Hanging Rock

"Oi! You walked all the way from the train station in Woodsend?" The ranger asked in astonishment.

"Yep" we replied.

"No one picked you up?"

"No! I put my hand out but no one stopped" I explained.

To take a step back to a friend of mine's room on Saturday night you will find three Trinity Exchange students and a quasi Australian discussing a day of touristing for Saturday. I had just been convinced at dinner that a road trip the Dandenong Ranges would be an adventure of the century, one that was worth calling in sick for work the next day. So I did. Yet to our dismay we soon found that one must be over the age of 21 to hire (we say hire over here) a car, and none of us were. Further at 10:00 pm the night before we couldn't find any 21 year olds available to drive. Thus we randomly choose the next best option, a tourist spot located an hour of the city by train.

We left college around 9:30am and hopped on a few trams in order to make our way to Southern Cross Station (which like many things in Melbourne seems to imitate London's Waterloo Station). From Southern Cross we took the first train departing to the small town of Woodsend and quickly fell asleep on the train.

Upon arrival we strolled through our first small Australian town to the information hut and as obvious tourists we scanned through all the brochures. Before leaving the town towards the supposed dormant volcano in the distance we stopped at the local bakery where one could find "Victoria's best Vanilla Slice." Rob, a fellow tourist from Trinity was taken by curiosity and purchased a slice and soon verified the store's advertisement. We then departed to our dormant volcano named "Hanging Rock," which we truthfully knew very little about (especially the distance it takes to walk there). It was voted (not in my favour) that we would walk to the volcano rather than cab. Well, ten cold, wet kilometers later we arrived to speak to the park ranger, who in shock of the distance we had walked offered us a lift back to town after our hike.

The mountain - as you can see below - was nothing less than beautiful and dramatic with proper Australian views of sheep, fields, and wallabies (we didn't actually see any wallabies, but we were supposed to). Ironically the volcano with its many interesting rocks and shapes is named after one in particular - the hanging rock (depicted above) - which really isn't all that interesting. The mountaneous rock formation is typical of Australian scenery, and is made infamous by the movie "The Hanging Rock" - a horror movie in which a few girls dissapear in the maze of rock formations at the top of the mountain. We too had fun trying to find our way back down.

Well it was a great trip... certainly the third Australian Experience, yet I don't know...I think Niagra Falls wins lol.

All Best,

Jordan