Tuesday 1 November 2016

VISITING ABANDONED BUILDINGS

Clearly the whole 'blog every day for a year' idea didn't last long but I just wasn't into writing things that weren't at least a little bit interesting or fun to write. This however, will be a much more interesting thing for me to read back on.

About a week or two ago, Rodney drove Maddi and I to Ararat where we all stayed in a little cabin type accommodation and went on a tour of one of Australia's most famous mental asylums. We got there a few hours before the tour started and filled our free time with walking, taking photos, eating pizza and watching Saw.



















Unfortunately, I didn't take my camera on the ghost tour because I wasn't sure if it would be able to take photos in such low light - of course I didn't think about the fact that there would have to be lights for us to see. Anyhow, no one else on the tour had a camera, and I think I would have felt a bit too much like a tourist hehe. People (including me) did take photos on their phone though! And there was a group photo at the end.

The tour was pretty fun - the guides were in character and had great costume dresses on - and some of the things they told us were crazy. Aradale Mental Asylum only began closing in the 90s, which isn't long ago at all. There were something like 68 buildings, 63 of which still stand (don't quote me on those numbers), it housed around 2,000 patients, and the staff there were all so mean to the patients. We were told one story about a patient who refused to eat, so the nurse shoved a spoon of food so far down their throat that they coughed up blood.


We left Ararat pretty early the next day, stopping briefly at a lookout before heading to back home!

-G :)