David, Bien, Huy and I headed to Mt Hotham early last Friday morning for a fun filled weekend of snowboarding. Tu and Nghia couldn’t take time off work so they headed up later that evening. We were all very excited as snow reports forecasted excellent snow coverage and conditions for the weekend.

We hit the slopes about lunchtime on Friday and man, the conditions were just fantastic! It was the best snow I had ever experienced. It was just so beautifully soft and dry which made for excellent snowboarding. Plus the sun was out all day long and visibility was great.

Saturday was ok. The conditions weren’t as good as the day before but they were still good. The boys headed out early for a full day of snowboarding. I was a little tired and sore from the previous day so I headed out after lunch.

Sunday arrived and it was time to get ready to head home. It snowed during the night so there was fresh snow everywhere. We had a few hours before we had to check out of our apartment so we decided to head out for some snow play. It was just so beautiful with snow falling ever so gently. I had never experienced such calm snowfall so it was just so amazing. It made for the perfect end to my best ever weekend of snowboarding so far.

I spent last weekend at the Grampians (officially the Grampians National Park in Victoria, Australia) with my mum’s side of the family which was a lot of fun. There were around 16 of us and we all stayed at the cosy Mt Zero Log Cabins.

On Sunday we made our way to Mt Stapylton to tackle the 2 hour walk. We were told the walk would be a little challenging but we had no idea it would be as involving as it was (I found out later on that travel guides graded the walk as either moderate or hard). There were many slippery rock surfaces and certain areas required some rock hopping and rock scrambling which would have been a little too dangerous for my youngest cousin and some of the older folks in the group. There weren’t any guard rails either so it wouldn’t have taken much for someone to accidentally slip and fall off a rock ledge.

In the end about half of us made it all the way to the summit. The views were quite spectacular. I especially liked the numerous rock pools scattered around the summit area which you can see in photos below.

Stoj, David, Bien, Huy, Nghia and myself headed up to Mt Buller this morning. We were all excited as it was the first trip of the season. The season only officially started last weekend but there has been very little to no snowfall. Luckily, enough snow fell in last couple of days (together with man made snow) for us to head up for some snowboarding.

Only the Bourke St run was open but that was enough to satisfy our snowboarding cravings especially since the conditions were so clear and beautiful. We couldn’t have hoped for a better day.

Here are some of the photos from today. The last two were taken at Mansfield where we had a pizza for dinner. Between the six of us we managed to down a total of 3 large and 3 medium pizzas!

Xuan and I headed to Emerald Lake Park today which is located in Melbourne’s outer east, about 50 km from the city. The park has two lakes, Lake Treganowan and Nobelious and offers barbecue facilities, paddle boats, walking tracks, fishing and the famous Puffing Billy heritage railway.

We spent the afternoon walking on the tracks and taking photos along the way. A lot of our time was spent taking photos of cute little red mushrooms we discovered scattered around the park. After some research I found out that they are called Amanita muscaria and are poisonous.

Last night we headed into the city in Melbourne to take some photos. Xuan had her brother’s old SLR and she wanted to experiment with some night photography. It also gave me a chance to play around with my new Canon IXUS 960 IS compact digital camera that I recently picked up.

Although the quality of the night shots taken with my compact camera don’t really compare to those of the SLR, it still managed to take some reasonable photos after some playing around with the shutter speed settings. The photo below was one of the better shots taken with the compact. It is of the Yarra River taken from the bridge on St Kilda Road. On the left is Southbank and the right is Flinders Street Station.