Winos at The DAG
Trip Start
Nov 05, 2002
1
36
69
Trip End
Aug 13, 2003
Nundle and The Hunter Valley,
Australia
Saturday, May 3, 2003
Leaving Tamworth we continued our trip south, in glorious sunshine I might add, and arrived in a remote place called Nundle. It's a tiny place these days (a blink and you'll miss it sort of place) but seemingly during the Oz gold rush of the mid
1800's it was a hive of activity. There are a few preserved mines still around the place these days offering to show tourists what the life back then was like but on the day we tried to visit one it was closed...... well actually we couldn't find the place after a hour hike in the woods so we said bugger this and hit the road again! The options for accommodation in Nundle were thin on the ground and we ended up spending the night on a real live working sheep station! Boy, we'll never forget that night! During our stay we watched a performance of 2 lovely collie dogs, under the guidance of a sheep dog handler, round up a dozen or so sheep from a field and guide them into a pen in the shearing shed. It all looked so professional and ran so smoothly one would be forgiven
for thinking the whole thing was put on for us paying guests, especially when you consider the handler was a 6 foot tall Swedish blond in tight denims and a cowboy hat! But no, it was real; after all sheep are too stupid and/or innocent to be trained in such a way! After that it was into the shearing shed for a shearing demonstration by the local shearing champ Marshall Jnr. He was a real outback Oz character with one outback joke or pun after another. He was great for a laugh and still managed to get the whole sheep sheared, without a single cut, in about 5 minutes flat! He told us under normal working conditions, when he gets paid $2 per sheep, he could do it in about 2 minutes! Then it was over to us. First thing to do was to 'toss' the sheep (I'll thank you to
keep all jokes to yourself!) by going into the pen, selecting a suitable sheep for shearing and dragging the poor thing out on its arse (Note for those interested in such things.. this renders them helpless!) to be sheared. I'll leave it up to your imagination as to how we did that! Anyway, after we all had a go with the shears the poor sheep was cut all over and we realised how hard a thing it is to do.
So a good time was had there before heading ever closer to Sydney via the nearby Hunter Valley which is the main wine producing area of Australia. We spent the first night in a place called Denman before getting up bright eyed and bushy tailed for the mandatory tour of a vineyard (Tyrrell's). Of course couldn't leave without purchasing a crate of our favourite bottle from the cellar door. Hey, we may be backpackers but a good deal is a good deal no matter what! The wine was so cheap (mainly because, unlike at home, the Australian government decides not to screw the public) that the price from the door was a bargain that couldn't be passed up. Well, that's our excuse anyway! Continuing on, and with the newly purchased wine bottles rattling in the back, we rejoined the coast and arrived in Newcastle, a very industrial looking city just north of Sydney. Getting a nice cabin in a local van park we enjoyed the night, not to mention some of the wine, and prepared for our assault on Sydney in the morning!
Will report with the details soon.
Cheers
Dave
