Day trip: the hundred-mile square.

First came the aroma, a kind of steamy spiciness, like woks in an Asian market. Then a plate appeared. On it was an explosion of glistening red barbecued pork erupting out of a bread roll containing a sea of coriander, sliced cucumber, pieces of dynamite chili and shredded carrot.

It was a cold early autumn day under a steel grey sky heavy with cloud. We had been driving: what they used to call a day trip. East out of the city, and an early  lunch stop; a shopping square off the main highway. Selected at random.

More plates arrived. Barbecue pork banh mi. Roast pork banh mi. Pork crackling banh mi. Roast chicken banh mi. The place was a hybrid cafe bakery: laminex tables with chairs that shriek when you pushed them back, help-yourself refrigerators, those straw cylinders on the counter where you pull one and two others fall out. The front was all glass, framing the looming mountains above the shopping square. 

Iced coffee Vietnamese-style: a cold tawny caffeine blast designed to rocket you over the mountains. Then giant thick-icing-topped vanilla slices, chocolate mint bars like little baize-topped billiard tables; pastries and croissants and I forget what else. Under $50 for two adults and three teenagers. Back on to the highway.

We ploughed on through endless far eastern suburbia where countless 1970s cathedral-ceilinged and arch-windowed brown brick houses no longer host fondue dinner parties in their invisible sunken lounges. Or maybe they do. The mountains filled the windscreen until I turned left, north; and they swivelled to the right and slid slowly behind. 

Now we’re passing industrial estates and car yards and big-box discount stores, closed for Anzac Day; huge multi-coloured square blocks, with staring windows and doors shut like clamped mouths and sitting immovable on their plots like lame giants.

Further out of town the Yarra Valley is a flat green riverbed that seems too wide for one river. The Yarra meanders here in semi-circles as it flows south, as if looking for its mother, dead for two million years. Rain came, like a backlit curtain. Suddenly we were driving through a luminous green otherworld, sailing through a chartreuse sea before turning left at Yarra Glen, where the horse crowd and the hippies and the rednecks live in  peaceful sleep of shady summertime. Mostly.

On the radio ‘Harold in Italy’ by Hector Berlioz led us kind of appropriately down out of the mountains, a roller coaster ride westwards through forest to Eltham. Past Eltham’s bohemian mud-brick rather than brown brick suburbia, a few more geographical corrugations found us an afternoon stop at Heide to look at pictures. But more of that later.

Looking at pictures always takes longer than you think. By the time we hit Bell Street the darkening western sky was deep orange red in that same autumn tone as the leaves I have yet to pick up in the front garden.

*

Allegro Scoresby Vietnamese Bakery, 9 Darryl St, Scoresby. Four-word review: o mi o my