166 – 173. Hunter Valley II

Some workmates of Isla’s were going up to the Hunter for the weekend and kindly asked us to come along. Two nights in an old villa, copious amounts of wine and 10 people making fools of themselves meant that it would have been rude not to join them. We headed up on the Friday night courtesy of the chauffeuring skills of Steven and Jo but none of us had eaten dinner so we went looking for an eatery. We had taken the back road to the Hunter as it was quite a bit faster however, the trade off was that there was no signs of civilisation for miles. As the wheels ate up the tarmac we continued to starve until we eventually came across the prestigiously named Mangrove Country Club.

This place truly was a sight to behold. We pulled into the car park – or should I say gravel pit – out in front and made our way into the corrugated iron building that looked much like a scout hall. Inside was just as rustic and had the appearance of a dilapidated youth club where a mix of elderly people, hicks and their rug rats sat around wobbly tressle tables. There was even a broken down stage where I’m sure the locals (all 12 of them) would have held their annual talent show.

Surprisingly there was a bar in the centre of the hall run by a bloke from Nottingham and we asked if it would be possible to get some food. He said “Yeah, we’ve got a Chinese over there,” and pointed towards the door. We all walked back outside and went looking round the car park but there were no other buildings in sight. Totally confused we went back to the bar thinking at least we could have a drink and some crisps however, literally a hole in the wall revealed itself to be the “Chinese” and we had walked right passed it.

The food was actually not too bad and I have to say that I really enjoyed the Chicken Chow Tourist and Steven’s Mongolian Road-kill looked delightful. Soon we were back on the road and soon after arrived at the delightful Mulla Villa. The others already had the log fire going and the wine was flowing by the bottle. Before we knew it the clock had gone past midnight and everyone dribbled off to bed.

We didn’t get a chance to have a long lie as the crazy pet goose started honking as soon as the sun came up. To say the Villa was cold was a bit of an understatement and as we tucked into our cooked breakfast everyone’s breath hung in the air. There was only one cure for the cold and that was to head to the vineyards and start tasting.

166. Nightingale Wines
When we first arrived in Sydney we went out for dinner in Darlinghurst and picked up bottle of this vineyards Merlot. It was one of the most memorable of all the wines I’ve ever drank but unfortunately we’ve never been able to find it again so when people were asking if we had any requests we put in for a trip to Nightingale.

It was our first stop of the day and I have to say I was a bit disappointed. They wines just didn’t taste as good as I remembered however some of that might have been due to the amount I’d drank the night before so we bought a couple of bottles just to be on the safe side.

167. Margan Wines
This, our second stop of the day, is where things began to loosen up and people were getting right into their tasting – some more than others. Steven got me tasting the dessert wines (or “sticky wines” as they are nicknamed) and it wasn’t long till I was hooked. Fraser – who would become my partner in crime over the course of the day – realised that the dessert wines would provide us with easily drinkable liquid refreshment between vineyards so we stocked up and got drinking.

It was a bit of a shame for Nessa (Fraser’s wife) as we divided ourselves into “the Boys Car” and “the Girls Car” and since she was pregnant and therefore not tasting she ended up having to drive the lads around and ergo put up with all our antics and general bad behaviour. I’m told the girls car was a lot more civilised.

So we polished off a full bottle of sticky wine on the way to the next vineyard. Fraser however had a cold sore so he wasn’t allowed to drink out of the bottle and had to steal his own “plague glass” from one of the tastings so that he didn’t contaminate the wine.

168. Blue Tongue Brewery
I was so happy when we got to stop here to taste some beers since the last time we were in the Hunter we had to leave our wine tour early in order to get the bus back to Newcastle and therefore missed this brewery. This place was set up to get people drunk. $10 got you a paddle of 6 different beers and when you returned the paddle you were given a free glass of a beer of your choice. I opted for the ginger beer which has been a favourite of mine for the last few months.

Once we’d sunk a few beers people were beginning to get hungry so we made a move to another vineyard whom we knew would let us eat our packed lunch there before doing another tasting.

169. Terrance Vale Wines
The manageress of the Mulla Villa had prepared us 2 huge hampers which contained breads, meats, cheeses, pates, salads and fruits. There was far too much food but everyone did their best to make a dent in the supplies but soon we gave up and went into Terrance Vale to taste some more wines.

I don’t think many of us were impressed with the wine from here but since they’d let us eat our lunch outside we felt obliged to by a few. Thankfully a few of the others picked up some bottles so I didn’t have to.

170. Brokenwood Wines
This was our last stop of the day and by this point everyone was looking a bit worse for wear. That didn’t stop us buying some more sticky from this place (which unfortunately came in a 750ml bottle instead of the usual 250 – 350ml) and then playing the board game “Pass Out” in the car on the way home. It only took a few minutes for the bottle to disappear and the “Plague Glass” so more than its fair share of refills.

