h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well. Where to start with this lot? At the beginning, probably.

Saturday morning, my friend N came around and put me in her car and off we went. The aim was to go places we hadn't been before, just to see what we'd find.

We went to Boorowa first. A small town - a village in European terms, really. Clearly the place had done well in the 19th century and up until about the middle of the 20th, but now it's struggling a bit like so many small towns in this drought. Two pubs, or maybe three - I can't recall. The cavernous courthouse and the old church halls all argued for there being a much larger population in the past. The bakery was good. The craftwork on sale in the old courthouse wasn't especially. The place sells itself as a place to see the superb parrot - a blue/green bird, about the same size as a budgerigar or a little bigger, with an orange underbelly. We didn't see any.

Then Cowra. This is a bigger place. Five or six pubs. Slightly lived-in rather than shabby; I think it's doing beter than Boorowa. Cowra's current claim to fame is its Japanese Gardens. http://www.cowratourism.com.au/Japanese_Garden_p117.aspx These are here essentially because of something that happened in 1944. http://www.awm.gov.au/encyclopedia/cowra/index.asp The Japanese inmates of the Cowra POW camp staged a mass breakout, preferring to die in battle than be held prisoner. More than 200 of them did die, along with four Australian soldiers. Many of the others were recaptured after a while, some being sheltered by local people in the meantime. (They had sworn not just to escape or die, but not to harm any civilians in the process.) So near the town there's a Japanese war cemetery - the only one outside Japan, I think. Decades later, the Gardens were a gift from Japan in gratitude for the care Cowra had given the cemetery. (Japan's still trying to make amends after all these years...) The Gardens are lovely, the ponds are full of the most enormous koi carp, and the superb parrots we didn't see at Boorowa are much in evidence.

After lunch at the Gardens we headed to Canowindra (the 'i' is silent; no idea why). Three pubs, or maybe four. Everything needs a bit of paint and some freshening-up, no conspicuous wealth on display anywhere, but I think maybe it's always been like this. Dry and dusty, even when there's no drought. The main attraction here for nosey tourists is a heap of fossilised fish, on display in the Age of Fishes Museum. http://www.ageoffishes.org.au/ The museum shop sells glow-in-the-dark dinosaur skeleton glove puppets, which N found irresistible. (Not that I can sneer at gift shop purchases; I'd bought a small ceramic figure of an ancient Buddhist/Shinto sage at the Japanese Gardens.)

The scariest part of the entire trip came at Cudal, a shabby hamlet (one pub and a bowls club) north of Canowindra. I was just about to comment on the drunk rabble hanging out of the bowls club when two cars came around the corner on the wrong side of the road and almost smashed into us. The driver of the second car gave an apologetic wave. Her passenger giggled. Clearly it's the sort of place where the locals don't bother too much with road rules and things like that. About 2km further on we were almost hit by another vehicle which was at least on the proper side of the road but the driver might have been distracted by his passenger having his legs out of the window and his head on the driver's lap (when not grinning inanely at tourists). N and I decided that Cudal was too strange for the likes of us.

It was late afternoon by this stage so we headed for Orange where we'd booked motel rooms. The place was named after the Prince of Orange in the 1820s (Why him? I couldn't find out) and it's a real city with about 35 000 people and a couple of dozen pubs. It's a lovely place. Neat, tidy, good food, good beer... It's building itself up as a gourmet food place. (They don't grow oranges, but apples. This amuses me.) So we ate and drank and then flaked out in a classic 1950s motel.

In the morning - Ophir. This is now a reserve; it's the site of the 1851 discovery of gold, which is what made this country viable. (It also made it unappealing as a place to send prisoners...) Ophir is about 25kn from Orange, at the bottom of a very steep gravel and rock and dust road. It's very pretty in a harshly alien sort of way. We bypassed Byng, and Lucknow, and kept moving on.

Millthorpe is somewhere I never want to go again. It's a dreadful tourist trap. Lots of kitsch junk/antique shops, monumental Victorian architecture and nowhere to eat except the sort of restaurant that has minimalist decor, no indicative menu and a young man looking quite frightened by the bill he's just been given. The pub looked just as pretentious. So we kept moving on.

Blayney didn't appeal much. It looked real, at least, and made a nice contrast to the prettified horrors of Millthorpe, but there was nothing to detain us. Three pubs. We went back to Cowra, passing at least one kangaroo and an emu, and a place called Carcoar which has a gun museum and various tourist traps, on the way.

In Cowra we stopped at a nice-looking pub and ate and had some beer - desperately neeed, as it was about 36C and very dusty outside. The menu was simple but appealing and the beer was cold. There were Japanese-themed paintings on the wall and a local couple (him European, her Japanese) was just too blatantly symbolic of local history and the decades of reconciliation.

Then we went on to Grenfell, via the one (dead) horse settlement of Bumbaldry. What splendid names these places have. Gerrybang was another one, and let's not forget Kangarooby. As a rule - the sillier the name, the smaller the place.

Grenfell's a nice place. It's had better times, but it's still there. I liked the garden of locally endemic plants at the edge of town. But it was Sunday afternoon, and about all we could do in Grenfell was leave and continue on to Young.

