Ballarat

This weekend's adventure was Ballarat!

Ballarat is a small town two hours from Melbourne about the same size of Champaign-Urbana.  It grew rapidly during the Victorian gold rush in the 1850's.  I have a friend, Jemima, who lives there and offered a place me and several friends (Dani, Hilary and Justin) to stay.  It's my first experience with the Australian bush ("the bush" or more colloquially "DA BUUUUSH" is the country side, not necessarily desert).  I was happy to get out of Melbourne and see a new part of Australia!

On Saturday we went to the Ballarat Wildlife Park.  It's a small park outside the main city where you can go to pet and feed kangaroos and emus!  They were so cute!  We walked about for a couple hours chilling with the kangaroos.  The wildlife park staff also had a demonstration of the most poisonous snake in the world.  There's some statistic that some 7 out of the 10 most deadly animals are in Australia.  They make them tough here.

Here are some more pictures with the roo's!

Dani feeding kangaroos!

I also got to pet a koala:

The rest of the day was spent with Jemima and her family (who were gracious to house and feed four young Americans).  Overall a quality day.

Lets pan for some gold.

The next day was filled with a trip to Sovereign Hill, a reenactment town much like old colonial towns of New England.  Like I mentioned earlier, Ballarat was a gold rush town, so this was a gold rush reenactment.  The original mine is still there and you can go down (for a fee).  There were all sorts of things that any original Australian mining town should have: a blacksmith, a confectionery (sweets shop), candle makers, a couple parlors and a river where you can pan for gold.  To be honest, it is a bit of a tourist trap, but it was still really interesting.  My favorite part was wheel making (for horse carriages).  They have a working machine shop like the one from the 1850's.  All the machines were powered by a large steam engine in the corner via a huge pulley system.  It was so freakin awesome.  I am such an engineer:

I thought this was a pretty cool thing they were doing to make the wheel hubs:

 

As well as some cool machines, we got to see someone melt $150,000 worth of gold into a bar.  We also go to pan for our own gold.  I was wildly successful:

I reckon I'm about 1 cent richer

 Though these adventures were both really cool, nothing quite compared to the stars that I could see during the night.  They were breath taking.  I really want to go camping so I may see the true extent of a perfect southern starlit night.  Just one of God's gifts while in Australia.

What will I do next week?  Stay tuned and you'll fined out!

Paul