All this left Fraser as a dribbling idiot and when we stopped in at a pub in a town called Woolombi to watch the All Blacks play the Wallabies, things just went from bad to worse. We only managed about 3 pints during the whole match but that was sufficient to take the drunkenness to the next level. I’ll not go into details but suffice it to say there was much profanities and general ungentlemanly conduct especially since both Fraser and Michelle are Kiwis and New Zealand won the game.

We got back to the Villa shortly after the game finished and by the time we had finished dinner Fraser had to be put to bed. The rest of us managed to stay up till the wee hours and gossiped in front of the open fire before calling it a night.

171. Stonehurst / Cedar Creek Wines
There were a few sorry looking people when we started Sunday’s tasting at this place. It was a tiny little cellar door and apparently the whole place had been underwater during the recent floods and were selling water damaged bottles at half price. I couldn’t stomach anything and just had a soft drink instead but I’m told the wines were quite good.

172. Pooles Rock Wines
The penultimate stop for the day and I had a new experience here – late harvest wine. This is grapes that have been left on the vine slightly longer and picked late. It makes the wine slightly sweeter and a bit stronger but not a sticky as the dessert wines. I had to by a couple of bottles and I’m looking forward to supping on those at a later date.

173. Audrey Wilkinson Wines
This was the last vineyard on our second tour of the Hunter Valley and it was great. The views were spectacular as it was located on top of a hill with an unobscured 360 degree vista. The wines were pretty good to and it’s the only place where I’ve seen the Zinfandel grape since leaving the UK. We ended up with a couple of those and the Cab / Malbec which was astounding.

After Audrey’s we went for lunch back at the Blue Tongue and then left the Hunter for the second time. Everyone had a fantastic weekend and it was definitely memorable one. We brought home 18 bottle of brilliant wines and at the Blue Tongue my card was rejected as I’d exceeded my daily transaction allowance so I’m not looking forward to checking my bank balance. Hopefully there will be some money left for our travels to Queensland this week!

165. Longboarding

My friend Angus has about 4 long boards and when he’s not snowboarding they allow him a similar (although more painful) experience even in the centre of Glasgow. In essence they are long skateboards used for cruising and carving the roads and hills as opposed to pulling the tricks associated with conventional skate boarding. Back home there has been a great deal of chatter about them and many people are now getting into longboarding.

After spending some time on eBay Oz and Australian Gumtree I realised that I could probably pick up a second hand board here for next to nothing and since Sydney is so full of great hills I felt it would be a waste not to. Besides, it would let me get a taste and see if I really wanted to take it up as a hobby. I emailed a chap called Chris who was advertising a pretty-much unused board and went into the City to check it out.

It was basically a plank of wood with 4 wheels but on closer inspection it had good Invader trucks and new 80mm Kryptonic wheels with ABEC III bearings so if nothing else these alone were worth the $140 (£55) that I talked him down to. It crossed my mind that the deck, which seemed durable but quite pointlessly heavy could always be replaced at a later date with a more up to date one.

He talked me through the basics and showed me “how it goes” but I was too embarrassed to have a shot in front of him having only shoogled on Angus’ a few times in his hall. I was sure nailing myself on the pavement outside Central Station was not where I wanted to make my longboarding début. So I paid the cash and scuttled home with the board under my arm.

We had decided to get a DVD out that night and I saw it as a prime opportunity to test my new toy since it would be dark (so nobody could see me) and as there were several decent hills on the way to Blockbuster. It only took me about 5 minutes to find a hill that I was confident a beginner could ride so without gloves, pads or a helmet I put the board down in the middle of the tarmac and got on.

The next few seconds are a bit hazy but my last vivid memory are the words of my longboard vendor going through my head, “Now these wheels are really fast so be careful. The last guy I sold a board to wasn’t and he totally mashed up his hand on his first ride!”

The board started moving and I made one turn then another. I thought things were going great until I tried to make a third turn and realised that I was going too fast to jump off and I had no idea how to stop the thing. My forth and fifth turns and every one after that were more like wobbles and they started to happen with increasing frequency until I was zig-zagging down the street with the only hope of stopping arriving with the next car to turn into road ahead of me. Luckily that didn’t happen and I somehow stayed vertical. Thankfully there was a slight rise towards the next junction that slowed me enough to allow me to jump off.

To say I was traumatised was an understatement but the adrenalin buzz from that 30 second run was unbelievable and now I’m hooked.

162 – 164. Crocodile Pizza, Outback Pale Ale and the Sydney Observatory

162. Crocodile Pizza
We had been planning to go the Observatory for ages but with all the rubbish weather we’d put it off on the assumption that we would see very much with the recent dense cloud cover. Eventually however, we took a gamble and decided to book ourselves onto the 8:15pm tour on a Friday night.

