissed at least I’m not covered in tail poop, COW.  

The walk around the gorge was ridiculous—so beautiful, so wild. There were eucalyptus trees EVERYWHERE, and I couldn’t decide whether to look up for koalas or to the side for wallaby or to the ground for echidna or ahead for snakes.

Uncle Don/Aunt Karen, if either of you are reading please look away—I don’t want you to know how many pictures of this bird I took to get this one (please remember, people, all pictures here are the BEST ONES).

The gorge road was both very lovely and very un-people-populated. I’m pretty good at walking like a ninja, tbh, as I’ve been stalking various animals for my entire lifetime, but I haven’t managed to figure out how not to be startled by sudden movements myself and that is how a wallaby and I managed to mutually terrify: it freaked out and beat (big) feet, and I heard a noise like a horse stomping and panicked and look, wallaby, I am super sorry about that and I hope someday we can sit/ perch down over a beer and laugh about it. This encounter also confirmed for me that macropods are what deer are back home—they’re everywhere and people are always warning you about them on the roads and while the sight of a deer is hardly thrilling I don’t know that I would ever get tired of macropods. Guess the grass really is always greener.

Today, Saturday, I found a place to stay for a little while longer—Beechworth is really cool and I’ve been on the bike for days so it’s nice to not have to unpack/repack for two whole days. Well, really just tomorrow, Sunday, but still. I may have realized a break might be a good idea when I was walking along the gorge road and I thought I heard a car behind me so I tried to check my mirror.  

I stayed at the Armour Motel on Friday night and it was perfect but fully booked for the weekend, so I’m now in a motel that is adjacent to the old insane asylum and it absolutely looks like there might be some insane people still kicking around because I don’t know what else could explain this:

A digression:

This morning, as I was leaving the Armour Motel, I was wrestling the bike out of the spot where the owner had told me I should park, under a carport but in some gravel. (Yet another example of people kindly offering me “safe” places to put the bike but those places require more work than ordinary places and yet I can’t find a way to say no.*)

There was a man there doing yard work and when he saw me trying to muscle through the gravel he shouted “That’s a bloody big bike you’re trying to move there,” and while I repeatedly said “No thanks, I’m good,” he ignored me and came over and grabbed the luggage rack and suddenly the bike was moving backward without me being in total control of that movement.

So, on the one hand, he did help me get the bike back far enough that I could get on and drive it straight forward (only like three feet, Mark the Friendly Australian Motorcycle Guy, if you’re reading this—it was a parking lot, not a gravel road!). On the other, he completely disregarded me refusing his help and put his hands on my property when I specifically said not to. What to do with this guy?

I have been putting down some thoughts about what it’s been like to be a lady rider (we are something like 10% of all motorcycle riders) and this interaction with Yard Work Guy brings up the same question I always have when I have these kinds of encounters: did he feel right in doing what he did because I’m a woman or would he have walked up and done the same to a man? I don’t know how to know the answer to that, but I can’t shake the feeling that me being a woman might be more relevant rather than less.

I moved the bike on to the pavement area which was also in the shade and started packing it up, and Yard Work Guy gave me the usual “Where’re you headed today?” I was feeling a bit peevish so I said shortly “I’m not sure,” and he said “Sounds grand” and walked away. Then I got to the overthinking part.

I assume that YWG feels like he did me a favor, like he helped me out. And, assuming he felt a little frost from me afterward, I’m guessing his reaction was to think I wasn’t very nice, rather than to think “Hmm, I wonder if she is tetchy because I did something she specifically asked me not to do and maybe I shouldn’t have done that?” These are assumptions and guesses, I know, but I feel pretty confident in them. So then I’m thinking well, shit—me being peevish at this man doesn’t give him cause to reflect on his actions, he just assumes I’m a witch.** On the other hand, being friendly to him doesn’t help in suggesting his behavior bothered me, and yet on the third hand, am I really going to start a dialogue about microaggressions with this guy? I was mulling this over while loading up and finally I decided the right thing to do was to assume he had good intentions and to honor those by being friendly to him.

