Tent city to rich city

Before leaving Swan Hill and our beautiful and gaudy purple motel There just had to be a few photos of the Town.

 The purple motel

We wanted to see the Pioneer Settlement down by the river, the entrance used to be through the old paddle-steamer “Gem”. The entrance has been moved – and as a result the old timber vessel may last a bit longer – but the Gem is such an unusual water craft by the standard of today that I enjoyed the opportunity to take a few shots of it while there were no people around.

 a former Murray River paddlesteamer

Unfortunately the cost of entering this tourist village was rather exorbitant and since we only had an hour in which we could take a look through we decided that we would rather drive on to Bendigo and spend a bit of time there instead. It was a little disappointing at the time (not to go around the Pioneer Settlement) but as it turned out we were able to take a tram tour around Bendigo and still not be too late getting to my brother’s home near Melbourne.

I asked our tram driver to pose beside the 1914 tram that he was going to drive.

 Our tram driver in authentic uniform

We started out in a tram that was much younger than this and when we pulled into the tram depot all the passengers were asked to dismount and transfer to this timber lined tram.

 The timber interior of the 1914 tram

Our trip on the tram took us past a few of the things we had walked around on foot. We passed the Golden Dragon Museum that houses the Chinese dragons that are used in parades for Chinese New Year.

We saw the wonderful ornately decorated roofs of the temples and pagodas in the grounds of the Golden Dragon Museum.

The tram journey took us past many early timber buildings and it was slow enough to stand up and take photographs out of the open windows.

Bendigo grew because of the gold fields of the 1850’s, many of the poppet heads from those days have been preserved and some of the mines are open for tourists.

The Deborah Mine, which is also the start of the tram tour, has many levels of mine underground and it is possible to spend half a day on a tour with an experienced guide, exploring the nine levels of tunnels and shafts.

I think a quick look into one tunnel might be interesting, I am not sure if I could get pleasure from spending several hours in a tunnel!

AJ