A Single Step

  Back to Victoria, but this time purely for fun. Having spent a couple of days last year in the Emerald–Monbulk area for work, I'd been wanting to come back to explore the Dandenongs at my leisure.  With Tuesday's weather looking much more promising than the next day's, I decided to try this relatively short loop walk. That length turned out to be somewhat misleading: several significant steep sections made this considerably more challenging than I'd expected. The start of the circuit was an auspicious setting, at a picnic area among the magnificent, towering mountain ash that are such a distinctive feature of the landscape around here. The first steep climb began immediately, heading straight up Jacksons Hill Road. It was a great way to get heart, lungs and legs pumping. It was all worth it, though. The views descending Ridge Road were spectacular, looking east towards the high country as the fog started to clear from the valleys. The view to the west was equally stri...

Weekend travel to Melbourne for work provided an opportunity for an extra day in the city and a rare chance to explore outside the city centre. The original plan was for a relatively short walk following a route found online, from Camberwell in the east to the city centre, but fair weather and energy to spare prompted an extension to Brunswick in the north.  It's definitely not the most beautiful walk I've ever done, but it's a great example of the variety of built and natural landscapes encountered on a good urban walk. The start, Camberwell. Not my tram   The day began with a 40-minute tram ride from Flinders Street, virtually right outside the hotel, to Camberwell, which was surprisingly quiet on a Sunday morning. Like, I suspect, many people who live outside Melbourne, I picture its suburbs as a more-or-less unbroken string of impossibly cool cafes, punctuated only by an occasional footy oval. The little bit of this suburb that I saw was slightly faded and sad, a...

  The name of this blog is obviously an allusion to the cliché about the start of a journey of a thousand miles. But it's also about the act of metaphorically putting one foot in front of another: a nod to the fact that sometimes life is just hard and you don't much feel like going on; but that there's value – and perhaps a little virtue – in simply plodding onwards, whatever the goal might be or even regardless of whether there's a goal at all. I was prompted to create this thing primarily as a way of recording a long trek I'm planning to do at the end of this year, when I'll be walking the length of the Tokaido, the ancient 500-kilometre route linking Tokyo and Kyoto. I'll write more about the Tokaido later, but while planning a dive into the scary world of blogging (isn't that something famous people do?) it occurred to me that it could also serve as a record of other, less lengthy walks. Not that I expect anyone else to be particularly enthralled by ...