The first weekend after break was a pretty busy one. On Friday I went to a jam session at at pub called the Drunken Poet and then to the opening performance of the Melbourne Festival. The festival was started as a sister festival to the Spoleto festival in Charleston and the one in Italy. They were all founded by Gian Carlo Menotii and the Melbourne Festival was called Spoleto Melbourne - Festival of the Three Worlds. The opening performance for this years festival was outside in Alexandra Gardens near the river and featured a group of acrobats from Spain who did a bunch of ariel acts on a giant metal ball hoisted into the air by a crane in time with a live music act. It was great fun.
On Saturday I went on a day hike with a few people from the Mountaineering Club to the Cathedral Ranges. The area had been badly burned during the bushfires in February 2009 but it was already coming alive with tons of wildflowers and ferns and other small plants. The hike was mostly along the rocky ridge line so there was a lot of scrambling over rocks and it was a really nice hot sunny day.
K@osmos at the Melbourne Festival
lunch break on the rocks
wildflowers
up on top
view of the ridge line
really tall gum trees on the walk back to the car
That evening I went to the Victorian Folk Music Club 40th Anniversary Woolshed Ball. I had a lot of fun dancing and even played a few tunes with the band!
The next weekend I went to the Grampians with the Mountaineering club for a two day bushwalk on the Major Mitchell plateau. The hike was a lot of fun! We rolled in Friday night at 11:30 and went straight to bed. It rained a lot that night but we stayed perfectly dry in my tent. When I woke up there were like 20 eastern grey kangaroos wandering around munching on grass and maybe 30 sulfer-crested cockatoos making a huge racket. I think over the course of Saturday and Sunday we walked 23 kilometers with a elevation change of around 550 meters. The Grampians are a funny mountainous area that just sticks up out of nowhere almost. They were heavily burned in the January 2006 bushfires so it was interesting to see the progression of growth a few years later from what I saw at the Cathedral Ranges the weekend before. It rained and sleeted and snowed on and off on Saturday but the snow didn't really stick because the Grampians aren't high enough in altitude. The higher parts of the plateau looked very similar to the Hartz Peak area in Tasmania. I guess usually the Major Mitchell plateau and the Grampians in general are very dry so it was kinda special to see them flowing with water.
After we set up camp in the rain on Saturday and were cleaning up after dinner, some lost day hikers wandered through our camp. They had taken like 6 wrong turns and seeing as the trail was not too well marked and it was dark, we had to find a way to squish them in to the 4 two person tents we had brought for 8 people. Sunday the weather was actually quite decent with the exception of the freezing wind at the higher altitudes. We pretty much walked downhill the whole day and actually got some sunshine!
Eastern Grey Kangaroos just outside my tent!
back on top
a ridge across the valley
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