Young's in a cherry-growing district. There are also lots of religious groups in evidence, and a completely unwelcoming old trout (I bet she was called Helga or Dorcas or something like that) on the desk at the information centre. We ate ice cream then set off again, quite keen to get home by this stage. We were too tired to consider the Chinese gardens, which are by way of atonement for the anti-Chinese 'Lambing Flat Riots' of the goldrush days. Next time, maybe. (There are a lot of Chinese restaurants in this part of the country - every town seemed to have one or two - I suspect they're run by the descendants of the 1850s Chinese miners, and I also suspect their dishes will be somewhat non-authentic by now, five generations on.)

There's a place called Wombat near Young. There was a poultry farm selling Wombat Eggs, which I found alarming as a concept. In the distance there were hills that can only be extinct volcanoes, looming across expanses of velvety-looking grainfields.

By this stage I was failing to take in more details. I'll just note that there's a really good secondhand bookshop in an old church in Harden, and that Bywong and Bowning look like nice, slightly shabby, slightly hippy villages. Then we were back on the Hume Highway, only 60km from home...

That's only the sketchiest of sketch outlines of the weekend. We covered about 900km, got hot and dusty, saw lots of nice places (and Millthorpe and Cudal ) and decided that we must do something like this again. Getting out of the political/bureaucratic bubble that is Canberra is higly necessary sometimes, just to stay in touch with the reality of this country.

Sounds like you had wonderful time.

It was all great fun... It felt like we'd been away for a week, but when we got back to my place it had in fact only been 34 hours.

We're planning the next safari.

you'll be replacing bush tucker man next

glad it was so enjoyable



also I enjoyed reading about it

I'm glad that you enjoyed reading it. Typing it wasn't much fun after a day of typing, but if I didn't do it now I probably wouldn't have gotten around to typing it later.

It was such a let-down being back at w*rk today.

Soooper!


You should really submit this to , they would love it!

Seems as you had a good weekend. But I would not call a 900 km weekend trip "brief".

Some smaller places in the outskirts are better avoided, we have a few of them here in the Far North as well.

a nice read. really sounds like you had fun

the prince of orange you mention *could* be Wilhelm van Oranje-Nassau, who took the throne of England in 1688. He was also the Stadthouder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands

apparently I have relatives residing in Cowras cemetery..my father was most peeved to learn I had moved away from Can'tberra....... he had planned to go there and glean gravestone info for the family tree some time next year, .....

oh well, i am sure they will be there for A while yet

but it sounds like you had a fun weekend

Thanks for sharing!

I love the way that town size is judged by the number of pubs!

I'm quite jealous - I'd love to just drop everything and head off down the road - but The Missus and Kids would probably have something to say about that!

ah, yes, the number of pubs. i loved that too, but forgot to mention it

mind you, lazy as i am i would probably prefer a one pub town - and let all the world come to me instead of walking from this to that

Lil - thanks, but no. Putting something into The Post implies revisions and amendments and adding more material (of which I have a fair bit), and I simply don't have either the time or the energy.

Dragonqueen - it *was* a brief trip; less than two full days, after all. And I suspect every country has its strange remote towns where nothing is quite normal... They're fun to read about, interesting to see, but challenging to be in.

Pierce - it wasn't that chap, it was definitely the Prince of Orange who became the first King of the Netherlands, not the one who invaded England in 1688. I did at first think it might be a reference to that one, but apparently not. I'm treating it as one of life's little mysteries...

Helly. I did go past the cemetery; should I have waved? Then again, I've never been introduced so they might not have responded at all. At least they're in a reasonably nice place, even if they don't get out much these days.

Hoggy - measuring towns by pub size is the best way, I find. Anything below 400 people usually means one pub. Up to a thousand, two or maybe three. More than four pubs and you're in a metropolis by Australian standards. Pierce, having more than one pub isn't a problem as such, even for the most dedicated customer; they're usually all on the same street, and sometimes less than 20 metres apart. They got these things right in the 19th century. In fact, in Grenfell there's one pub which claims to have been established in 1866. By a strange coincidence, the town itself was founded in 1866. That's worthy of respect.

my town of Pontefract, used to have the record of most clubs and pubs within a square mile - the towns saying was:- you can go for a pub crawl in the rain and not get wet

There used to be a couple of hundred pubs in the Adelaide city mile. Sadly, there's only about 60 left now.

many tried to do a pint in each one (80 odd I think)no chance of even half pint
but now sadly, the town is full of "true" idiots, 3 or 4 pints and I can take the world on (other words not printable)

when reddyfreddy showed us the city of london during the meet in may he pointed out that the oldest pub in england - ye olde cheshire cheese - was the first thing they rebuilt after the great fire

makes a lot of sense to me: the builders would need a place to have lunch, yes?

when i went to york/yorkshire a few years ago they told me the city had 365 pubs - one for every day in the year

alas, we were only there for a fortnight - you can't possibly imagine the hurry we were in ...

...whereas I have 3 or 4 pints, then send unintelligable emails to people!

Hoggy, you're not the only one to do that.

Now, here's a news story that appeared yesterday, when I was in no position to post a link here. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/17/2745648.htm

Clearly this chap is a kindred spirit to N and myself. But he has a touch of dementia. What's our excuse?

(I ask this question as a person who once thought it a good idea to get in a VW Beetle with my ex, drive 1300km to a party, then drive home again, in the middle of Summer, with no airconditioning.)

ivan, you should enter a sauna competition. hati will fill you in with whatever information you need, i'm sure

whenever my former neighbour disagreed with me over something he would end the argument with the words "look, mate, i've been a house painter for 20 years, what's your excuse?"