After a weekend of drinking and concerts (plus the opening park party for a pride festival and a street festival for the lunar new year) it was time to recover outside the city with a bike ride to a few of the Yarra Valley’s wineries. At 33° and humid it was also very much not the day for serious exertion, but with wine tasting and country roads calling, there was no way not to go.

With 43 kilometres of highway between to the wine path, it was convenient that the Melbourne Metro goes all the way to the trail head (literally, the trail started at the parking lot). The path begins in slopey suburbs and connects via a bridge with too much gravel, but it becomes a much more more rural-looking path afterwards though plenty of people were strolling through it even on a Monday afternoon, most probably from the suburbs just off the path. After a dozen kilometres and almost 2 hours of struggling up (and zooming down) hills and shading under forest we arrived in Seville. The three wineries offered some great ranges of wine, mostly the chardonnays and pinot noirs for which the Yarra Valley is (so the wineries said) best suited.

On the way back the late afternoon sun gave the forest a fantasy glow, especially where the path was bracketed by rock faces where the old railway had been dug in to the hills. The sense of going through a land out of time was reinforced by the many piles of horse poop that had to be dodged, left by the equestrian school.

Posted from Lilydale, Victoria, Australia.