Snowy Mountains, October 2002

Leaving the coast, I had to be a bit careful because of the altitude. I'd done a couple of dives the day before, but it was about 20 hours since I'd surfaced and my dive computer had cleared before the road started climbing into the hills. I reached Cooma for a spot of lunch and the temperature had started to drop to about 9ºC. I definitely needed my jumper.

The appropriately named Snowy Mountains

After Cooma, I continued on towards Jindabyne. The road gave good views of Lake Jindabyne, which is part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric scheme. I had a look around the visitors centre and bought my ticket for the Kosciuszko National Park. The park fee is a daily rate and has to be the most expensive national park in Australia. I can't remember exactly what I paid, but it was something like $18 a day.

Leaving Jindabyne, I headed towards my destination for the night, Thredbo. The mountains were in the distance and the peaks were covered in snow. Thredbo is a ski resort in the season and there's a YHA there which has to allocate the rooms on a ballot basis months in advance during peak season. However, there wasn't enough snow left to ski on and it was still a bit early for the walking season, so the large YHA had 6 people staying there. Most of the shops were also shut, though the pub was open, as was the supermarket. So getting something to eat wasn't a problem.

As I arrived, it started snowing. It settled on the slopes, but it wasn't that cold, so it soon started to melt again. This was my fifth visit to Australia, and it's not a place I associate with snow. It looked quite strange to see gum trees covering the ski slopes. Mount Kosciuszko is Australia's highest mountain at 2229m, but as you'd expect in a country as old as Australia in geological terms, it's not a sharply defined peak because of millions of years of erosion. In fact, the mountains are more like a ridge, there's a cable car up to the summit and there's even a road, though I think that's out of bounds to the public these days. One of the cable cars was running, and I did think about going up on it, but it was an open chair lift style, and I really didn't have the appropriate clothing. Getting caught out in another snow flurry would have been unpleasant.

Murray 1 Power Station

After a fairly early night, I set off on the road again through the park along the Alpine Way. There were some nice views though more low cloud did cut the visibility down. It was a pleasant and quiet slow drive. I narrowly missed hitting some stupid parrot which tried to fly into my car and saw a wallaby by the road side.

Eventually I came to the Murray 1 Power Station. I remember being taught about the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric scheme in geography at school, so I went and had a look around their visitor's centre. The scale of the scheme is very impressive. It diverts water through a series of tunnels and dams. The water used to run eastwards to the coast, but is diverted west, underneath the mountain range. Apart from generating electricity, it is then used to irrigate the drier agricultural lands to the west. Quite apart from anything else, the visitor's centre was a convenient place to get a coffee and a snack. With several stops along the way, it was almost 3 hours since I'd left Thredbo.

Shortly after leaving the national park, I crossed the Murray river and entered the state of Victoria. The temperature increased as the altitude decreased and it was a warm, pleasant spring day. I drove past Lake Hume, which was a lot lower than it should have been because of the drought and then back into NSW and the town of Albury. There's a paddle steamer there that goes along the Murray river, but I'd missed the last trip, so decided to press on south.

I picked up the Hume Freeway and made good progress. At about 4pm, I decided it was time to stop for the evening. The next town was called Euroa. It wasn't in the guidebook, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway. I decided to splash out and treated myself to a motel room for the night. I popped down the local pub for a couple of drinks and had an enjoyable evening chatting to some of the locals until about 10ish, when they started closing up.

Early the next morning, I was woken up by the sound of rain at the window. By the time I was ready to leave, it had dried up and it looked like it was going to be another nice, spring day. I decided to head south towards Sorrento.

Back to Oz Index

Onto Sorrento