On the dot, up drove my aunt and uncle (the ones who spent a couple of nights with us on our Snowy River adventure last year) and my cousin with her two kids. We set up our picnic by the river, chatted, laughed, ate sandwiches and generally had a lovely time. It was nice and sunny, so I had a paddle in the river. (The water wasn’t cold by UK standards, and if I’d had a towel I might have had a swim, but my cousin’s eldest kid started shivering and saying she was cold - I guess if you come from Cairns, 23 degrees with a breeze probably is quite cool.)

What a brilliant holiday! I loved cycling and hanging out with Dan, Stephanie and Danni, watching the scenery and landscape change as we pedalled, hearing the birds in the bush, seeing wildlife scurry off, relaxing in small town campsites and generally being a tourist. I think we were very lucky with the weather (apart from the wind on the third day). There were a few things I learnt:

A few more thank yous for this section: my parents, for shuttling us and the bikes around, putting us up, feeding us; my aunt, uncle, cousin and niblings for the picnic lunch and BBQ dinner; my sister, for plotting a future adventure with me (can’t wait!); and of course Liz and Dave from Snowy River Cycling, who really went above and beyond, and even picked the bikes up from Stratford at the end, which saved us having to ferry them back to Bairnsdale or Orbost. I highly recommend looking up Snowy River Cycling if you are planning to cycle in the area (they run tours, too, which look amazing).

We spent a lovely half term holiday in Australia and the main event was a five day cycle tour from Orbost to Stratford. It was the first time we’d been cycle touring, and I loved (almost) every minute of it. Here’s the first part - Part 2 coming soon!

I am not a frequent cyclist, and while Dan used to cycle all over the place when we lived in Melbourne, that was several years ago. But after hiring bikes for a day on our Snowy River adventure last year, the seed was sown. We got in touch with Snowy River Cycling to arrange bike hire, invited a couple of friends along for the ride, and booked some campsites along the way (with Australia-side help from my mum!). And then we started training.

The first three days of our tour were along the East Gippsland Rail Trail, which stretches approximately 100km from Orbost to Bairnsdale, through GunaiKurnai (Krowathunkooloong and Brabawooloong) country. Our friends Danni and Stephanie joined us for this section.

My parents helped get us and our gear to Orbost, where Dan and I picked up our hire bikes the night before we set off. After my folks left, we did a tiny tour of the main street, had a look at the new mural depicting local Indigenous foods and totems under the bridge, ate chips for dinner in Forest Park and shopped for some food supplies. A big moon bobbed in the dusky pastel sky as we ate tinned fruit, then bedded down for a cold (~5 degrees) night at Orbost Caravan Park.

Back up at camp, I headed back to the others for breakfast and, when Dan and I were ready to go, we went to the general store for some lunch supplies. There wasn’t much on offer, but we scrounged together enough for a decent lunch (avocado, tomato, tortillas and - much to everyone’s amusement - chicken salt as there was no plain salt to be found). We were leaving Nowa Nowa when Danni noticed a tear in the wall of her rear tyre. We decided to press on, knowing that if it came to the worst, we would be able to walk back to Nowa Nowa or on to Bruthen, no more than 15 or so kilometres from the very middle of the day. 

​A few things stick in my mind about the trail from here to Nicholson: making train hoot harmonies as we passed through the short tunnels, the nature reserve by an old station (where we saw a hare munching on the protected grasses), the change in track surface and vegetation to a more coastal feel, the falcon Dan spotted flying off, the hereford cows and calves in the paddocks beside the trail, the benches with beautiful views over said paddocks and down towards the lakes, the very strong wind that kept us from stopping at said benches, the wedgetail eagle soaring higher and higher on said wind, the magpie divebombing said eagle, an echidna shuffling in its slow-speedy way over a paddock and out of sight behind a dam wall . . .

Dalgety Bridge over the Snowy River, first erected in 1888 to replace the previous punt that crossed a little upstream. Most people who see the Snowy as it travels through the Monaro see it at Dalgety.

We loved seeing these emus - including some young birds and a completely white adult - near Beloka, west of Dalgety. We wondered if the white feathers are leucism (which I learnt about after seeing white-winged crows in East Sussex) or albinism, but we weren't close enough to see if it had pink eyes. The first emu photo above contains a lot of clues to the use and mis-use of the Monaro - non-native hawthorn trees and weeds all over, signs of bad erosion, and yet these emus thrive on land that seems barely able to sustain farm stock.

This would once have been underwater. Around here, the Snowy of old was a natural stock boundary for nearby stations. When the river was dammed, farmers were informed they might need to extend their fences, but the local belief was that the scheme would only ‘skim the snowmelt’ from the river, keeping anything over flood level. In reality, Jindabyne Dam stopped the river almost entirely. Photos of the river at 1% flow show that it could hardly prevent a determined sheep from straying to greener grass. The difference between the Snowy of old and the river in its dammed state was, and is, most keenly felt in this stretch. Here, joined by the rushing waters of the Thredbo and Eucumbene, the river would once have swept clean a wide path over the stones lining the riverbed. These days, that path is much narrower, the water slower, the stones often covered with a thick layer of sediment. While canoeing upstream of Dalgety, we enountered a long stretch of reed-clogged river. The water moved from side to side of the old riverbed, meaning we had to paddle back and forth, searching for a gap in the reeds. We often had to jump out of the canoe to drag it down rapids between each reed-walled pond, trying not to fall and twist our ankles, hoping we weren't annoying any snakes in the reeds!

Despite the reduced flow, the Snowy River around Dalgety is meant to be a great spot to see platypus. One evening we wandered up from the campground, following the handmade signs to a riverside spot recommended for platypus sightings, and sat in a pair of plastic garden chairs provided for just such occasions. We were instructed to sit still and silent for as long as we could, as platypus are rather timid animals. I was enchanted by the delicious sunset light playing on the river (above). As we waited, a flock of galahs provided a soundtrack - screeching to roost on one tree, then swirling away behind us to another. We saw no platypus, but it was a relaxing end to the day.

Dalgety sits on a natural crossing place over the Snowy, which has been used for thousands of years. The first non-Indigenous settlement here was known as Buckley's Crossing, uncreatively named after a colonial settler-farmer in the area. The present day pub (built 1889) is still called Buckley’s Crossing Hotel. Buckley’s Crossing became a key point on the droving route down into Gippsland and back, being one of the easiest places to ford the Snowy. It was sometimes called Barnes’ Crossing from the mid-1800s (surprise, surprise, after another settler). The name Dalgety was not applied until the early 1870s, when the town was formally surveyed. Before the bridge was erected in 1888, there was a punt in operation - I think from the bottom of Barnes Street, pictured above left. The Catholic church, Our Lady Star of the Sea (above right) opened in 1878. I think the outdoor dunny opened more recently. (There was another outhouse a bit further away, made of stone and stuffed so full of hay or grass and other organic material that the door couldn't open properly.)

Did you know that, for a few years, Dalgety was set to become Australia’s capital city? Here’s a history lesson for you. After European invasion but before federation in 1901, settled Australia was not a single nation but a series of British colonies. Victoria and New South Wales were the two largest and most powerful colonies and there was a deep-seated rivalry between them, partly based on their differing trade policies. This proved to be a hurdle on the track to federation, as both colonies believed the new nation should follow their trade practices. In addition, a new nation needed a new capital city and bitter debates raged over whether that should be Sydney (the older city, in New South Wales) or Melbourne (then the larger city, in Victoria). This disagreement called for a compromise - and section 125 of the Australian Constitution states, “The seat of Government of the Commonwealth . . . shall be in the State of New South Wales, and be distant not less than one hundred miles from Sydney” but that “Parliament shall sit at Melbourne until it meet at the seat of Government.”

