Tilba Tilba

This entry is also available in: Русский

I do not know why but this name reminds me an old joke about Baden Baden :)

Tilba Tilba is a place, somewhere three hundred km south from Sydney. The capital of that place, which is proudly called Central Tilba is a town with population of about 60 citizens. But somehow this place attracts so many tourists from everywhere its inhabitants are seriously concerned about problems with parking.

What potentially might be so special in a village that has only one street and a shopping center looking like this:

Convinience store in Tilba Tilba

This is a post office, convenience store, souvenir store, cafe, chocolate shop, tourist information center and petrol station(!)

To be honest, tourist information center was concluded in single stand with some booklets most of which we already had. For locals information center offered much more sophisticated service - real bulletin board

Bulletin Board

See, what people had to do before Internet had been invented? But this board is rather an ancestor of already became history BBS (how many of us actually know, what was it and how it looked like?)

Observant readers might already have noticed that almost one third of space on board was occupied by a note about funerals. We came arrived there around ten in the morning and found everything locked - everybody went to funerals of local fire brigade commander - a lade in “Alpaca shop” situated just opposite to that “supermarket”, who happened to be its owner, told us post office staff asked her to keep an eye on their workplace while they pay their respect.

Lady making yarn on authentic spinning whell

I very like in rural Australia the way local people maintain authenticity of their places, as in Berry people proudly tell that they do not have a supermarket there. And this shop sold wool clothes and accessories. Not any machine-made wool sweaters but goods made from alpacas. And, furthermore, not from any alpacas but from alpacas that owners of this shop raise on their farm. Yarn is hand-crafted exactly like shown on picture above and, to complete the picture, every item there has a tag with a name of the animal whose wool was used to made it and you can find that alpaca’s portrait on the wall!

Also Tilba Tilba has its own cheese factory and some funny houses.

Colonial style cottage in Tilba Tilba

There isn’t anything really funny about house like that except one thing. Of course, I understand that in modern interiors fireplace is nothing else but just a piece of design and usually does not have any heating functions at all, but this house has been build well before gas heaters and reverse-cycle air conditioners became available to consumer, and climate in that landscape assumes temperatures close to zero somewhere in the middle of August which makes this fireplace design funny - why bother building it to heat the environment? If built the same but inside the building the house itself would be much warmer in winter.

Literally around the corner from Tilba Tilba we found a completely unexpected attraction, which impact on our minds couldn’t be described with any other words but “overwhelming”.

Foxglove gardens

We were lucky - it was slightly raining and the park was open. The park is someone private property and owner lives right there in a house. There is no public access to the house and it is patrolled by security guard:

Cat in front of the cottage in Foxglove gardens

Luckily, everything else is open and can be looked upon, touched and smelt. It is better not to eat anything - taste of wild strawberries we found was anything but taste of strawberries as we used to know it.

Garden consists of a huge number of installations made from trees, flowers and other plants, spiced with plaster figures.

Foxglove gardens

They also have real birch trees, real pine trees and real apple trees with real apples on them. Sorry, we did not want to try them after a failure with strawberry.

Of course, any Australian garden must have some outdoor furniture in it:

Chair in foxglove gardens

And, of course, flowers. Beds of roses surprise with their size and variety of colors and sizes of flowers.

Rose

Unlike possums, fruit flies do not eat rose buttons (I wonder if they do anything to prevent those cute creatures from invading to flower beds?

Of course, garden like that wouldn’t look complete without a gallery like this:

As usual, finding this place on a map is an easy task with google:


View Larger Map

del.icio.us:Tilba Tilba digg:Tilba Tilba spurl:Tilba Tilba wists:Tilba Tilba simpy:Tilba Tilba newsvine:Tilba Tilba blinklist:Tilba Tilba furl:Tilba Tilba reddit:Tilba Tilba fark:Tilba Tilba blogmarks:Tilba Tilba Y!:Tilba Tilba smarking:Tilba Tilba magnolia:Tilba Tilba segnalo:Tilba Tilba gifttagging:Tilba Tilba

Leave a Reply

Login with OpenID

(enter URL like xxxx.livejournal.com)

Or stay anonymous