I maintain my love of sleeper trains, but even the Melbourne-Bairnsdale bus today was pretty good. What the busride had over the trainride was its daylight hours, so I could actually expect the Australia rolling past me.
I keep having to remind myself that it’s winter here, since everything is so green. Rural Victoria (at least in the Gippsland direction) looks like a lot of dairy and sheep farms. It’s kind of hilly (in a way more bulbous than rolling) and off in the distance are mountainish looking things.
There was a weird stretch where there were these erratic dead, branchless tress studding the fields like bones in compound fractures. It was kind of ominous, but fairly localized.
I like how the trees are different from North American trees. You see a clump of trees in a field and that’s fine and then when you pass close by it’s like no northern tree you’d care to think of, all made of ropes entwined on itself. When I was out walking I thought about how knowing more about plants would probably get me amazed at the differences in the ground cover and grasses and all that too. But trees are big enough to be noticeable.
Bairnsdale is a small town and my motel is about a mile from the train station and town square. This is because of a mixup in the recommendation process wherein someone thought a restaurant was a hotel (well, it is called a hotel but that doesn’t seem to mean anything about lodging here) and quoted us the price of the motel with the one-letter-off name. When we couldn’t book a room at the restaurant we assumed the recommender had mistyped the name, rather than that she was recommending I sleep in a restaurant.
It’s not a bad little town. I had all of Sunday afternoon to wander around. There’s a village and a really tall-spired church and not much is open past 2pm on a Sunday afternoon.