I wonder if the Snowy’s fate might have been different if Dalgety had indeed become the capital city. Would the river have been turned into a large ornamental lake, just as in the Griffins’ winning design for Canberra? Or would it have been redirected and sculpted like the Yarra through Melbourne?  It’s likely that the Snowy and Mowamba would have both been dammed - when Dalgety was being staked out for the capital, the surveying team noted the Snowy’s potential for hydro electricity, and part of the reason for the Snowy Mountains Scheme was to provide power for Canberra. But I doubt that the Snowy and its tributaries would have been so mercilessly strangled if their damming and diversion inland for irrigation might have had a visible, tangible impact on the aesthetics and lifestyle of those in the capital city. As it stands, a small weir just upstream of the Dalgety Bridge (above) only gives an illusion of fullness.

For a couple of years, over a century ago, Dalgety must have felt like it was near the centre of Australian culture. But the New South Wales politicians kicked up a stink about the site - they thought Dalgety was too close to Victoria and too far away from Sydney, too cold, too dusty, too sparsely vegetated, too wild. In addition, there was concern from the powers that be that placing the capital at Dalgety would draw sea trade to the port at Eden on the south coast of NSW, which might eventually supersede the harbour at Sydney. To be fair, there were also some practical objections, such as Dalgety’s distance from the main Sydney-Melbourne railway line and how much it would cost to build a branch line to service the proposed capital. And so the search began afresh and the “Seat of Government Act 1908” named the site of present-day Canberra as the location for the new city.

Amusingly, despite the story of the dams and the rain shadow of the Great Dividing Range, it absolutely pissed down on our first evening in Dalgety. But during our few days there, I was lucky enough to see the famed rain shadow in action. I walked out of town and headed down a long gravel road to get a glimpse of the Snowy downstream (above). I watched as a huge rainstorm billowed over the Divide, while only a few dark clouds sporting small skirts of rain made it onto the Monaro.

You can see in the photo above how reeds and other vegetation encroach on what was once riverbed. I have to say that, while small, the river was livelier than I expected - perhaps due to the recent rainfall.

We drove past many farms and talked with Dad about the history of sheep farming and shearing in Australia. It plays such a big part of the country's colonial (and racist) history, and as we travelled through the Monaro we could see signs of a much more prosperous past - a time when wool was a key part of the Australian economy. There was shearing at a couple of the nearby farms/stations when we were staying in Dalgety; we heard a few people at the pub talking about it. And it was pretty interesting to see this old corrugated iron-clad building a way outside of town. We presumed it was old shearers' quarters. The smaller structure looks like a meat shed - before refrigeration, this is where carcasses would have been strung up and butchered for consumption. The top half would be covered in flywire/mesh to keep the insects out and to let the cooling breeze in. 

The roads took us through grasslands choked with lamb’s ear and thistle and hoarhound, past neat, abandoned farm houses. Perhaps the successful graziers are those who have land elsewhere, somewhere the grass can catch a coastal rainstorm and cattle can put some flesh on their bones before market. Somewhere the local council hasn’t given up on spraying the worst of the weeds. Somewhere the wild dogs don’t terrorise the ewes into miscarrying, or pick off the calves with the tiredest mothers.

In the hills near Bungarby, tucked away down a dirt track to the river, secluded amongst the trees and granite, it’s astonishing yet strangely understandable to find a monastery. Understandable, because isn’t this precisely the half-wild, hard landscape, sitting on the edges of formal civilisation that people seeking spiritual nourishment have been inhabiting for thousands of years? Astonishing because, in an area colonised by Protestants and Catholics, this is a Russian Orthodox community for women, established in 1999. ​Finding this community, with its connections to far flung places and famous political revolutions, reminded me once again that the Snowy River’s colonial history is not homogenous. We wanted to go down to the river, but thought we'd ask permission first. I ducked out of the rain under a vine-covered verandah and spoke to the Abbess/Mother Superior through the window to the kitchen. She told me the track was pretty sketchy (well, she didn't use those exact words) after the recent downpours and that she didn't fancy having to come to our rescue if we got stuck.

We'd had a bit more luck getting down to the river earlier in the day, right on the extremities of what could be described as the Monaro. The road we were following veered into a paddock beside a small, old farm house and became barely more than a smudge in the grass. I knocked on the door, but the house was empty. Halfway up a nearby hill, we could see a couple of people on a bike rounding up cattle and we waved to get their attention. A few minutes later they came down to chat to us, to let us know they were only here for a couple of hours to pick up their mob and take the cattle down to their paddocks down on the coast, a property with more rain and more grass. It was lucky we’d caught them on the right morning! They doubted our car’s chances of getting to the Maclaughlin, but suggested we could drive up and around through their property, park near an old sheep run and bushbash down to the river at the top of Stonebridge. My ears perked up at that, because I’d read about it in George Seddon’s book Searching for the Snowy and knew it's a place not many people get to see. Thanking them, we headed off, following one of the aforementioned unmaintained roads, going slowly - very slowly - over the enormous waterbars until we came to what we thought must be the place they said to park the car.

We left the car, crossed through the paddock (full of mullein and horehound) and over the ridge, then used the fence line and feral goat trails as our guide as we bush bashed down the steep hill. In the photo above, I think that the dark green trees are the native black cypress pines - quite distinct from the duller colours of eucalypts surrounding them. 

Our friendly guides had told us to look out for goats and for a big stone outcrop that they called Goat Rock, which they said always had goat poo on it. We knew we were on track when Goat Rock appeared as promised. We'd caught glimpses of the river before, but the view from the top of Goat Rock was pretty special. We scrambled down and across the rocks, made slippery by the drizzle, until we stood beside the river at Stonebridge.

George Seddon describes Stonebridge in Searching for the Snowy (1994:71) like this:

The Snowy River is interrupted on its journey to the sea by three dams: Guthega, Island Bend and Jindabyne. Following our days in the high country, exploring this section of the river took us from the mountains to the fringes of the Monaro High Plains. (Content note: there are a couple of pics of snakes in this post!)

The biggest dam across the Snowy is at Jindabyne, and this is the first dam we saw as we drove up to the start of our journey. The photo above was taken from a point downstream several days later, but before we get to that, let's go back in tiiiime . . . 

Construction on the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electricity Scheme started in 1949. It was completed 25 years later. Something like 70,000-100,000 people came to Australia to work on the scheme, and many stayed. Since then there have been a few upgrades and additions and there are now 16 dams, 7 power stations and a combined 225 km (140 miles) of tunnels, pipelines and aqueducts. It’s still considered to be one of the most complex hydroelectric schemes in the world - and it's huge, spreading over 5,000 square kilometres, although only 2% of the construction is visible above ground. Guthega Pondage (above), is the impounded reservoir formed by Guthega Dam. It's the first (or last, depending on your direction) dam across the Snowy River, and the first dam completed as part of the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme in 1955. We first encountered it at the end of the infamous Day Two.

This is what the Snowy River looks like downstream of Guthega Dam: a rocky river bed, dotted with a few stagnant pools of water. The water from the reservoir is, as far as I could tell from the information signs and the shape of the landscape, pumped out through a level tunnel along the sides and tops of the hills, then released down long pipes to work the turbines at Munyang/Guthega Power Station several kilometres downstream (below right). You can see the layout in this arial shot on Wikipedia.

