Australia - Eat It Up

Too far to go often, too big to ever do it all, our travel editor thinks of the country as a menu the size of a continent. He recently fed his infatuation for the place - driving a Mercedes-Benz CLS55 AMG

Story By Johnny Lucas (first published in Driven Magazine, June 2006)

The Pacific Ocean : get over it
Let me be up front about my bias regarding Australia :  I love it.  If you haven’t been there, don’t spend any more time reading this. Get online, get on the phone or just get on a plane and get there. The two challenges about spending time in Oz are one, it’s far, and two – there are just too many choices.  As for the first challenge, yes there is an ocean between here and there: get over it!  Flying in and out of Australia is never a short hop so it stands to reason that Qantas has a bit of experience in doing long flights well. As for the second challenge that there is just too much to do, experience, walk on, swim in, smell, look at and taste in Australia – that’s more of a problem.  

Let me help you with that menu
On my most recent trip to Australia , my sixth, the mission was to come up with an itinerary for a truly Australian experience that would highlight some of the variety of the country and still allow time to put your feet up.  Think of Australia as a menu the size of a continent: you’ll want to build your time around a really good main course and add some appetizers and desserts.  Here is a ‘main course’ that you can chew on for a week or so. You can do it on your own, or with us fun folks at DreamCar Travel.  No one is going to go to Australia for just a week, mate, so if you do follow this itinerary, choose what other items you’ll add from the menu.  Perhaps the Barrier Reef and a beach for appetizers then Ayers Rock for dessert? 

Authentic outback gem
Start at Burrawang West station in central New South Wales .  It’s most of a day’s drive from Sydney (which I did) or a quick flight (which I recommend) to this 100 per cent authentic spread that’s been producing great beef since the 1830s. In 1990, the property was bought by a Japanese billionaire who wanted a retreat for his senior executives, so he commissioned the best in accommodation to be built in this remote location.  He didn’t want a piece of Japan in the outback, he wanted the best of Australia .  What he got for his millions is a unique combination of luxury and authenticity. Sadly for the billionaire, the Japanese economy tanked and he sold to a deep-pocketed Australian who opened Burrawang West to the public. Personally, I could spend any number of days at Burrawang just contemplating the vast sky and absorbing the calm open space at this beautiful place. 

The unstressed herd
But there’s also tennis, swimming in the pool, archery and kayaking on the billabong.  And there’s the cattle operation itself which always has something happening: birthing calves, shifting pastures, staring at the alpacas or just having the run of the station on four-wheeled motorcycles called trikes.  Cattle at Burrawang are deliberately given an easy, gentle life – unstressed beef is tender beef. 

By evening, I’d done nothing productive all day, but I sat on the veranda of the main homestead with my feet up anyway.  I watched the kangaroos come out at dusk to nibble grass and, in my idleness, I felt an unearned solidarity with generations of hardworking stockmen.

When dinner came, I was glad not to be an old-time cowboy because the cuisine at Burrawang in the 21^st century is amazing.  I was wondering where the army of chefs and sous-chefs, herb gardens and vegetable plots were hidden.  And yes, they serve their own beef.  It’s a revelation: tender and succulent, perfectly and simply grilled.  I can’t imagine there’s better beef anywhere on the planet.

Strangely enough, my most enduring memory of Burrawang is of the importance the people who live and work there place on their custodial relationship with the land.  For example, carp are one of many species introduced to Australia by Europeans. These ugly creatures are damaging the streams and competing with native fish.  The guys looking after the cattle were delighted to see that a flood stranded carp in the pastures while native species were safe because they knew to dive deep into the receding pools.  The guys also thought it totally reasonable to spend good money to pull out the non-native willows from the billabong just because they are non-native and they suck up way too much water unlike Australian species that are misers with each drop.  Every Australian I met knows that they’ve got a unique and delicate continent to cherish and protect. 

I spent two days at Burrawang, but really wanted at least three.  Any more and I’d be applying for a job there.

I say, it’s capitol
The sophisticated capitol city of Canberra seems a world from a cattle station, but it’s not too far away so it’s a good place to go next.  For a few generations the Government of Australia has poured billions into Canberra to make it a worthwhile place to visit.  I think they can finally declare success.  My favourite place is the National Gallery. After your days at Burrawang (which has a great art collection of its own) your eyes will have changed gears and noticed that in Australia things are different: the vegetation is drier, the light is redder, the brashness that you thought you saw on first glance is really textured with subtleties that you were not used to looking for.  The Australian art in this gallery is like a shrine to the natural Australian aesthetic.  And if that sounds too artsy-fartsy for you, the restaurant in the gallery has beautiful things too, ones you can eat.

