I was going to title this piece ‘I went 40 hours without internet and survived’ but decided otherwise. J. had already sneakily managed to get me to go to a place with a gold mine and a train ride, but failed to tell me there was also no reception. Nah, it was all good – to be honest, my recommendation for anyone in Victoria wanting a digital de-tox is to visit Walhalla. It really was blissful and reminded me of the daydreaming sans screen days.

My folks have a beautiful memory of Walhalla from when they first met – a day spent in extreme heat by a gurgling stream, the smell of eucaplypts thick and heady. Dad remembers Mum wore an orange jumpsuit. Thus the place seemed imbuded with some kind of mystic old world romanticism from my parent’s halcyon days. Turns out, old world romanticism is what this valley is all about.

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Named ‘Walhalla’ or ‘Valley of the Gods’ after a Swiss guy that owned property there, the town is a gold mining town nestled near Mt Baw Baw, about 2 hours drive from Melbourne – cross country skiing country in Winter. The town was built after they discovered alluvial gold in the creek and went a-hunting for it’s source. It took them ten years to dig a mine that didn’t even produce gold – that same mine could have been dug in 4 days with modern technology. Eventually though, they struck a vein and the town produced some 4.7 tons of gold up until about 1914, when the war started. The miners all left and they sent the school kids down there to bring up the metal for the war effort.

Whilst the valley is now rich with trees, tree-ferns, mossy lichens, mushrooms, wild colonial plants such as borage and yarrow and marigolds, it wouldn’t have looked like that back in the day as they cut down all of the trees to fuel the mine.It’s so blissfully quiet, yet then they would have heard the constant clanging of the rock crushers and the hum of village life. I loved the post office, where mail would arrive from Europe after a two year journey. The arrival of the mail was a town event, where long queues would form outside the post office. Walhalla was actually in the running to be on the first postage stamp here in Victoria but the kangaroo won out (beating King George as well). The old post office was restored in the ‘90’s and still had original wallpaper and a 130 year old bedspread and other artefacts.

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Of course, I was interested in the history of the people there, whilst Jamie was interested in the machinery – old rock crushers, boilers, steam engines, trains and bridges and a whole lot of rusty equipment littered the town and it’s surrounds. You can spy, in these photos, J. hugging a steam engine and talking to the driver of the diesel train that took us on a beautiful journey through the mountains.

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I didn’t mind the train, but the mine didn’t interest me much – if you’ve seen one mine, you’ve seen them all in my book, to be honest! I spent an hour reading in the back of the van instead, snuggled under a blanket – what a luxury. The blessings of no data indeed.

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The most fascinating place for me though, was the old cemetery. It’s one of Victoria’s oldest and most picturesque graveyards, and I loved imagining the lives of the people buried there. There were men from the Cornish tin mines, having escaped the oppression experienced there and being lured to Walhalla by the promise of gold. There were men from Devon (as Jamie quipped, now gone to heaven) and Ireland, from Italy and Spain. There were babies and the old, young men – how I wished to know the story of their lives. Did they miss the old country, or love their life in the new, and all it’s promise? Did they dream of their old home, or were they happy to be laid at rest where kookaburras and lyrebirds sang, and tree ferns shaded their graves?

How beautiful the view was, from there, a hundred odd years on. How quiet, and how perfectly lovely.

You can find Walhalla on the SteemitWorldMap HERE

If you want a 24 hour digital detox, there are worse places to be and worse ways to do it! Nice to be back on Steemit though - I did miss you all :0P

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I'm also totally honoured to be a passenger on the #ecotrain - check out this hashtag for some pretty amazing posts permaculture to meditation, environmental issues to food forests - I highly recommend checking out this tag as you're guaranteed of sweeeetness!

Plus, I'm super excited and honoured to be part of @tribesteemup - a heap of amazing crew who all post quality posts about helping the Earth and humanity and generally making the world a better place. You should definitely check out the #tribesteemup trail to find some quality writing.