At the start of our third day, the clouds burnt away and Guthega Pondage turned blue beneath the clear sky (above left). But conditions up here are, of course, not always this idyllic! When researching her book The Snowy: The People Behind the Power, Siobhan McHugh spoke to some of the 450 Norwegians who came to work on the scheme at Guthega. They were apparently pretty unimpressed with their accommodation (uninsulated fibro huts) and food (they were given margarine, they wanted butter) and at one point they went on strike until they were able to have hot showers. To me, it seems more than fair that they should’ve had a few basic amenities, especially as they were risking their lives on a daily basis. In fact, Guthega was the location of the first Snowy Mountain Scheme fatality: a Norwegian miner killed by a rock fall. In total, 121 people died working on the scheme (unofficially, there may have been more), 53 of them in underground accidents.

Towards the end of the day, we made it to Island Bend, a campground on the site a temporary township established for Snowy Mountains Scheme workers and their families in 1952. These days, there are only a few hints of the township that once was - flat pieces of ground where houses and halls and schoolrooms once stood, a grassy airstrip, the odd feral flower escaped from a garden and signs warning about the lingering presence of asbestos. It’s hard to imagine the area as a bustling small township. While researching this trip I came across a few scanned copies of the village newsletter, Around the Bend. Uploaded by Bruce Mitchell, one of “the Snowy kids” from the scheme’s townships, these typewritten publications give some insight into life in the township. A February 1967 edition notes that the barber shop is closed, there are updates on the darts team and archery club performances and an announcement about the weekly film programme: a Sunday matinee (Oliver Twist with John Mills and Alec Guinness), films on Sunday and Wednesday evenings, a Friday film group and a note that “Free Documentaries will be screened as usual on Thursday evening”.

We camped the night at Island Bend, in the section tucked in the eponymous bend of the Snowy River. You can see our spot in the photo (above right) before we put our tent up - note the trees, much taller than on the mountains. We didn't have time to explore the site in full, as it's quite spread out. I'd recommend this spot - though hopefully you won't get a bunch of people arriving from Sydney at midnight and setting up noisily in the pitch next to you!

We didn't manage to get a spot right next to the river, but that didn't stop us heading down to the water to watch the sun set. There's a bit more flow here than below Guthega or even at Munyang. I guess a lot of it must come from the small creeks and tributaries trickling off the mountains.

Kangaroos don't have to obey human signs. (In case you can't read it, the sign reads, "Aircraft may use this strip at any time. Please do not proceed past this point.") We also saw kangaroos fighting - a first for me! They'd have a bit of biffo, then stop to nibble on the grass for a while, until one of them bopped the other on the head and away they'd go again. A bit like cats, really!

The mountains are riddled with signs (literal and figurative) of the scheme and its history. Yellow markers pointed up rough tracks off many of the roads and after a while we decided that they were pointing to pylons. This particular sign (above left) indicates the access point for pylons 5-15 - or so we believe! If you know differently, please do leave a comment. We also found survey marks (above right), fragments of walls, random pipes sticking out of the ground, bolts on roads and in gutters, chunks of wire-threaded concrete on the riverbed and many more remainders of recent industrial history.

From Island Bend campsite we took the roads down to Island Bend Dam. We couldn't get access to the dam wall, but we spotted a few interesting things anyway. I climbed up a random bit of stone and concrete wall to get a better view (the top photo of the reflections and the bottom left photo of Dan on the road are taken from up there). A little way downstream we detoured back down to a bridge across the river, giving us a glimpse back up to the dam wall. Catching glimpses of all these enormous structures in the middle of the mountains reminded me of moments in The Lord of the Rings when the travellers come across huge structures like the Argonath and other physical remnants of times past.

We encountered this snake on a bush track, lying between us and where we wanted to go. Apparently alpine copperheads are the only snakes that hang out in the mountains, so presumably this is one. We'd seen two the day before, making their way down the roadside gutters. One hadn't noticed us and had slithered slowly on its way. The other saw us, got the fright of its life, and practically flew over a bush to get away from us. This one didn't move. We stamped and clapped and shouted to let it know we were there. We threw a couple of little twigs at it from afar to try to get it to move on. It didn't move on. We couldn't see even the slightest twitch, tremor, or tongue flick. We started wondering if it was dead. I walked slowly forward until I was only a couple of metres away. It didn't look dead, but it still wasn't moving. I figured I was so close that if it was going to bite there wasn't much I could do, so I walked on past, stopping to snap a couple of close ups - after all, it's not every day you get this close to a lovely snake!

Tunnel entrance at the confluence of the Snowy and Gungarlin. The sign reads, "Saftety counts. Target for this tunnel repair: zero accidents." We laughed a bit and wondered (a) is there ever a target of 1-or-more accidents? and (b) this is just the target, what was the actual outcome? One of the worst and most dangerous jobs during the original construction of the scheme was working on concrete tunnel lining. While researching her book, Siobhan McHugh heard stories - from friends of friends of friends - about people being concreted into the lining between the forms and the rock face. She also read the evidence from an inquest following precisely this kind of accident in a shaft near Island Bend, on the last shift before Christmas 1963. The inquest decided that what had probably happened was a rock about the same diameter as the concrete pipe had lodged in the pipe and blocked the flow of concrete into the shaft. The workers noticed that no concrete was coming through and someone poked at the pipe just in case there was a blockage. What they didn’t know was that about nine tonnes of concrete had built up behind the rock. The concrete poured out in a catastrophic rush, dislodging the pipes and knocking the workers off the scaffolding to the bottom of the shaft.

There might be other people buried beneath the concrete, says McHugh, and we will probably never know. The Snowy Mountains Authority kept meticulous records, but the contractors did not. There are many stories about family members shift-swapping, about people using assumed names to escape wartime incidents or child maintenance payments. With the identity of any given worker being such a slippery thing, it’s probably impossible to ever say for certain how many people died on the job.

If you're interested, Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentlemen have a recent album inspired by the stories of the migrant workers on the scheme. The song "The Sun Will Shine In" particularly reminds me of this place: I wake up in darkness, I work all day in darkness, I go to sleep in darkness . . .

The big, somewhat phallic construction is the surge tank or tower at the Snowy Valley Lookout on Kosciuszko Road. I am still unclear on its function. The information sign had this to say (weird non/capitalisation from original): "Jindabyne Pumping Station [at the bottom of the valley below the surge tower] pumps water during off peak periods from lake Jindabyne through the Jindabyne-Island bend Tunnel to the Snowy Geehi Tunnel at Island Bend for diversion to Geehi Reservoir. Additional flexibility is achieved during periods of high flow in the Geehi River by diverting water in a reverse direction through the Snowy-Geehi and Jindabyne-Island Bend Tunnels to lake Jindabyne. The large concrete tower Structure at the Snowy Valley lookout is the Surge Tank for the Jindabyne Pressure Pipelines. The surge tank has an underground spillway which releases water via the dissipator chute at Jindabyne Pumping Station." I hope that makes it all clear. (This blog post made more sense to me: "The tank itself is basically a spring; the cylinder is air tight, so when the water stops flowing along the tunnel, it has nowhere to go except into the tank where it compresses the air, which then starts resisting the flow, bringing it to a gentle halt. Then the water level will drop as the pressures equalise.")

The Snowy Mountains Scheme was conceived and begun in a time before it was considered important to do any kind of research into the environmental impact of large scale engineering works. The ongoing effects of damming the Snowy are obvious downstream of Jindabyne, but there are traces of construction all around the mountains. This sign was taking a rest in a pool of water just off Kosciusko Road, near the intersection with Guthega Road, where we hitched a lift into Jindabyne after two days walking.

