Smiley Nomad

If you ever look up for places to visit in the small Victorian town of Bairnsdale, St Mary's church would almost always come up as the top pick on the list. At the end of my locum in Bairnsdale, we could not leave this quaint little town without visiting this piece of history.  After having a sumptions breakfast at Mr D's cafe we took a small stroll to the church. Built in 1913 this church is an unmistakable red-orange brick structure in Bairnsdale standing proudly in the middle of the town right on the main street. The main tower has a sculpture of Mary welcoming you to this place.  It is the inside of the church that is very special. The walls and ceiling of the church have beautiful murals done by an italian migrant artist, Francesco Folriani, who was looking for work in this region over 70 years ago. For these murals, this is definitely not your average regional Australian church you would visit and I could realize why it makes to the top of the list in the things to do in...

It was my last day locuming in Bairnsdale. As the lockdown restrictions eased, Tan could join me in Bairnsdale. After over a 7 hour journey from Warrnambool, he came to Bairnsdale around 5.15pm. I picked him from the station and without wasting anymore time, we wanted to go and see the silt jetties. I have heard the sunsets here are mesmerizing and wanted to see it to ourselves before leaving Bairnsdale. Mitchell river silt jetties are located about 10km from Bairnsdale. It is porbably better you have an SUV / AWD to get there as the latter part of the journey is on dirt road with so many potholes. Silt jetties are a natural formation of finger like elongated deltas formed by silt, minerals and mud over millennia. At 8km Silt jetties in Bairnsdale are the second largest in the world and the largest in the southern hemisphere.  By the time we reached there the sun had already set but it was still casting a mesmerizing array of colors at the horizon. It was only us there and the thic...

2020 has been a challenging year. With the COVID outbreak all the traveling has been restricted even within Australia and I have been absolutely bored running between home, work and coles.  It was time to at least checkout the backyard during this Christmas holidays. I was oncall yesterday and luckily had only 4 admissions, post-take ward round finished by 10am and out of spontaneity me and Tan decided to pay a visit to the seal colony just over 180km from Warrnambool. I had been intrigued by this Seal colony walk from a facebook post by one of my colleagues. The drive to Bridgewater was one of the regular drives in any Australian country road, passing through vast planes of grass lands, gracing cows and sheep, studded with some wind power generators. We reached Portland in about 1.5 hours around mid day and were hungry. We came in hope of having a nice lunch at a restaurant but realized being the Christmas day even the Mcdonalds was closed and alas had to buy some frozen heated me...