YWG walked by a minute later and I gave him a big grin, which he regarded with some suspicion. He went inside to get a saw and came back out and I announced to him “I figured out where I’m going!”

“Oh yeah,” he said flatly, “where’s that?”

“I’m going to look at some Aboriginal cave art,” I said, brightly.

“What’s that again?”

I repeated myself, and he paused, then got his own back saying, “Aye. It’s pretty hard to see,” and he walked away.

Well, you were right, Mr. Yard Work Guy: it was impossible for me to see as all roads leading there were gravel so I gave it up for a bad job, toured around a bit, then stopped off at a waterfall where I found a bicycle touring group called “Ladies back on your bikes” and this was a group of sixteen women who apparently get together once a year and someone had misplaced the keys to the support van so they were all riding around in circles in the parking lot shouting “Who’s got the keys?” at each other and it turns out we are staying in the same hotel tonight and I am to be seated near them at dinner and they have absolutely washed the slightly bitter taste of my convo with MYWG completely away. Ladies, back on our bikes!

In other news…this town Beechworth is ADORABLE and they have a bakery that is not messing around. They also have a (somewhat tenuous) connection to Ned Kelly and his gang and boy howdy they are making the most of that. I took a tour of the jail today and that was GREAT!

Some fun facts I learned:

• This jail was a jail from 1864 to 2004 (!)
• The cells only got flush toilets in 1994—up until then it was buckets
• The razor wire replaced barbed wire in 1983 but it looks VERY shiny and new
• Cell doors were made higher in the new wing because in 1864 the average man was 5 feet four inches tall so they made the doors proportional in size.
• Prison cells are very small and I would not like to be in one.
• When the prison first opened, they followed a protocol called “silent and separate,” which meant NO TALKING allowed and all the prisoners wore hoods (with eye holes) and had the number of their cell attached to them. When they went in to the yard to break rocks (this was a hard labor prison) the cell number came off and was put on a board. When they came back in, they were handed another cell number at random—they had no personal possessions at all, just the clothes they were wearing, and they had to sleep in whatever cell they were assigned to no matter who had been in it the night before. No. Thank. You.

In addition to (AGAIN) being the only person taking notes during the tour, I was the only one who got to the jail 45 minutes early just in case the tour sold out (the tour did not sell out). I must confess that I did leave the tour before it officially ended, only partially because the guide kept referring to the female prisoners who’d been held there as “girls” while the male prisoners were never “boys.”

I will end this on a less huffy note: YARN! There is a Crestwick store in town and the Crestwick is the oldest still-running woolen mill in Australia. There is a fun facts history exhibit in the back of the store along with wool in all its various stages of production and everything was touchable and so I touched everything and it was lovely.

Then I went around the corner to a joint called the Ardent Alpaca (I’m just not 100% sold on that name tbh) and at first I thought it was only finished products and my little black heart fell but then I found the knitting room and my little black heart soared! I was in there so long a lady came to check on me and I’m guessing either it was my outfit (overpants, Fanny, boots, t-shirt) or the way I was on the floor rearranging one of the shelves so that the yarn was all tidied up that made me a little suspect so I got a friendly grilling and had to drop some knitting knowledge in order to prove I was harmless. I agonized over what to take home as souvenir, and finally settled on Australian-made alpaca which means if I can just find wallaby yarn I will have a complete Australia collection of alpaca, possum, and macropod. (Yes, this picture includes finger--it's a dead giveaway that I am excited.)

As she was ringing me, up the inquisitor yarn lady thought to make sure all 5 skeins were the same dye lot and I said “Oh, don’t worry, I already checked.” This prompted her to tell me a story about how she went to America and bought 20 balls of souvenir yarn while she was there. She had it shipped back to Australia and it wasn’t until the yarn finally arrived, six months later, that she discovered she had 10 of one dye lot and 10 of another. [Non-knitters: this can either be not a big deal at all or can result in visible differences in coloration from one dye lot to another.] This story happened thirty-some years ago and she tells it like it was yesterday—that wound may never heal.