What? There's a model of the Jindabyne area in the visitor centre in town. It shows the valley as it was and is - the light blue shows the old path of the Snowy, the dark blue shows the waterline of Lake Jindabyne, the black lines are submerged roads, the red lines are roads used in the present. Douglas Stewart’s poem “Farewell to Jindabyne" documents the fate of the old town, lying beneath the lake.

Let us lament for Jindabyne, it is going to be drowned,
Let us shed tears, as many as the occasion warrants;
The Snowy, the Thredbo and the Eucumbene engulf it
Combining their copious torrents.

Over almost thirty stanzas, Stewart lists “all Jindabyne has to offer” in less than complimentary tones, concluding half-way through the poem that “Nothing, except the hotel, was built for permanence”, and:

Many a time thus viewing the total township
And thinking how soon it was all to be buried in water
Like drowned Atlantis and never be heard of again
I have thought: the sooner the better

Worrying the issue over, Stewart name-checks the people and their properties soon to be submerged (note the European names): Hans at the Kookaburra Cafe, Rankin’s and Jindabyne Motors, Leo A. Hore at the pub, E. Kluger and “his famous salami sausages”. But soon enough, he remembers that all these people will be re-homed in New Jindabyne.

What the poem leaves out - as does much of the writing about the scheme - is the loss of older sites, places important to the Ngarigo and other Aboriginal groups. Stewart’s view of Indigenous people is of:

The shy dark shadowy aboriginal race
Always like creatures in water, who left one word
And vanished without a trace . . .

It’s a summary that suggests the disappearance of Aboriginal people is complete (it isn't) and that such a disappearance is a sad inevitability (rather than a concerted regime of violence by colonisers). Stewart doesn't talk about Aboriginal cultures, stories and places lost beneath the water. There were no surveys of such sites done before construction, but had there been the surveyors might have listed places similar to those found elsewhere throughout the high country, the Monaro and the Snowy valley: camp, shelter, ceremonial and stone tool manufacture sites, middens, scarred trees (either carved to mark the burial places of important people, or scarred in the removal of bark to make shelters, canoes, shields, baskets), or other things not so bounded by a specific physical location - a landscape or a particular view, part of a songline, specific geological features, plants or animals. Stewart contends that Aboriginal people left behind only a single word - presumably the word “Jindabyne”? - so whereas he and his implied audience are able to get a bit nostalgic for the homes and cultural hubs of ‘modern’ Australia (houses, pubs, shops, churches), the Indigenous equivalents (art, artefacts, sacred sites, names and stories) remain unlamented.

We saw many lizard friends on our travels in Australia. I'd forgotten how ubiquitous they are, and how much I miss seeing them in the UK. These photos were taken a few days apart, in very different locations - one high on the hillside, one down in the riverbed - which you wouldn't necessarily think, given the rock is the same speckled granite. It must be good for basking! Anyway, on the left is (we think) a Cunningham's skink, probably about a foot long, and the one on the right is something else, much smaller and smoother . . . sorry, I'm not a lizard expert. Again, if anyone can provide a better ID than that, please leave a comment!

Off we go, to try and get to the river below Jindabyne Dam. You can see how the landscape is changing. We've moved from the alpine vegetation above Guthega Pondage, down through the montane forests and taller trees in the valley around Island Bend and Gungarlin River. We're now into the grasslands that, while they still sit on the escarpment of the Great Divide, can probably be counted as the fringes of the Monaro High Plains (to be featured in my next post!).

Back on the Snowy, below Jindabyne Dam. In the 1990s, 99% of the Snowy River's natural flow was held by the scheme, much of it ending up being diverted into the River Murray. After a huge, grassroots campaign and a lot of political lobbying, the four governments involved in the scheme (Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and the Federal Government) finally agreed to return a bit more of the Snowy's water to the Snowy. The figure I remember the campaign asking for was 28%. This has, as far as I'm aware, never been achieved - and nor has the promised 21% eventuated. However, a good deal more than 1% now comes out of the dam, which was altered to enable enormous "flushing" flows, designed to mimic snowmelt floods. Having seen photos of the Snowy at its worst below Jindabyne Dam, I wasn't sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised to find a swift-flowing stream here. Obviously, it was a lot smaller than it must once have been - the valley floor is the old river bed and the river is only the size of a big creek - but it isn't completely stagnant. Finally getting to see this bit of the river, making it down to the water below the dam wall, felt like a milestone.

But, as noted in a previous post, we couldn't make it much further along the river itself. We climbed back up the valley and set off along the aqueduct track that links Lake Jindabyne (on the Snowy) and Mowamba Weir (on the Mowamba - a tributary of the Snowy). It was hot, so we stopped whenever we could find a smidgen of shade and looked back at the view of the dam. Check out that spillway! It would surely make an epic water slide!

One of our final glimpses of the Snowy River as it heads away down Jindabyne Gorge. I'd love to come back and see a bit more of this section one day. There are 4WD tracks and private roads that go down to the river in this stretch, so it's not impossible to access . . . Or perhaps I could go kayaking on one of the big environmental releases, like this:

The aqueduct track turns away from the Snowy above the Mowamba junction, and heads back out towards the Snowy River Way (one of two ways to drive between Jindabyne and Dalgety). The Mowamba River (or Moonbah, below left) has its own story in the Snowy Scheme saga. Rising on the slopes of Mount Terrible, the Mowamba travels on its merry way until it is diverted via a weir and aqueduct into Lake Jindabyne. For a little while, back when environmental flows were first returned to the Snowy, the Mowamba was allowed to overtop the weir. As it isn't dammed upstream, it became, for a while, a surrogate snowmelt headwater for the Snowy. However, once the big alterations had been made to Jindabyne Dam, the aqueduct was switched on once again and now only a trickle makes its way out from the base of the Mowamba Weir (below right).

Old bridge, new bridge. On the left is the older wooden bridge over the Mowamba. Now the Snowy River Way crosses a more substantial, double lane concrete bridge. I noticed quite a few places on our journey where old bridges has been left beside the new as formally listed and/or informal heritage structures: here, Bete Bolong Creek, Murrindal River, Ambyne on the Deddick River.  After visiting the Mowamba Weir, we hitchhiked to Dalgety - and that is where my next post will pick up!

Here's the story of the creation of the Snowy River, told by Rod Mason (then Kosciuszko Indigenous Liaison Officer), cited in Claire Miller's book Snowy River Story: The Grassroots Campaign to Save a National Icon (2002). I thought of it every time I looked up and saw the moon on this trip.

Thanks for reading - remember to let me know if you can identify those lizards! I'll be back in a couple of weeks with a photo post about the Monaro High Plains. In the meantime, you can check out my overview of the trip or my photos from the high country.

The walk up the mountain was very pleasant, especially as the clouds started to clear. In this photo, Dan and I are (I think) approaching the crest of the Ramshead Range, with Ramshead North on the left. Read more about our walk up the mountain.

This is the Snowy River, a photo taken from the first (or last) bridge across it - a steel mesh footbridge on the walk from the top of the Thredbo chairlift to Rawson Pass. We saw tiny fish here, mountain galaxias, speckled and wiggling in the shallows.

The extremes of this landscape: huge, ancient granite boulders, exposed to the sky and weathered into a rounded jumble by thousands of years of rain and snow and wind; tiny flowers and delicate mosses of the ephemeral bogs. Beautiful.

