Being Melbourne Cup day, a public holiday in Victoria, we decided to go for a drive to the country side. Noojee was always in my bucket list as it was known to be a beautiful location in the Yarra Ranges and has a lot of amazing attractions including an old fashioned pub with a history of around 100 years, waterfalls, bushwalking, trestle bridge etc. After setting up and charging all the camera gear and accessories, we started our day, a day of complete failure ! Do you want to know why ? Keep reading.
Failure 1 – Failure to research: We drove for around 2 hours and reached the beautiful town of Noojee and on turning towards the historic trestle bridge, we saw the gates were closed and a board was placed there saying that the trestle bridge was closed due to the recent storm damage. True ! I remember there was a damaging storm in Melbourne at the end of last week !
Failure 2 – Failure of customer service: We then went straight to the Noojee hotel for lunch as it was the lunch time. After scanning the QR code (as per the Covid protocols) we entered the historic hotel and pub in Noojee. At the main door, the Covid Marshal lady welcomed us with an attitude : “How can I help you ?” I was stunned and had a second thought : Are we in a wrong place ? I imagine this is a place where people come in to eat and drink ! I did not expect that question from a staff member welcoming patrons who come in to their restaurant. I understand that the place was very busy and no seats were available for us to have our meals at that time. But that welcome greeting was totally inappropriate. I responded to her that it looks like you are very busy and we walked out. In fact we were not that hungry as we had our Maccas on our way, but wanted to have a taste of what Noojee hotel has to offer ! We would have loved to wait for sometime but they didn’t have that on their menu !
Failure 3 – Google Map failure : We then decided to go to the waterfalls. As we are new to the place, we set the google map to ‘Noojee Falls’ on the phone and started driving. It was shown 2.8 kilometres from our location. When we reached around that point but there was no sign of any waterfalls and we decided to drive further out. We didn’t realise that we started going deep into the thick pine forest. It was a gravel road that was not sealed but it was okay to drive. As there was no room for turning around, we kept going forward, assuming that road will bring us back to the Noojee town. At one stage we reset our Google Map to Noojee and started following it. After some time the road changed to a mud road and became narrower. We had to cross couple of fallen tree branches and dips. Bottom side of the car started rubbing on the humps and we started to get panic. We could also see that the road was getting sloppier and narrower. We decided to stop at this point and started thinking of getting some assistance or guidance. I called my roadside assistance company (RACV) and they didn’t respond to my call. Thank you Optus for the fantastic network in that area ! (Mobile Network Failure)
I somehow managed to take a U-turn on that narrow mud road with the assistance of my wife and started to drive back. We were actually deep inside pine plantations and on the logging roads ! We went searching for a wrong waterfall which wasn’t existing ! Thank you Google Map ! You can still see this “Noojee Falls” on Google maps, which is not existing ! Google map was giving us wrong directions, there were no Mobile networks and we didn’t have a 4 Wheel drive. We were driving our Toyota Camry and made a lot of fine scratches on both the sides from the tree branches we crossed. It will definitely take me couple of hours to remove those scratches by polishing and buffing.
Failure 4 – Failure to research : On our returning back home hungry, upset and cursing the ghost town of Noojee, we found a board to the Tooronga falls and it was closed to the public ! We should have done a google search before leaving home.
It was a day of series of failures and thank God we are back home safely.
Notes to take home :
1. Do a research before going for a drive
2. Make sure you use a mobile network that really covers you.
3. Eat well before you leave for a drive
4. Don’t expect any better customer service from ‘some’ country people !
Jyju's Pen 