A Dangerous Business

Well then… I didn’t think I’d be back here so soon. Get back from New Zealand, settle into work, plan my next adventure for 2025. Unless there’s been a glitch with the Gregorian calendar, it is still very much 2024. Yet here I am, about to hit another trail.

In short, I got bored at work and I started looking at hiking trails. One thing led to another and I had the concepts of a plan and a time to do it. Now that I am surrendering all but 4 weeks of my life to my employer, the trail couldn’t be ridiculously far away (i.e.: in Australia) or ridiculously long (i.e.: not the TA). These criteria have led me to the Grampains in Victoria. In 2021, a 160km trail was opened spanning the length of the national park. It’s designed to be completed in 13 days, but some of those days are pretty short so I’ve organised to do it in 7. Add in me doing this trip over the King’s Birthday long weekend, I only need 5 days of annual leave for this trip.

Right, let’s get to it. Glad to be leaving a concerningly hot Brisbane morning, I made the shortish hop down to Melbourne on a Virgin 737.

An oddly busy Skybus transported me to Southern Cross station, and with 3 hours before check-in, I did what anyone would do in Melbourne with time to kill… throwing my pack in a locker and darting around the city on trams.

Conveniently, as soon as check-in time rolled around, the weather decided to do a little trolling and drenched the city in a short but sharp storm. Thankfully I avoided the worst of it by hiding in the City Circle. Checked in and bed made, the rest of the day was dedicated to groceries for the trail and any other supplies that I needed, plus a couple more tram rides.

I was hoping to get out to Halls Gap the following day, but the first campsite was fully booked, meaning I had a day to kill. Instead of meandering around Melbourne (again), I thought I’d explore one of Victoria’s regional centres, eventually choosing to go to Bendigo. This of course meant a trip on the state’s regional rail network that continues to impress me. I was hoping to catch the Swan Hill service, one of the last remaining loco-hauled trains.

Slight problem, you need a locomotive to haul a loco-hauled train. And it never showed up, forcing VLine to throw a VLocity onto the service at the last minute.

The running theory amongst the passengers around me was the driver had forgotten about the change to daylight savings and had slept in. To be fair, my phone hadn’t automatically changed time zone, so if I hadn’t woken up naturally an hour early I probably would’ve missed the train too.

We may have left Melbourne late, but because of the faster speed the VLocity’s run at we quickly made up time, sprinting through the outer suburbs and into the bush.

It takes roughly 2 hours to get to Bendigo. Upon arriving I finally got a coffee in my system (was banking on having a cafe car on the train) and walked over to the Central Deborah Gold Mine, operating from 1939 to 1954 and extracting over 900 kg of gold in that time. It’s now a major tourist attraction in the town, offering tours through some of the old tunnels.

We only go down to level 2 of the mine, about 60m below ground, but at its peak this mine reached a depth of 412m and 17 levels. These days everything below level 4 has been flooded due to groundwater.

Our tour guide explained the kind of rocks the miners would look for, what a typical day would look like down here, and how they went about actually extracting the gold (clue: kaboom).

Once that was done I took a ride on one of Bendigo’s old trams. Until 1972 there was a decent network of trams running through the city, but as with most cities around the world, the advent of buses resulted in the network being closed, with one line being reopened fairly shortly afterward for heritage purposes.

One train trip back to Melbourne and 7 hours of sleep later, it was time to get out to the Grampians. Just like the Great Ocean Walk I did last year, the trailheads of the Grampians Peaks Trail are accessible by public transport. The easy way would be a train to Ararat and then a coach to Halls Gap. But c’mon, where’s the fun in that? How about instead I take The Overland, the twice weekly train to Adelaide that’s been running for over 130 years.

Ok, time for a little PSA about this train. It’s operated by Journey Beyond, the same company that runs the Indian Pacific and The Ghan. Their whole thing is tourist trains; relaxed timetable, fancy accommodation, off-train excursions. The Overland really doesn’t fit this description, being more akin to a proper intercity service. In fact, a limited number of tickets onboard the train are sold to customers only travelling to the service’s Victorian stops (Ararat, Stawell, Horsham, Dimboola, and Nhill). If you were to buy one of these seats through VLine, you’d only pay the capped regional ticket fare (as of 2024) of $10.60. I didn’t know about this when booking my seat and conveniently, Journey Beyond doesn’t advertise this deal. So I paid full price, a non-refundable $95 ticket. So yeah, if you’re only travelling within Victoria and you want to take The Overland, check VLine’s website first.

So what was the train actually like? Well, I could whinge about how slowly it took to get out of Melbourne (tl;dr, track gauge shenanigans) or how dated the carriages were and how much they bounced and squeaked over the bumpy rails… But I really liked it. It was a unique experience travelling on a rail line I haven’t been on in very comfy seats, relaxing as we passed my farm fields and a weirdly large number of wind farms.

We were 20 minutes late by the time we reached Ararat so I was getting mildly nervous that I’d miss my coach connection in Stawell. In the end the delay was actually rather convenient as I only needed to wait for 10 minutes at the station instead of a potential 40.

One coach ride later and all I can see are towering mountains. Well, towering by Australian terms. To wait out the time between my arrival and check-in, I took the pack for a quick shakedown around town seeing as it’s been a while since my body has handled this amount of weight, followed by an ice cream, watched the entire time by a flock of cockatoos.

Then it was time to relax at the hostel and joy of joys, I got a room to myself! That’s always a nice feeling. Anticipation for the trail is rising steadily, albeit with a few nerves for tomorrow. The shuttle doesn’t leave Halls Gap until 9am so I’m a tad nervous about having enough time to reach camp. I don’t think it’ll be an issue, but I would still prefer to leave earlier if I could. Nothing I can do about it now.

Here’s hoping I make a few less typos this time…