The sign at Cootapatamba Lookout notes, "This waterhole was named Kau-oola-patamba, the place where the eagle drank, from an Aboriginal storyline from the north." Lake Cootapatamba (as it's generally written) is the highest lake in Australia. It’s one of only a handful of cirque lakes, or post-glacial tarns, found on the mainland, formed in the bowl-shaped hollow that occurs at the upper end of a valley where a glacier has scoured out the rock. Lake Cootapatamba is cupped in a shallow plain, and as we climb we see the landscape descends in steps down the mountain. You can't see it in this photo, but just over the ridge behind the lake there’s a tiny, bright red hut, a survival beacon designed to catch lost skiers and hikers who come the wrong way off the mountain in bad weather. 

There was a cairn, like an OS trig point, at the top of the mountain. Several paces away, across the rocky top, someone had built their own cairn. Further downstream, in the middle of nowhere on a fire trail that is only accessible by management vehicles and people on foot, we found another stone tower.

Here a small stream meanders over a high plateau before disappearing into a steep-sided valley. This was one of the few views that made me feel that I really was physically at the top of the world. This landscape is beautifully described in Alan Gould's wonderful poem "Flying Over the Australian Alps", which I reproduce in part here entirely without permission. Please read the full piece at the link.
​
                        Under you     Australia
is a broad unmade bed     hills pleating     folding
as if around an entanglement of limbs     forests
cushion the yellow light greenly     or vanish
into reservoirs of cobalt shadow     a valley
ignites along the filament of its creek     dams
perhaps a dozen     take dazzle-fire like insect wings
 
You are travelling     the earth is travelling
in a slow enchantment   from a time toward a time.

Granite, granite, granite. And then, suddenly, an entire hillside of slate. This reminded me of the abandoned slate quarries of Wales though as far as I'm aware this has never been used as such? The spot in the photo caught my eye because of the tiny microclimate in the hollow, where a huge range of wildflowers and alpine herbs were growing.

Thick stone walls clutch green-framed windows, protecting the glass from the weather. A chimney straggles from a dark red roof, secured with wire to the ridgeline. This is Seaman's Hut, named after W. Laurie Seaman who, along with his companion Evan Hayes, was one of Australia’s first skiing fatalities. On 14 August 1928, Seaman and Hayes were on Mount Kosciuszko when a blizzard closed in around them. A search party following the pair’s tracks deduced that they’d been separated. Seaman had followed the pole line back down towards Rawson Pass. He was blown off course by the strong winds and retraced his tracks, but missed the pole line of Summit Road in the blizzard. His body was found near the current hut site almost four weeks later, where he had presumably waited for Hayes to join him. Hayes’ body was not found until 1930, over two kilometres away above Lake Cootapatamba. Seaman’s Hut was built by the NSW Tourist Bureau using money donated by Seaman's parents with the idea that anyone who might need emergency shelter on Kosciusko would be able to find it. It's maintained by the Kosciuszko Huts Association.

The second (or second last) bridge across the Snowy River, on the gravel road from Rawson Pass down to Charlotte Pass. It sees a lot of foot and bicycle traffic. In fact, until 40 years ago, the road from Charlotte Pass was open to vehicle traffic, too. A 1930s pamphlet The Motor Road to Kosciusko declares, “Every motorist should aspire to driving his car to the very Summit of Mount Kosciusko” - and many motorists (including the women drivers ignored by the pamphlet) did so. It wasn’t until the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve designation kicked in during 1977 that the road was closed to public vehicles. We stopped at this bridge for a while and I stood still in the clear water until the curious galaxias grew confident enough to come and nibble my legs. It tickled!

Alpine mint (left) and some kind of pea flower (right). The mint has a very Australian smell - not much like the mint you might grow in your garden. I kept meaning to make myself a mint tea, but didn't get around to it. At any rate, it's probably illegal to pick it in a national park.

Snow gums. How amazing are they? White Sallee is their other common name. As we came down the mountain, their presence indicated that we were dropping out of the alpine region. The snow gums don’t grow very big up here, due to the low temperatures, the snow and ice, the wind and frosts - as you descend, they get taller and straighter. The bark folds like skin in the bends of the trunk, making the trees seem part-animal. The bark is silvery grey, dripped and streaked with pale coffee cream, the pink of new skin and red, orange and pea-soup green. The colours flicker in ribbons around bending, curling limbs and flow across the gnarled base of older trees.

Facing upstream from the lookout at Charlotte Pass. The left hand fork is the Snowy, the right is Club Creek coming down from Club Lake. The track that crosses them both at the confluence is the Main Range Walking Track - the long way from here to Mount Kosciuszko! We started our second day by taking the track down to the river, then turning right and following the river bed downstream.

Here I am, at the start of Day Two. Look how happy I seem. That is the face of someone who really has no idea what they're in for! The going was easy here - it got much harder later on. Behind me you can see the path coming down from Charlotte Pass and to the right of the image you might just be able to make out a chimney - all that remains of Foreman's Hut.

The rock formations here - and throughout our trip - were wonderful. This photo shows two basins that have, over thousands of years, been hollowed out of a granite boulder by the grinding motion of smaller stones moved by flowing water. I wonder how long the stones in the right hand basin have been there?

As the day wore on, we found ourselves clambering down more small waterfalls, over bigger boulders, through deeper water. This is the last photo I took while on the river - there's a gap of almost two hours before the next one. I'd already hit the wall by this stage, but over the next couple of hours Dan also got the wobbles, we realised that we'd not come nearly as far as we'd thought and we scrambled ourselves to a point where the river was too deep to wade safely any more. Eventually, we climbed up a small waterfall onto the hillside, where we found the vegetation was thinning out. We walked cross country, avoiding bogs where possible, until we found a footpad heading down to Illawong Suspension Bridge, Illawong Hut and the footpath out to Guthega. Adventurous!

The photo on the left was taken on the walk to Illawong Hut. Yes, it's the remains of a crustacean - a yabby. Probably. (I've just Googled yabbies and discovered their scientific name is Cherax destructor. How cool is that?) This explained the holes we'd seen the day before up near the source of the Snowy - they were probably yabby holes.

On the right is a cool contraption that was once used for crossing a creek between Illawong Hut and Guthega. It's a heritage monument now, and the plaque calls it a flying fox. Presumably you sit on the metal seat and pull it along one chain link at a time - in the photo you can see that the links on the far side of the seat are bunched up while the ones on the near side are extended.

This is the road out from the ski village of Guthega, high on the slopes above the Snowy River (which is in the valley to the right of this photo). We kept thinking how few people we saw - no walkers off the main trails, and only a couple of cars every hour. If this was in a small, densely populated country like the UK, it would be crawling! The tall red poles are road markers for visibility when everything's under snow. The epic number of reflectors on this one caught my eye. Someone's been busy.

The intersection of Guthega Rd (sealed) and Link Rd. Link Rd is a summer-only track that leads over the mountains to Smiggin Holes ski village on Kosciuszko Rd. But the main feature of this photo is obviously the bushfire-deadened snow gums on every hill. In 2003, a complex of fires killed several people, injured hundreds and caused huge damage to the outskirts of Canberra, while another raged through almost two thirds of Kosciuszko National Park. In 2006-7, when the longest continuously burning bushfire complex in Australia's history burnt through Gippsland and the Victorian Alps, Kosciuszko National Park again experienced serious damage. These are the scars. All across the ridges and slopes, the bony hands of burnt gums thrust up from the stony ground, fingers fanned out brittle and bare. The pattern is repeated over and over, crosshatched monochrome etchings on the slopes where there should be a flurry of leaves. With distance, the burnt trees blur together, giving the impression of dark cloud or smoke, as though the slopes themselves are the remains of a still-smouldering fire.

