Uncategorized

Skippy The Happy Kangaroo

Although we have only just returned to Melbourne, it will soon be time to leave again to travel over to Perth, which everyone says is very nice. We spent the last few days travelling away to Colac, a small country town around 2 or 3 hours away from the city, to attend the wedding of Sal’s good friend Liv (in which Sal was acting as one of the three bridesmaids) and then back, slowly, along the Great Ocean Road.

Colac is a small town–not quite the sort of place where everyone knows everyone, but almost. It’s the sort of place where people run around in circles for 6 days just to have something to do.

The wedding was lovely, and there will be some photos of me looking slightly, erm, tired and emotional, at the reception posted up here when I get a chance (or drunk, if you prefer). Amusingly, as I was introduced to a guy also called Matt sitting in the row behind us in the church, on explaining why I was there what with Sally being a bridesmaid and all, he said that I must be a worried man this weekend… but it was his girlfriend who went on to beat off the scrum to snatch the bouquet several hours later. Ah, the irony.

The other Matt & Sal

[Oh, and speaking of scrums, I was delighted to be able to dip into the house and catch the last few minutes of real time, and then the whole of extra time in the World Cup Final. All the Aussies that were there (which would be, um, everyone apart from me) took it surprisingly well, although the papers aren’t quite so good, after the week’s build-up of “countdown to glory” style headlines. Apparently we’re arrogant winners and poor losers. Hmm, that sounds familiar…]

Drunk as I might have been, at least I wasn’t as rough the following morning as Chris, with whom I had travelled up to Colac on the Friday, and who was sitting on our table. He was so rough the next day that he couldn’t even join us at the barbeque (oops, make that 3 in just over a week) at the groom’s parents’ house, preferring to sleep it off in his car, flattening his battery in the process and having to call out the RACV. That’s what dirty VB does to you then (ah, how quickly we turned from disparaging the stuff to guzzling it, when there was so much of it going around–I think we all regretted it the next morning, though).

Deciding not to remain in Colac, we headed down to the Ocean Road, and spent Sunday night at a lovely resort in the town of Lorne (brilliantly, there’s a crown green bowls club in the town, which I hope is purely so that it can be called the Lorne Bowls Club–I didn’t see the tennis club, but hopefully that’s the Lorne Tennis Club, or even the Lorne Lawn Tennis Club…). We did play tennis, however, if only because the resort’s court was literally outside our room, so it would perhaps have been rude not to (happily there weren’t too many people staying there to witness our pathetic attempts at play, given that all the appartments and rooms look directly onto the court).

Finally, on Monday, we travelled back to Melbourne along the rest of the Ocean Road, stopping off in Anglesea on the way to see the kangaroo-infested golf course, where the animals wander the fairways and greens. Yesterday, they were mostly sleeping under the trees (although the evidence of their having travelled the rest of the course was deposited around for all to see). Whilst photographing one group of kangaroos, we were both highly amused to watch the large alpha male of the group casually attempt to mount a much smaller female while she tried to wriggle away and the rest of the group rested uninterested. I bet they don’t put that on the front of the guidebooks…

Kangaroo and me