Canberra ’s new Parliament House says a lot about the attitude Australians have to government.  It’s a nice building, but not pretentious in the least, and the roof is covered in grass so you can actually walk up and have a picnic on top of the legislature. The architecture at the National Museum is among the most bizarre you will ever see and the Australian War Memorial brings tears to many eyes. 

Next stop is the Blue Mountains .  People in British Columbia laugh at what Ontarians call mountains, but the Blue Mountains have got to be the most unusual anywhere.  First of all, they were not pushed up as other mountains were.  Australia is the world’s oldest continent and these mountains were once a high plateau.  Over the eons, valleys have eroded away, turning to sand as they washed out to sea.  This sand then washed back in as the beaches and sand islands of the east coast of Australia .  It was a lot of earth moving.  The result is spectacular and there’s nothing like it anywhere else. 

Finding the right walk in the woods (you’ve got to call it “the bush”) is my favourite activity in the Blue Mountains .  I’ve been there a few times and find a new favourite each visit.  The Australia bush is the where the heart and soul of the country resides, maybe even more than the Outback, if that’s possible.

On my last visit I went with an aboriginal guide off the usual trails to see rock carvings and ceremonial sites.  We followed an ancient songline, one of the invisible pathways that cover Australia like a mystic lace.  Aboriginal tradition has it that the Creator of the world walked these same paths in the Dreamtime, the time outside time.  As He encountered landforms, animals and plants, He sang out their names, thereby singing them into existence in what we think of as the real world. 

We stopped to have lunch at one tiny fragment of the Garden of Eden that has water falling from hundreds of feet above into a very swimmable pool with its own small beach.  Part of the experience was that it was not supposed to be an easy walk and at eight hours, with considerable elevation gains and losses, “not easy” was achieved. 

Rites of a tough passage
My guide took me to a site where pubescent Aboriginal boys went through their rites of passage.  As well as the usual starvation, sleep deprivation and over-exertion that many other cultures deem appropriate for adolescent males, the ceremony in this part of the world included, cutting the chest to make lifetime scars, circumcision and knocking out one front tooth.  It was a privilege to stand on the spot where all this happened. I did that for a few minutes and thought about my adolescent predecessors who had stood on the same spot over the centuries.  My experience of huffing and puffing up and down the cliffs to get there suddenly looked like a cake walk. 

Best drive of the trip
At the other end of the exertion spectrum there is a collection of spectacular lookouts that you can just drive to.  The views are inspiring. Between the Blue Mountains and the Hunter Valley there’s a great drive going through a couple of very old towns and along the ridge of a national Park.  The road crosses many burbling brooks including Big Weenie Creek.  When I drove this road I was delayed a couple of hours by a tree that had fallen over the electrical wires and the road.  I was driving a very eye-catching car, the Mercedes CLS55 (see sidebar) and that made it even easier than usual to strike up conversations with other stranded motorists.  When the police arrived on the scene they first of all made sure that people kept back from the fallen wires and secondly, offered to trade me their cruiser for the Mercedes.

Sydney ’s classy playground
The Hunter Valley is a long time favourite getaway for Sydneysiders to play golf, spend the weekend, taste wines, fly planes, ride horses and generally enjoy a few days of indulgence.  In the Hunter Valley you really will think of travelling in Australia as a menu: both literally and figuratively.

In the literal sense, you would be hard pressed to find such a variety of absolutely top quality food experiences in such a small area anywhere in the world.  Australian chefs are second to none and the climate means that the produce is local all year round, in many cases grown on the restaurant’s property. 

At Robert’s Restaurant I met the proprietor, Robert Molines.  Before I went, I knew I was facing that classic Australian dilemma: too many great choices.  Robert may have sensed this.  Over pink champagne we talked a bit about life, love, politics, mortality, women and humour and he said “Now, do you want to see a menu . . . (dramatic pause) . . . or do you trust me?”  Of course I trusted, and got an incredible dining and drinking evening.  (Details are posted at dreamcartravel.com)

Robert’s Restaurant is on the edge of Tower Estate, one of the better wineries in the Hunter (which is saying a lot) and site of the best place to bunk down: Tower Lodge. Twelve huge, idiosyncratic suites set in the vineyard.  Each with enough character that you want to bolt the door and hide for a few days.  