By this stage, the end of the third day, we had dropped out of the subalpine region and into the montane eucalyptus forest. Whereas snow gums are pretty much the only tree in the subalpine altitudes, there are several species of tree in this photo (in the reflection and behind the mirror in the river valley). You can also see how the tree behind the mirror is growing much straighter and taller than the snow gums in previous shots.

Goodnight, mountains! This is taken on Kosciuszko Rd, looking towards Sponar's Chalet (you might just be able to make it out at the bottom middle of the photo). It has to count among some of the most spectacular sunset skies I've seen. Emily stopped the car and we all spent a good while gawking as the clouds moved from yellow to fiery orange and bruised purple.

I'll be posting more photos from the trip over the coming weeks (or, more likely, months), so stay tuned! Thanks to everyone who helped us out on this journey: Emily, Kate, Elisabeth and Jerry, Nathan, Jesse, Christie, Sue and Colin, Sian and John, Rosemary and Mason, the Presentation of the Mother of God convent, Caroline and Barry, Alex and Julie, Bridget and family, David and Jane and Mimo, John and Chris, Esther and Gabe, Pete, Cynthia, Glenn, Mary and Ben, Margot and Aaron and the fire tower network. If I've forgotten anyone, I'm sorry. 

I posted about our Snowy River adventure plans back in July and again in October. So, I reckon it's about time for another update.

We’ve organised most of the transport and food drops that are essential to completing the journey. I’m really grateful to all the friends and family members who have offered to help (or allowed themselves to be roped into it). From our perspective, it’s not only about getting a bit of food and a pair of clean socks: I think sharing our trip with other people, even if it’s just for an afternoon or an evening, is going to be a real highlight. We’ve also booked accommodation at the three spots other than my parents’ house where we’ll have the opportunity to sleep in actual beds (Jindabyne, Dalgety and Buchan). Luxury! It remains to be seen if we actually make it to said accommodation on the booked nights. Who knows what might happen?

Thanks to family in Australia, we have a full set of paper maps for the river - nine of them, in fact. I’m in the process of comparing them to satellite images, photos and other sources to make sure they’re accurate where it counts (e.g. emergency access, fire trails) and to see if there have been any major changes since they were printed (e.g. new developments and roads). It might also give us an idea of which side of the river we might like to be on - for example, to avoid cliffs, bluffs and flowing creeks, or to take advantage of wide sandbanks and flatter areas for pitching our tent. Of course, satellite images aren’t necessarily up-to-date and it is the nature of rivers to reshape their immediate surroundings, but this should give us a good overview.

Having decided to try getting from McKillops Bridge to the Buchan River on foot, I’ve been turning my attention to another problem stretch in terms of access. From the dam wall at Jindabyne to where the river runs back into the Kosciuszko National Park, we’ll be travelling through the Monaro. We’ve been asking around and most people have suggested it’s not possible to walk this section either. I’m not sure if that’s because (a) it’s legally dubious (in Victoria, the river is bordered by a strip of Crown Land which is technically, if not practically, OK to walk along - in New South Wales, only the water itself is public access), (b) it’s not physically possible to walk or (c) it’s not possible from their points of view, although it might be from ours. Other options include wide detours away from the river (probably on bikes, considering the distance) or paddling. We shall see.

Back in October, I wrote that we were a falling behind in our gear acquisition. This really started to stress me out, but I think we’re back on track. We have sleeping bags (two Pipedream 400s from Alpkit) and new shoes (originally I got Merrell Moabs, but I had to return them as they didn’t work for me, so I am now the proud owner of a pair of vegan-friendly Merrel Grassbows which are amazingly light; Dan got Meindl Responds). I gave Dan the job of sorting out our electrics - he’s bought spare camera batteries, a nifty little USB/international charger, memory cards and whatnot. My parents got a PLB from KTI - which we’ll borrow for the trip (working out the international registration and transport was just too difficult). Excitingly, our tent has arrived! We ended up going with the Alpkit Ordos 3, which feels huge for its weight. We had fun last weekend setting it up in our friend’s garden. There are a few other bits to get, too: gaiters (to help fend off snakes), a decent digital dictaphone/recorder for note-taking, gas (has to be bought in Australia), toiletries, first aid kit top ups, a map case and so on.

We really have done bugger all physical training. We’ve gone on some short walks and are planning a few middle-distance day walks over the next month. It’s just so cold and wintery. Bleh! I’ve pledged to carry my bag (with some stuff in it) for all our walks from now until we leave. Speaking of bags, we need to do a trial pack at some point to make sure we can carry everything. No doubt we’ll end up jettisoning a few bits and pieces. I’d also like to set the tent up again - and sleep in it at least once! - before we leave.

Mentally and emotionally, I’m still not really sure how to prepare for this trip. It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve never done anything like this before, never set off on a trek without knowing it was possible. Last week, I realised a lot of my anxiety stemmed from uncertainty - not only about what we’ll come across, but how we will deal with it. So I turned all managerial and decided to write down what I wanted to get out of the journey - a kind of aims and objectives, if you will. What a dork. I came up with six main goals:

1. To see as much of the river as we can
2. To learn more about the river
3. To have fun
4. To overcome challenges
5. To stay safe
6. To document our journey in writing, photos and other media

Dan and I jotted down a few ideas as to how we might achieve these things, too. It’s a sort of contract with myself and it’s made me feel a bit more grounded in the face of the unknown.

April was even busier than March - and I took loads of photos. Lucky you.

We started the month in Australia and had a couple of days in the country . . .

. . . before heading to Melbourne. I posted many photos of Melbourne at the time, but here are a few more.

And then, all too soon, we returned to the UK - which put on quite a welcome with this sunrise!

We got back as lambing season began and we had the most amazing experience of seeing a sheep give birth in the field beside the footpath on the South Downs. We watched the newborn lamb almost manage to get up on its wobbly little legs, then the farmers came and whisked ewe and lamb away - presumably somewhere they could keep an eye on them.

The springing of spring also meant lots of foragables coming into season. I posted a sorrel recipe and a few other things also made it onto our table.

But it wasn't all sunshine and wildflowers. Towards the end of the month there was a light smattering of snow on the South Downs. Chilly!

The last days of April were part of the May Day bank holiday, which we spent with friends in Suffolk - but I'll post more about that next time.

More 2016 revisits can be found here: January, February and March.

Seaside, countryside, bush.

The month started with a visit to Margate with our friend. It was a gorgeous day - bright and windy - and we enjoyed our walk around the town and along the coast. One day I'd like to go back and hire bikes to cycle around to Broadstairs on the Viking Coastal Trail.

Notes from Lake Field. After the daffodils beginning to bud in February, the crocuses burst through, letting us know that spring really was on the way.

Then it was off to Australia for a week in the bush (end of March) and a week in town (start of April). I wrote about our time in the country in what I think is my favourite post of 2016: Australia (Part 1: Country). I took so many photos in Australia, and shared a lot of them in my posts at the time. But here are a couple of new ones for you - an eastern spinebill and a red-browed finch.

I'll post some more city pictures from our visit to Melbourne next time.

P.S. I really like reading "year in review" posts, so please hit me up with your links in the comments.

Our adventure down the Snowy River in Australia is still on! In my last post about it, I mentioned that I wanted to talk about the planning process, to be honest about the logistics and all the work that goes into the trip before we head off in March. So, here goes. (This post got a bit out of hand with the videos!)

Back in July, several people said they were interested in helping out with food drops and maybe joining us on the river. Some mentioned camping with their families or joining us for a rest day in town, others liked the idea of walking with us through the high country, some even suggested bringing their ponies or bikes and heading off ahead down the road to meet us at the next campsite. Understandably, as we start following up on these expressions of interest, some folks won’t actually be able to come - the dates won’t suit, they’ll have made other plans for their holidays, or it’s simply too far to drive.

