Sweet Wayfaring

Yesterday's brown butterfly is one of the brilliant blue butterflies when it opens its wings! I've run out of material so perhaps this is a good time for me to take a blog break while I figure out what I will do with my blogs in the New Year.

I spotted this butterfly at the Nerada tea plantation.

I remember that I forgot to post a story about the Nerada tea plantation on the Atherton Tableland.   I wondered how the tea was harvested.  The only image in my mind of tea harvesting was of women on the slopes of India hand picking the crop.  The neat hedge-like clip of these fields assured me this was not the case here. The photo below of the video display shows how it's done. The informational display says the best tea comes from the top shoots.  Hand pluckers can pick 40 or 50 kilos a day.  With shears a plucker can do about 150 kilos a day.  A Japanese developed hand shearer can do about 300 kilos a day per person but it is hard to control the depth of the cut. The machine above is Australian developed and can do 45 tonnes in a single shift, of tea as good as hand plucking.

I have a couple of supplementary shots from the trip.  Here is our round up of some of the birds we spotted.

And so we reached the end of our long journey.  In our garden winter flowering camellias were in bloom, the first blossom was whitening the boughs of the pear trees and the air was fragrant with jonquil, daphne and wattle.  Ah home!! Thank you for following along with me over so many months which actually took 9 weeks but much longer to report.  It has been a delight to relive one of the best journeys I have ever travelled.

Wanting to eek out the holiday just a little longer we spent a couple of days at our rural retreat at Clandulla -- the little wattle and warm log fire warmed our hearts.

Too soon we were passing by our favourite lake outside Mudgee. It was looking a little dull and cold but I do love this countryside.