Even though the Hunter is all about the perfection of its smallest details, you can’t resist an overview of the whole beautiful valley.  The best view of course is from the air.  It’s a perfect environment for hot air balloon rides: mist in the paddocks, a few other balloons silently drifting with the same early morning breeze and watching the valley wake up from a viewpoint a few hundred feet over its head.  For the Australians sharing the balloon’s basket it was old news, but I loved seeing the families of kangaroos come out of the woods at dawn to munch the pastures.  I even had an aerial view of a minor boxing match between two males that had hopped out of bed on the wrong side that morning. 

Tigers in the air
Even most Australians don’t know that the Hunter Valley is the home of the world’s largest collection of Tiger Moth aeroplanes.  This emblematic bi-plane was built as a pre-Second World War training plane.  The passenger flies in the front of the two seats wearing goggles and head gear borrowed from Snoopy’s attacks on the Red Baron.  Once you’ve flown in one, you’re hooked for life. 

Strapped down in the open cockpit it’s very sure to say that being aloft in a light, elderly aircraft gives you a Nearer My God to Thee experience.  If your pilot does some aerobatics such as a barrel roll, or a loop-de-loop your relationship with the horizon will never be the same.  If you’re up for it, the pilot may do a “stall”: climbing in a steep vertical arc until the gravity-fed engine becomes starved for gasoline and conks out.  Then there is only the sound of air passing you by and that quickly goes totally silent at the high point of the flight when the little plane stops dead in mid-air, its face and yours facing heaven.  You hang there for a tiny splinter of eternity before gravity realizes you’ve escaped and reaches up to swat you down. 

In case you were wondering, the plane then makes a nose-first high-speed dive towards the earth and the gas flows again.  During the rapid descent the pilot can “jump start” the engine in the same way that a car with a dead battery is started by rolling it downhill.  The survival rate is pretty high. 

That experience is good for the last day of an Australian trip.  It’s kind of like finishing your meal with a quadruple espresso.

Make it real
Qantas also has a great deal going with its Airpass: $1,399 from Vancouver gets you there, takes you to three Australian cities and home again.  (Shoulder season from Toronto including three Australian cities for $1,999 is also a very good price.)  Qantas has the longest beds in business class (6’ 6½”) and when I flew, a good collection of movies and TV shows. Really good info on Australia , including the Qantas Airpass, is at Australia.com.

Mercedes-Benz CLS 55 AMG
It’s a tribute to its designers that this car is bigger than it looks.  Mercedes has traded in their boxy shapes for the exact opposite: long, smooth sweeping lines that makes this large sedan look like a coup, but it’s got a real back seat and legroom there too.  At 469 horsepower, it’s got more than enough power for Australia ’s very well-policed roads. 

Driving in Sydney , I had to keep checking the rear view mirrors to confirm that I was wholly in my lane (very small lanes in that town) but it handled well in the city.  It’s even more in its element on the highway and I would have loved to have driven it to Perth , about 4,000 kilometres away. 

Australian speed limits are very well enforced so I never did get to open up and let all those horses run free.  On one occasion I had a tailgater.  I gave him the slip by ignoring the suggested limits that are posted for sharp corners.  The Mercedes held the road like a big cat.

The car comes with a good assortment of bells and whistles and more are available.  My favourite is the Drive-Dynamic seats that gently inflate and deflate contoured airbags in the seats to hold you in place while you’re cornering.  It’s a very motherly feeling for a Mercedes to be giving you! 

If you’re shopping in the $125,000 range (add 25 per cent luxury tax in Australia ) and want a classic, but not stodgy vehicle that sometimes has to carry four adults in elegant comfort, this is your car.  You won’t get tired of it quickly.

Useful Links

www.australia.com

www.quantas.com

www.Mercedes-benz.ca

www.Burrawangwest.com.au

http://www.nga.gov.au

http://www.nma.gov.au National

http://www.awm.gov.au/

www.selecthotels.com/lillianfels

http://www.bluemountainswalkabout.com

http://darwin.thefreelibrary.com/The-Voyage-of-the-Beagle/19-1

http://www.towerlodge.com.au/

http://www.robertsrestaurant.com