In conclusion, based on three conversations with women of a certain age, we should make the US-Australia Solo Lady Travel Exchange Program official: we all love going to each other’s countries and some of us love buying yarn there. We can get Amtrak to sponsor us and then if somebody gets home to find she has a mix of dye lots, her exchange buddy can go back to the store and get her sorted out. Business plan pending.

*Here is where today’s motel had me park—“You see that, um, weird wire pear thing,” the desk clerk said, “those doors don’t open so just put your bike there.” Okayyyyyyyyy there is a huge parking lot and it seems a little weird to have a motorcycle added to your wire pear décor but your call, desk clerk lady! May everyone entering this building enjoy the sight of this motorcycle. [And then when I went out to get this picture, I discovered motorcycles were multiplying. I have seen several Rocket IIIs in Australia, which I find interesting, as in the US it seems less common (though I do know a guy who owns, I believe, three of them--not all in the US but geez, Rod, you have eclectic taste in motorcycles).]

**I am.

OMG so many pictures!

Ran into this guy on my way to the asylum. 

Excellent graphic!

Beechworth has a pretty lake with duck-things! (Grebes?)

Beechworth also has this bridge from 1875 (!) which was built without mortar and is still in use (!). Beechworth is also famous for being a gold mine town and so that waterfall is a result of miners digging a trace so they could...somethingsomethingsomething get gold. 

Beechworth is full of roses and they smell amazing. 

So too did this repair shop--cut grass and gasoline. 

It is a thing in Australia to take a perfectly good pick-up truck then cut the back part off and make...a pick up truck? 

This is the prison. I know a LOT about its history, so please feel free to send questions. 

This is the exercise yard, which features the guard tower from where they could shoot at people trying to escape. The original prison is to the left and the red-brick wing was added in the 70s and yeah, I am definitely not sure we get to "rehabilitation" this way. 

So much razor wire.

This is the view of the underside of the trapdoor through which eight men were dropped when hanged to death in this prison. 

This is a cell, with flush toilet added. It is not cell 30, where Ned Kelly stayed, because yeesh I was not going to line up to take a picture of a prison cell you gotta draw the line somewhere. 

An 1864 original door. We were told on the tour that in early days there were 50 some guards on duty during the daytime (for about 130 prisoners--this was a small prison) and only one guard there at night. His job was basically to sound an alarm if the place caught on fire otherwise everyone was locked in their cells, period end of story, until morning.

When the addition was put on in the 70s, they also started doubling up. 

On a lighter (?) note, the tour guide said the cells were left exactly as they were when the prison closed in 2004. Here is a close-up of a bunk bed with a Harley-Davidson sticker on it--not sure a Triumph badge is what I would take to prison with me but then again who knows. 

And, just like break rooms all around the world. people have to be reminded not to put metal in microwaves. 

Ned Kelly is famous for, among other things, having made himself a suit of armor. It was apparently cobbled together from plow blades and I think there is something biblical about that but nah I'm not looking it up. Replicas of his helmet and breastplate are everywhere in Beechworth; the real artifacts are now on display in a library, of all places. These are facsimiles and serve as a reminder that Ned Kelly was 25 when he was hanged and if his last words really were "Such is life," the guy did try to give himself a chance at living. He killed policemen but his legacy is complicated; Peter Carey, a writer I very much admire, gave Ned Kelly's story a captivating (fictionalized) account in True History of the Kelly Gang and wow I love books so much.  

I was entranced by the history of the place--it reminded me of Williamsburg (VA, haha)--and then I realized this plaque was on a fake rock that was being used to hide a light and thank you, Brandon, for making me aware of yet another aspect of the world I can obsess over: where is the light coming from???

In conclusion, I couldn't decide whether I wanted to end this with the echidna butt (again) or this justification for the invention of the label maker. I don't understand this, but I assume it is an insult as it was attached to the side of a garbage can. Get your shit together, geoff wadeson, and stop being a hummus.