Bushfires, 40C and fine wine

So we decide to go wine tasting in the Hunter Valley this weekend - on the hottest day this summer. And yes we did get caught up in the bushfires...

Hunter Valley is like the desert. Seriously. Hot, dry, brown and with little shade anywhere. So probably not the smartest idea when it is pushing 40C in Sydney. In Hunter it was clearly over that.




Still we had a lovely day on Sunday. Took us a while to get going (not my fault for a change), picking up people in the van - which has now been named Bruce the bus - and all squeezing in. It was the same group as last week - Michelle, Paul, Dani, Taz, Danielle and Tom plus Michelle's two Irish friends Jan and Karen.




So off we went with the windows down and system up. But with just pure hot air blowing through - it was a sticky but scenic ride over the Hawkesbury River and north to Hunter Valley which is near Newcastle.




We arrived just after midday and headed straight for Peterson's House - the sparkling wine kingdom of Hunter Valley. We'd had some recommendations for where to visit from some friends at work so we had a few places to aim for out of the hundreds of wineries dotted around the valley.

The sparkling wine here was delicious - the house 'gateway' sparkling (just $17.50 - seven quid) was lovely and light and refreshing and they some lovely sparkling reds too. The sparkling Merlot was great - sadly you can only buy these from the cellar door.

Then it was on through the vineyard-covered valley - with views of Mount Sugarloaf and the Watagan Mountains around us - to Hungerford Hill (not so impressed though nice building), Tempus Two (pretty posh and bit snotty - pics below), Brokenwood, Lindemans as well as McGuigans cheeses and a small producers place for tasty olives, cheeses, pates, olive oils and preserves... it was pretty heavenly. Even if it was bloody hot.






Rather hilariously (for us), Paul and Michelle had decided, for some unknown reason, not to wear shoes. This meant they had to hop skip and jump from the van across boiling tarmac and red-hot gravel to the coolness of the wineries.

We weren't overly impressed by the quality of the wines - apart from the sparklies at Petersons and some of the very expensive ones - or by the attitude of some of the staff at the cellar doors. Clearly they took one look at us and thought - stingy travellers.

As my friend Dani noted on her MySpace blog, people here can seem very friendly on the one hand, but incredibly narrow-minded on the other. There can be quite racist attitudes here and there is way more conformity to dress styles and the way of life.

People dress fashionably in town but few seem to go out of their way to wear anything unusual - there may be a hint of hippy clothes but it will be hippy chic, there may be an element of gothic but it will be in smoky eye make-up than an expression through clothes or stark make-up. In short, Sydney can seem a little bland, a little narrow and a wee bit unexciting compared to vibrant cities such as London or Paris.

Of course that's not to say I'm not having a ball. I enjoy my job and it really is a beautiful place to live and work.

Anyway... we left Hunter around 5pm when the wineries were shutting up for the day. After a bite to eat, we hit the road for what should have been a two-hour trip.

But near Hawkesbury River we saw huge queues leaving the pacific highway and then hit massive queues up through the cuttings of Ku-ring-gai National Park.





We thought maybe there had been an accident but as we crawled along we began to see smoke on the horizon and realised there were some serious bush fires ahead.



Danielle had recently taken the wheel so I was upfront with her (luckily not sat on the bench over the engine any longer which was hotter than hell itself) and was stunned by the huge plumes of smoke discolouring the sky.

But once we had passed these clouds of grey smoke, the traffic did not speed up and we remained inching forward. The heat was stifling and we saw many people pulled up on the central reservation and hard shoulder with overheated engines.

Dani, Karen and Michelle jumped out and took a walk along the hard shoulder - picking up people who were also taking a break from sitting in their cars, wandering to see how far the queues stretched or trying to make it to the emergency telephones.


The girls running to jump back in the van...




At our junction, traffic was completely diverted from the highway but we sped up for a while only to hit more queues and to see huge black plumes of smoke and a red smudge on the horizon. We passed frighteningly close to red bilious clouds on our left while passing suburbs on our right - the train track and a line of trees shielding us from the flames and clouds of smoke.

The adjacent freeway to the pacific highway was completely shut and we later learned that noise barriers were burned and that flames had been leaping across the section of the Pacific Highway that had been closed off. More than 900 hectares has been raized and the following day at work we could see the smoke clouds gathering on the horizon.



Trainlines and the highways were closed and people were travelling up to Palm Beach to get the little ferry across the water to get home to the north. It was a thrilling but frightening experience and horrifying to think of the people in the nearby suburbs having their homes threatened with little anyone could do. The helicopters flying overhead waterbombing the flames seemed so small in comparison to the raging fires.



Elsewhere, Danielle and I did a few hours in the customer service department at Fairfax on Saturday, we waved farwell to another two friends on Saturday night at Shelley Beach and had a fun night out dancing at The Boatshed in Manly on Friday night.

This week promises the theatre, drinks at the Opera bar and Sounds on Sunday (the daytime party we went to on Boxing Day) this weekend for Emily's birthday, and planning Danielle's 21st celebrations. And work of course...