We’ve arrived in Hay for a very short stopover this evening. The area of the Hay township is where the Nari Nari people have lived for thousands of years, and we pay our respect to them and to their elders.
With Hay only being about 90 mins away, we spent most of today in and around Griffith. The day started with heading up to the the huge hill and scrubland area that overlooks Griffith, called Scenic Hill. Up there we quickly checked out an amazing piece of artwork on the town’s water tower, before heading down to explore an area known as the Hermit’s Cave. It’s where an Italian migrant called Valeri Ricetti chose to make himself a home in the mid 1900s, and created cave-like structures around the rocks including a garden area where he apparently grew fruits and vegetables. It was a fascinating walk, but sadly covered in a lot of litter which took away from the experience somewhat.
Still up on Scenic Hill is the Pioneer Park Museum, which has a huge amount of buildings from the formative generations of the broader Griffith area. It was great to look through such a variety of the actual buildings, and read their stories. There was a huge amount to learn about the formation of Griffith – in particular, the significant influence of Italian migrants on the area, something that is still visible today.
From there we headed across to the south side of Griffith for what was our most fun adventure of the day – a tour of the Catania Fruit Salad Farm. It’s known as a fruit salad farm because they grow multiple different fruits on the farm. It was a really authentic and generous tour – and we were the only participants! I think we tasted and ate more fruits in this one afternoon than we have almost the entire trip. We started with tasting fresh pecans and figs before the tour had even officially started – Joe had literally just picked the figs off the tree before coming over to meet us. We heard a lot about the history of the farm, and how his family came to own it in the 1960s, and Joe took over the farm in the 1980s. We tasted some oranges, and couple of different varieties of grapes, and then hopped on the bus to drive around and find out more about so many different fruits. We learnt about different orange varieties, as well as a wide variety of nut trees growing around the farm as well. The thing I found the most interesting was learning about how the irrigation works on farms, and those huge irrigation channels that sit alongside each farm – but more importantly, how each farmer has to plan about how much water they’ll use and then register that the day before.
We were given a whole watermelon to take with us, which was just so generous! He offered to open it and cut it for us then – but we decided to keep it until Broken Hill when we’ll have more space and time to properly cut it and enjoy it. While at the gift shop, we also couldn’t go past getting some jam, some of their own olives, and a couple of home-made bottles of Merlot from their own grapes.
Once we made it across the very beautiful and very flat Hay Plains, we headed straight to the north side of town where a sunset viewing area has been set up on the side of the Cobb Hwy. It’s an area far enough out of town that there is pretty much nothing in any direction – except the flat and open plains. It was the perfect spot to sit and watch the sunset together! We’d picked up some biscuits and dip just outside of Griffith on our way out, and so we sat and snacked on those (and rugged up a bit) for about half an hour. There were a few clouds around, so it wasn’t the picture-perfect drop below the horizon – but it was still spectacular.
We’ve wandered down the road to the local pub again for dinner tonight – no trivia here though! But this place still comes highly recommended by locals apparently.
Long drive ahead tomorrow, destined for Broken Hill!