This gave us time before hand to get a quick bite in and we found ourselves in the much recommended Australian Hotel in the Rocks. This place is famous for it’s gourmet pizzas (which are all the rage in Sydney). In various restaurants so far I’ve had pumpkin and goats cheese, Thai prawn and Moroccan lamb to name a few so when I saw Saltwater Croc Pizza on the menu I knew what I’d be having.

I’ve never tasted crocodile meat before and it’s kind of hard to describe. Everyone says “it tastes just like chicken,” but I don’t think that they’ve got it quite right. It’s more of an absence of taste and although this was basted in Thai spices it really didn’t hold the flavours well. As for the consistency, well it was somewhere between prawns that had been over-cooked and chicken that had been undercooked but still quite chewy. I’m not sure I’d order it again but I can’t help thinking that a big steak of it done on a BBQ in some kind of barbeque marinade would be awesome.

163. Outback Pale Ale
Smoothness 5
Cost 4
Piss-Factor 4
Aftertaste 3
Coolness 4

This drink scored high and I can honestly say that it’s the most rapidly disappearing beer I’ve drank here. If it’s possible to describe a beer as “more-ish” then this is it. After the first mouthful the rest was positively inhaled in a flurry of hoppy frothiness. An absolute delight and best of all was that it was recommended on the menu to go with Croc Pizza so a bit of a fluke in finding this one. Mind you, since it’s sooo good it’s probably on there to distract you from the blandness of the pizza – did a good job!

164. The Sydney Observatory
This was fascinating. Isla had been going on about it for a while and I have to say that I was expressed only half-hearted interest. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as absolutely intrigued by the goings on in space as the next person but the observatory is in the middle of the city and I thought there would be no way we would see anything due to Sydney’s light pollution. I was completely wrong.

We had a great tour guide called Jeff and at the start he took us outside and we did some stargazing from the Observatory grounds. He had a ridiculously powerful laser pointer that allowed him to point out the different constellations and everyone in the group was gob smacked with the things he showed us. We saw the Southern Cross and the Pointer Stars, we could see Orion (although he’s doing a handstand down here!) and he showed us Sagittarius and Scorpio including the heart of Scorpio which is an orange sun called Antares (which means “Rival of Mars” in Greek so named due to its similar colour). We also saw Star 1 which is Alpha Centauri – the closest star to the Earth, a measly 4.35 light years away.

Next we went into the South Dome to look at one of the oldest working telescopes in the world. This 4 meter long refraction telescope had to be manually positioned and took a lot of tinkering but still it was fascinating to look through. One of the interesting things we saw was that Alpha Centauri is in fact 2 stars (A and B) and they are so close together that the naked eye sees them as one. There is actually a third star in the Alpha Centauri group called Alpha Centauri C but its orbit around the other 2 is huge and is actually much closer to us than A and B hence its other name Proxima Centauri. At 4.22 light years away it’s still ridiculously far although the width of our galaxy is 1000 light years so that makes it seem a stones throw.

Next we wondered into the North Dome and had a look at a modern Reflection Telescope. This was totally cool as it was plugged into a PC and you just had to select the star you wanted to see and it automatically moved to the correct position. Not only that but it tracked the object across the sky so despite the rotation of the earth you never lost what you were looking at.

Through this we were able to see a cluster called the Jewel Box which was unusual as it had many colours in it. Normally things seen through a telescope are black and white as there isn’t enough photons to generate colour and your retina cannot build up what little photons there are. The photos you see of stars which are in colour have been taken with long exposures and multiple light filters (and some dabbling on Photoshop I’m sure!). The suns in the Jewel box are so powerful that they emit enough colour for us to see – blue for new stars and red/orange for older ones with white in the middle.

Finally we were shown Jupiter and 4 of it’s moons which was mind blowing. You could make out the dark bands of the equatorial rings and with the eye of faith you could even see the red (grey) spot and all this through a tiny 1 metre long reflection telescope. What was most breath taking was seeing the moons in a perfectly straight line, 3 on one side of Jupiter and 1 on the other which must have been startling to the first astronomers to look at it. In fact Galileo almost got hung for his heresy when he first observed these moons orbiting Jupiter with therefore negated the theory that Earth was the centre of the Universe and everything revolved around it. I wonder if Londoners are aware of this fact yet?

Finally we went to the little 3D cinema they have there and saw some fascinating photos that have been taken over the years including the one that was generated when the Hubble Telescope was pointed into a supposedly empty part of space for two and a half days. The end result was a picture of thousands upon thousands of galaxies going on and on and on. It really was quite difficult to fathom and certainly a museum that gets you thinking. If you ever get the chance then go visit an observatory like this one and I guarantee you’ll be impressed.