​I’ve pared our list of things we need people to help us with down to nine essential transport and food related tasks, a few “it’ll make everything so much easier” things and a couple of nice-to-haves. Most of these fall into five or six clusters (e.g. three tasks in one cluster might be: bringing a food drop to Buchan, picking us up from the river and driving us into town, maybe checking out the caves with us, then driving us back to the river a day or two later). Hopefully we will get most of this organised over the next month or so.

Food: Speaking of food, Kate has been concocting tasty morsels for us - a dehydrated dhal seems to have worked well (and lasted OK for six weeks before rehydrating!) and we’ve been chatting about salty tomato fruit leathers and the pros and cons of Deb (instant mashed potato) and pasta. Semolina is going to act as a base for a couple of meals (sweet and savoury). Maybe I will have to overcome my intense dislike of cous cous, as it is such a useful travel food.

​Gear: We are a bit behind with getting our gear together, mainly because we spent all our money on fun things like canoeing and Champing. We visited the Alpkit warehouse/showroom a couple of months back and it was fantastic! We’d been thinking of getting an Ordos 2 tent for this adventure, but the Ordos 3 is so much more spacious and almost free standing, with only a slightly bigger footprint and an extra 300g of weight. Decisions, decisions! Now we just have to save more money . . . We did get a Brukit (and then, several weeks later, some gas) which works a dream for cups of tea and instant noodles; soon we’ll try it with something more substantial. Also, we have bought travel insurance, woohoo! (I know, it’s not exciting, but it’s one of those things you just have to do.) As we often have before, we used World Nomads.

Adventure time: My dad has sourced us a couple of tractor tyre inner tubes for the downstream sections. Who doesn’t love the idea of inner tubing down a river?! Adventures don’t have to be Serious Business At All Times. I’ve also done some more in-depth route planning, which means I have a list of maps to buy, and also the following conundrum to work out . . .

So, north of McKillops Bridge, the Snowy looks a bit like this.

The river, which hasn’t really had full flow down it since the dam at Jindabyne was completed in 1967, cuts a smaller channel down the wide, flat river bed. There might be crevasses between the rocks, there might be a lot of tough underbrush growing in the old river bed, we might need to wade across the river sometimes to find a path - but I think that we will be able to walk or scramble our way along it. We’ll at least give it a bloody good try!

But south of McKillops Bridge, there are sections where the river looks more like this. The river enters gorge country, where the riverbed is much narrower. Very steep hills or cliffs slice right down to the water. There are a couple of points where the bottom of the valley is impassable on foot. I couldn’t find any Creative Commons photos of the gorge from the river, but you can see images here and here. Likewise, I can’t see any Creative Commons images from the Tulloch Ard Gorge lookout, so instead here's a picture of Little River Gorge, just before Little River enters the Snowy, to give you an idea of nearby terrain.

Most people I'd spoken to were saying we’d have to paddle some of the gorge sections downstream of McKillops Bridge. These people happened to be kayakers rather than walkers, so I wasn’t entirely convinced - but in the absence of other knowledge, I looked into paddling options. ​The easiest put-in and put-out points for a kayak or sports raft are at McKillops Bridge upstream and the confluence with the Buchan River downstream, at Balley Hooley campsite. This is probably the most popular section of the Snowy to paddle, so there is plenty of info about it. I started listing ideas.

1. Paddle - bring our own craft and gear. You can read the blog of someone who did a trip like this from Kosciuszko to the Coast. They missed out the upper section of the Snowy, instead taking the overland/shorter route south from Mt Kosciuszko/Targangal and meeting the Snowy River at Pinch River, above McKillops Bridge. As you can see if you read that blog post, there are only a few short sections where walking/scrambling probably isn’t possible, but because the river is deep, narrow and full of rapids, I don’t like the idea of trying to swim or wade them.

​The benefit of having our own packraft/s is that we wouldn’t have to rely on many other people - in fact, we could use the boats all the way down the river, whenever we wanted. Also, they’re apparently pretty comfortable to sleep on! The downside to this is that it’s expensive to buy decent packrafts, paddles, floatation vests and possibly helmets - and it’s pretty heavy to lug around all that stuff if you’re not using it. Also, we’re more interested in walking and scrambling than paddling; having packrafts with us would really change the timbre of our adventure. Also, if you’re paddling whitewater without a qualified guide, insurance companies start charging massive premiums - or simply won’t cover you. (You might see why when you watch the following video! This is not usually what the river is like - this was filmed during one of the big environmental water releases.)

2. Paddling tour - get a group together and go on a guided tour. A few companies do guided tours down this part of the Snowy and this would be pretty lush, as they organise transport for all the rafts/kayaks and gear and some of them also cook all your food for you! You get the benefit of an experienced guide 24/7 which makes the whole thing a lot safer and, if your guide’s any good, you get to hear a lot more about the areas you’re passing through. But where a guided tour would make things easy in theory, in practice there’s a major hurdle: you need a minimum of 4-6 people for most tours, and it costs about $1000 per person for the four day trip. While we are OK to fork out the money as part of our adventure, we had a grand total of no people express real interest in joining us for this. Another downside to the guided tour thing is that, once again, it would change the feel of our journey.

3. Paddle hire - hire a sports raft and paddle by ourselves. We could hire the craft, paddles, safety gear and waterproof barrels/bags for the four days between McKillops Bridge and Buchan, arrange transport for the gear to/from the river, and off we go. It’s the least expensive option and also fairly in keeping with our DIY adventuring style. We’ve recently done more paddling and discovered that we like shooting rapids, though when I looked for videos and images of the rapids on the Snowy River, they usually showed the biggest ones - the whitest water, the largest rocks, the narrowest chutes. In the gorge, rapids range up to Class IV which, if you read Wikipedia, is somewhat beyond our level of paddling prowess: “Risk of injury to swimmers is moderate to high, and water conditions may make self-rescue difficult. Group assistance for rescue is often essential but requires practiced skills.” Eek! However, further investigation (checking online maps, poring over photos and videos, reading blog posts and talking to our man on the river) revealed that there are good maps with the major rapids marked on them and that we could portage around them when needed.

Unfortunately, while I'd convinced myself and Dan that this was going to be our best option, convincing a company to hire the equipment to us, especially when the water levels might be quite low after summer, was another matter. I can’t say I blame them for their reluctance (I know we’re safety conscious and won’t be stupid; they don’t). After a couple of failed email threads and awkward early morning international phone conversations, I started to get pretty anxious and considered ditching the section entirely. There was only one other option . . . ​

4. Walking - scrambling up and over the hills when necessary. Back to square one. Walking. As it happened, my parents were catching up with someone who used to live near Orbost and who is a keen bushwalker. He and a few friends had walked the Snowy in sections downstream from Jindabyne in the late 1980s. I got in touch with him by email to get some hints and tips. “I went on foot the whole way, including the gorge stretch,” he told me. “It was a bit of a challenge but really not all that difficult to go up along some of the ridges beside the river. There are lots of animal tracks to follow - so it is possible.”
​
After tying myself in knots trying to organise the paddling malarky, it turned out that perhaps we could get along most of the section on foot after all. And where it’s not feasible to stay right beside the river, we could engage in a bit of cross country bushbashing. I went back to my timeline and maps, made some measurements, checked for tracks and access roads and eventually decided that we could probably still get to the Buchan River on the day we originally intended. Yes, there would be a few long, hard days of walking, but by that point in the trip we should be fitter than we have been for years (if not ever!), so hopefully it wouldn’t be too bad. We might also choose to walk the last long day along tracks and roads instead of along the Snowy itself, but I’m not going to stress about it - after all, it’s not meant to be a scientific survey of every metre of the river!

