Wine and Wombats

On what turned out to be the first rainy, but cool, day of our stay in Melbourne, we went with Tom and Leah northeast of Melbourne to the rural Yarra Valley.  They had borrowed a friend’s car the night before so we made our way slowly out of the city and then faster through the sprawl of Melbourne’s suburbs on the freeway.  The Yarra Valley has rolling hills covered in pastures, vegetable crops, apple orchards and vineyards.  We stopped at two wineries.  The first, Punt Road, had a small, modern tasting room and we stood along one side of the bar to taste several wines.  They had a crisp, dry sparkling white and several chardonnays.  The region is known for its pinot noirs but they also make merlot, shiraz and cabernet.  I wasn’t all that impressed by the red wines but the pinot had promise to my taste.  It had just been bottled last year.

Lunch at Yarrawood

We continued up the road to Yarrawood, a slightly larger vineyard with a pretty dining room and patio overlooking the vines.  We sampled a few more wines including a very good rose made with pinot noir grapes.  With lunch I had a glass of Verdelho, dry and smooth without the aftertaste chardonnay often has.  It accompanied my meal of crumb coated flatfish tails over a leek and potato rosti and pea shoots with green goddess dressing.  Flatfish tails are the tail end of the fish, but were not at all bony.  Jake and Tom shared a platter of roasted vegetables, cheeses, ham, olives, bread, crackers and spreads and Leah had arrancini.

A sleeping wombat

From Yarrawood it was about a 10 minute drive to the cute looking town of Healesville and to the Healesville Animal Sanctuary just outside of town.  The sanctuary specializes in rescuing and conservation of native Australian fauna.  It has a large and very modern hospital where you can watch the vets do surgery and lab work.  There are exhibits of many rare Australian animals that are being bred or are unable to be released to the wild.  The exhibits are set in a natural Australian bush setting with a few large Eucalyptus trees and many smaller trees and shrubs.  Badger creek runs through the preserve and is home to wild animals including the platypus.

Dingo and a marrema breed dog

Jake watching the huge pelicans

wallaby

We watched keepers feed one of the Tasmanian devils and give a brief talk about it.  The devil was much cuter looking than I expected.  They are testing a vaccine against the contagious cancer that has been killing them in the wild.  Back past the wombats to the night exhibit featuring all manners of mostly desert creatures with odd names like bilbies, bandicoots, and gliders.  The wallabies were out but staying under cover of rocks and logs.  A keeper was feeding the frogmouth bird, a plump squat bird with a huge mouth. A dingo and marrema dog in training as a guard dog were playing together in one enclosure while a keeper led a human-dingo encounter in another enclosure.  There were several aviaries to walk through with all manner of colorful Australian birds.  And I caught the end of the bird flight demonstration where a huge eagle glided back and forth across the lawn.

Conservation campaign

Flying foxes - the light was low during our visit, so my good photos are of animals that were not moving!

The platypus was nowhere to be seen, apparently they had just released two young males into the exhibit the day before and they were still keeping a low profile.  I did watch an echidna waddle about the koala enclosure.

a poor photo of an echidna

I really enjoyed the sanctuary, but in restropect the conservation message was somewhat limited to 'save the animals' and 'use recycled content toilet paper' without much explanation about why one should care.

After taking in the animals for a few hours we headed back into town dropping the car off at its house in a northern suburb.  We stopped at I Carusi for some very good pizza for dinner.  Jake and I couldn’t resist ordering the dark chocolate and strawberry pizzetta too and it was really good – same dough but I think cooked with the chocolate pieces and sliced strawberries on top then sprinkled with powdered sugar.  Definitely something to try next time we make pizza dough.  The trick will be to get the dough cooked enough without burning the chocolate.  2 trams later and we were home!