Wright 2015 Australia Pictures

 

We visited Australia in November 2015, spending a week on Kangaroo Island and several days visiting our friends Jane and Malcolm Calder, who live in the Yarra Valley outside of Melbourne.

 

Kangaroo Island was delightful. We particularly enjoyed staying at The Fig Tree in Baudin Beach. For the most part, we avoided the other tourists and hiked by ourselves. One highlight was a private botanical garden near Stokes Bay where we were practically the only visitors.

 

Jane and Malcolm were among the survivors of the terrible 2009 bush fire in Steels Creek, and we were particularly interested in learning how the people and the landscape had been able to recover from the catastrophe. Although we had read books and seen a video on the subject, actually being there brought it home to us in a new way. While we were there, we took the opportunity to visit the extraordinary botanical garden in Cranbourne, a suburb of Melbourne.

 

We took lots of pictures. Here are a few of them, leaving out a host of pictures of plants, both on the island and on the mainland. You can see the pix and navigate around fairly easily. To see all the pictures in a batch, click on its link to open a sort of slide show. Click on any small picture to see it blown up. ÒPrevious,Ó ÒUpÓ and ÒNextÓ will then let you navigate through the whole set or take you back to the full thumbnail collection. To get back to this page from thumbnails, click the "back to main directory" link.

 

Kangaroo Island (Note that there are two pages of thumbnails here.)

Yarra Valley and Cranbourne

 

Here are also some short videos.

 

 Vivonne Bay

Goanna

Wind in the trees

Sea lion pups

Rainforest brook

 

For pictures from other adventures, simply go up a directory and scroll down to find links.

 

Charley and Leslie