Bairnsdale to Snowy Mountains

What a busy week again.  We will need a holiday to have a rest soon if we keep this pace up.

We enjoyed a few days in Bairnsdale mostly in the company of Peter and Colleen Robinson who escorted us to a lovely water front café at Paynesville for lunch the first day and the next day we lunched at/on the ‘Floating Dragon’.  The Floating Dragon as the name suggests is a Chinese Restaurant on a boat moored off the pier in the middle of Lakes Entrance. Both places provided excellent food.  We never went hungry at dinner time with Colleen insisting on cooking despite being a bit uncomfortable as a result of a bit of a tumble on the day we arrived.  We are happy to report that they are both in fine spirits and provided us with the most welcoming hospitality and pleasant company.  We enjoyed catching up on the latest with their family and they were interested in the whereabouts and well-being of our children and grandchildren.  They are both still avid readers and I off loaded another copy of “Poor Fellow My Country” to them; Peter hasn’t read it yet though Colleen has.  Of course it was an exchange and I now have an equally large book called “The Pillars of the Earth” to go on with.  The Cathedral in Bairnsdale is another large Catholic church with large stained glass windows and many very good oil paintings on the wall and decorated ceilings.  We found it really sad that the Church is now only open 9-3 due to vandalism.  Surely we have to give the idle wasters something more productive to do than wreck someone’s good work that has lasted for more than a century already.

Bairnsdale's St Marys

Colleen’s brother Rob and his wife Joan dined with us one night and they highly recommended we visit Mallacoota on the SE coast.  We left the highway and drove north through Brethen and the forests to the east and crossed the highway down to Mallacoota.  This is a small coastal holiday town which explodes during the summer holidays.  It looks a town of less than 1,000 residents but has four van parks.  The council run one we stayed at is on the shores of the lake where you can hear the surf pounding onto 90 Mile Beach a few hundred metres away.  The water front sites are within metres of the water and they have 98 tinny mooring berths along the wall in front.  The lake system goes for miles inland from here and the fishing is good – apparently.  It was cold and showery but the park was quite busy and several on the vanners were out in their tinnys.  Quite a few had campfires in old washing machine bowls on their sites also.  It is a very nice spot and would be even more appealing in summer.

Mallacoota Foreshore Van Park - note tinny mooring poles

Cute private jetty, across the lake to the van park, 90 Mile Beach in background

from the headland looking back along the lake

Next stop was at Eden on the coast and back into NSW.  We had fond memories of Eden when we last visited in 1981 as we saw whales in the bay at that time.  No whales this time but we enjoyed the area again.  We stayed in a park in town opposite the beach and on the shores of a lake which was nice and handy but there are two great looking parks a few kilometres south of town in the forest and on their own beach where a river enters the ocean.  They looked great for summer holidays.  We took a drive out through Ben Boyd National Park.  Ben Boyd was one of the first settlers and a real entrepreneur who established a whaling station with his own private 19.5m high sandstone lookout tower built on a headland opposite town.  Davidsons Whaling Station is another station built further inland on the bay and has been well preserved with several old timber buildings still in use since the 1850’s.  There is also an export eucalypt wood chip mill located on Twofold Bay.  The coastline is very pretty with nice golden beaches and spectacular rocky cliffs in between.  Garry enjoyed a game of golf on the very nice course while Carol checked out the retail opportunities and progressed the crocheting of a large mat she has found on the net.  We noticed that real estate is very reasonable with 4 bedrooms on a couple of acres available for less than $400K.  Apparently employment has decreased since the Greensea’s Fish Cannery closed and the Forestry quotas for logging have been reduced by successive Governments.  They still have a good pleasure fishing industry with several seafood cafes on the wharf.  We sampled and enjoyed some very fresh and tasty seafood for lunch.

Eden town beach opposite Van Park

The Seahorse Inn on the beachfront in the village of Boyd Town

Eden coastline lookout

enjoying the sunshine on a coastal walk

Boyd Tower built in 1840 as a private lighthouse but used as a whale watching tower

waiting for the photos to be taken....

Davidson's Whaling Station settlement

cute little coloured fellow with his eye on dinner

outdoor concentration office 1840's style

Quarantine Bay

who's expecting fish to be cleaned here??

We planned to head further up the coast and inland through Canberra but due to major roadworks we only went north as far as Bega and then went inland through Cooma and on to Jindabyne for the last couple of days.  We were looking forward to seeing the Bega Cheese Factory and while we enjoyed the displays, the craft/souvenir shops and the cheese samples, we were disappointed that there are no factory tours available.  Still we bought some good Australian made cheeses and kept going.  The rainforest up the range over Brown Mountain is as beautiful as the road is steep but the country side changes as soon as you are over the top.  The Monaro Plains are almost devoid of trees and has endless grassy rolling hills supporting plenty of sheep and cattle.

New model genetically modified cow - 3 times the milk of the old version

Painting made out of different grain seeds glued to a board 3m x 1m

Colourful cow

Jindabyne is a pretty town on the shores of Lake Jindabyne which has formed behind one of the Snowy Mountains Scheme dams.  We took a drive up into the snowfields with Perisher and Charlottes Pass busily preparing for the start of the snow season.  There have been good snow falls in recent weeks but the current rain has washed most of it away again.  We still managed to see a few die hard skiers and snow boarders on the slopes in the drizzling rain.  They must have been keen or on the last day of their holidays and determined to ski!!!  Thredbo is also getting ready and is much more like the scenery in Europe with the town built on the steep slopes on one side on the valley facing the skiing slopes on the mountainside opposite.  We were surprised how steep the hillside is and how many units are clinging to the steep slope.  Thredbo River in the valley is full of white water at the moment.  All of the ski fields are only 30kms from Jindabyne so it is a short drive from town but by the number of car parking spots at the ski lifts it must get busy on the road.  

At the top of Charlotte's Pass 1835m ASL

Perisher Valley

Snowy River

looking down the side of the (steep) hill into
Thredbo from the road

Thredbo River

more snow in the rain!!!

Lake Jindabyne from our van site

We saw a few Corroborie Frogs on display in the Nat Parks Office in town.  These are very brightly coloured yellow and black frogs that only live in the high country.  The Southern Corroborie only live between 1200 and 1700 metres high which is only in a small part of Kosiuszko Nat Park.  The Northern C Frog lives from 700 up to 1200 metres high which give it a slightly smaller area to choose from but is still less that 100,00ha in total.  The species are endangered as there has been a disease introduced by the Eastern Frog which carries the virus but is not affected by it.  There is no cure so the only response is to breed more Corroborie Frogs and release them in the hope a cure can be found.  It is a wonder the greenies haven’t tried to ban humans from the Snowy Mountains while we find the source of the disease and a cure for it.  They are too cute to lose forever.

Its not always easy taking all these photos!!!!