Run 1:01:00 [3] 11.8 km (5:10 / km)
A few stars aligned to set up this run. Lachlan and Susanne were coming in on the overnight train from Sydney towards the tail end of their Europe-to-Australia-without-using-a-plane trip, I wanted to catch up with them and their next destination was Ballarat; at the other end of the day, I have a workshop in Lorne tomorrow and Tuesday. On a more-or-less logical route choice between Ballarat and Lorne is Colac, and the stony rises country north of Colac that Invisible has mentioned here on a number of occasions; I'd been wanting to check out for a while and this was the chance.
This was a (deserted dirt) road run; the terrain itself is all on private land - old lava flows, with lots of small rocky knolls and ridges, mostly not more than 5 or 10 metres high, but enough of them to keep visibility down (along with scattered shrubs). The vegetation and visibility reminds me a bit of some farmed sand dune areas in NZ - at this time of year, the grass in paddocks which aren't being grazed is long enough to be awkward (especially given the rocky ground in places) but it would be better in August and September. The hills are very rocky underfoot but the gaps between them are sufficient that it would still be reasonably runnable terrain (not as full on as Mount Eccles from reports I've heard), though one negative is a lot of fences (some electric), and some stone walls which would probably require compulsory crossing points. Probably better for a middle than a long (if only to keep the number of landowners involved manageable), but may well be worth pursuing.
The run was decent, as my country back road runs often are. A bit twingey for much of the way from about 20 minutes onwards but never got any worse. Did have one puzzled local working on the garden in front of their farm.
Ballarat educational institutions have been into name changes a bit lately. On the way to the Prendergast residence (where I dropped my passengers off) is Phoenix College - I was wondering if it got its name because its predecessor burnt down, but in fact it's merely a merger of two other schools. The University of Ballarat is also changing its name to Federation University; as Red Symons very dryly said after interviewing someone from there the other day, he's looking forward to the T-shirts with the university initials. (I predict that it will become something like the Federation University of Australia no later than the start of the 2014 academic year). My favourite Symonsism of this type came a few years ago when he was interviewing someone from the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union about a dispute involving the zookeepers from Melbourne Zoo: "presumably they're in the miscellaneous bit".
Susanne and Lachlan inform me that one feature of Ust-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan hasn't changed since 2004: they still use second-hand buses acquired from northern Europe and still haven't changed anything on the buses, so they still carry destination signs for various Stockholm suburbs or ads for Finnish supermarkets.