So that’s the state of our planning at the moment. I expect I'll update you again in another couple of months - hopefully when we've made some more decisions, bought some more equipment and organised some more people to help out.

I love a plan. I love planning. The problem solving, the anticipation, the promise. Starting a project at work? We need a plan. Writing an article? Draw up a plan. Going on holidays? Plan, plan, plan.

It’s something to do with the anticipation, with being able to clarify goals, of thinking about how this thing will fit into and perhaps shape my everyday life. It’s something to do with the research, with discovering possibilities, with imagining potential futures. I like how planning an adventure brings it closer to reality, into the present, how planning out each step of a large project makes it feel less overwhelming and more achievable. I relish those moments when different aspects come together, or when a whole new idea suddenly opens up.

Not everyone loves to plan. Sometimes it seems like social media is fixated on the notion that the best adventures are unplanned, spontaneous, unexpected - the kind of adventures that happen when you stop on the way to somewhere else to watch a sunset, when you deviate from your SatNav route, when you miss your train and end up sleeping under the stars, when you allow yourself the luxury of no destination, when you follow your instinct, when you break free. I think it’s true that often the unexpected elements are what make a place or time particularly special.

​I’m not so keen on the inspirational quotes, though - the soundbites that once might have meant something, but now spend all their time plastered across over-exposed, over-filtered photographs of lakes or mountains or dirt roads or railway lines, or those twee pastel photos of young, long-haired, white women wearing oversized woollen jumpers and cradling enamel cups of steaming coffee while gazing into the middle distance. Those inspirational quotes never seem to mention getting lost in thick cloud at the top of a cliff when your GPS battery dies and you haven’t bothered to bring a paper map; or your car breaking down in the outback when you haven’t told anyone where you’re going, there’s no phone signal and you’re running out of water; or zipping open your tent to find a beast going through the food you failed to pack away properly, and wondering in that split second whether this particular creature prefers chocolate bars and peanut butter or human flesh. I rather think the best adventures do not include being dead. 

(Here’s a fun flowchart: Did You Have A Good Adventure? Though I think my idea of "hard" might be quite a lot gentler than other people’s! Also, here's an amusing "lessons learnt" blog post about cycling in a Californian winter.)

On the other hand, there is a danger in micromanaging journeys to the point that all the joy is squeezed out. Some things are better left as an approximate sketch or vague outline rather than a detailed diagram. I know I have a tendency towards over-planning myself, though I’m past the stage where my trips have a Contiki-tour-slash-nursing-home style itinerary: 6:47am wake up, 7:05am take photo of sunrise, 7:10am eat breakfast (insert menu here), walk 4.5km, drink 280mL water, dig hole 20cm deep, excrete 129g fecal matter, etc.

I suppose it's about balancing the two extremes: learning to plan with an appropriate degree of rigor for different travels and adventures - and to suit my capabilities. Last summer, I headed out for long daywalks without a map, food, or raincoat (my plans involved checking the forecast and walking in East Sussex, where a pub is never too far away). Likewise, wild camping at least once a month last year made packing for microadventures almost second nature - it felt more like slinging bread and tea in the sack a la John Muir than an exercise in major event coordination. Moving up a notch, planning a five day walk this summer, I’ve mapped out a general route and booked accommodation along the way - soon I’ll have a look at places where we can buy lunch, and I’ll stock up on chocolate bars. And last summer, when we were heading off on our walk across Wales, I spent longer thinking about kit, looking at maps and making sure I knew where we were headed: we’d been stuck up a Welsh hill in less than ideal circumstances before - not something I wanted to repeat.

But then, next year, we’re going on an adventure more stereotypically adventurous than anything I’ve ever done before - more remote, more challenging, more, “I don’t even know if this is possible.” And in response, I am reverting to type: plan, plan, plan!

Let’s back up a bit. First, an admission. While I love planning, I rarely write about my plans before they’re finalised.

Why? Not to put too fine a point on it, I’m afraid.

My big worry is that I’ll look like a fool if the plan doesn’t come to fruition. How will I feel in a few months or a year if I have to come back and admit to the people who read this that we’re not going on that big, remote, challenging adventure at all? I’ll feel like a failure, that’s what.

(A lesser fear - one that’s more likely to happen, but easier to put aside - is that I’ll get a lacklustre response. Nobody will be enthused. Nobody will be encouraging. Nobody will comment. Nobody will give it a star or a thumbs up or a heart or a smiley face. I have to remind myself, that’s OK - I’m doing it for me, not for the lurking internet hordes, and naturally it's going to be more exciting to me than to anyone else. Besides, I've talked about this plan with people outside of the internets and they seem to think it's interesting!)

A couple of weeks ago I was reading the blog of the most enthusiastic ball of energy that is the adventurer Anna McNuff, specifically her post "To scoot or not to scoot, that is the question". ​In it, she talks about her plan to travel the length of South America by giant scooter, about testing out said giant scooters with a friend in the Welsh hills, about having a fantastic time . . . but realising this was not going to be the best mode of transport for a trip that involved going up a lot of hills. Anyway, Anna’s post is great and the video makes me want to go scooting, but she opens with something of a rallying cry - to talk a bit more about the planning of adventures before they begin:

So, that got me thinking, and now I'm all psyched up and wanting to talk a bit about this adventure we’re planning for next year . . .

The Snowy River is one of Australia’s most iconic rivers - at least, it is within Australia. Mostly, ask an Australian if they’ve heard of the Snowy River and they’ll recite a line or two from Banjo Paterson’s 1895 bush poem "The Man from Snowy River", mention the 1982 film of the same name starring Sigrid Thornton (or the terrible sequel), talk about the Snowy Mountains Scheme or, if they’re environmentally inclined, about the campaign to restore water from said scheme to the river. But from my extremely anecdotal and unscientific research, it doesn’t seem like many people outside Australia have heard of the Snowy River. So, in case you don’t know: the Snowy River rises in southern New South Wales on Mt Kosciuszko/Targangal, Australia’s highest mountain; it then flows in a question-mark-ish line for about 400km south before entering Bass Strait at Marlo in eastern Victoria. In between, it’s dammed three times, trickles through the Monaro High Plains, gushes over rapids and through gorges in remote areas of national park and loops through farmland, past remnant rainforest and coastal lakes. There aren’t many towns on the Snowy: Jindabyne (population <1750) at the main dam, Dalgety (population <100) in the Monaro and then nothing much until Orbost (population <2500) and Marlo (population <400) on the coast.

And next year, we’re going to try and follow the Snowy the whole way from source to sea, walking, paddling, wading, scrambling, swimming . . . however we can.

I first conjured up the idea of following the Snowy on dreary day in February last year. I was unenthused and uninspired and I needed to feel that an escape was possible. What could be a better escape than an adventure down a river, following the water downstream, sleeping on its sandy beaches, meeting people along the way, boiling river water for tea, swimming every day and finally arriving at the wide open ocean? And why not the Snowy River? I grew up beside the Snowy, but I’ve barely seen any of it. It would be a chance to go on a terrific journey, with lots of walking, scrambling, paddling, maybe some bushbashing - and in the process, I could learn a bit more about the natural environments, human cultures, history and geography of the river.

So, the idea has been on the cards for a while, quietly bubbling away, with research about the river taking up lots of my spare time. I hinted at our plans in my "Why follow a river?" post back in February. But it wasn’t until last month when our weeks off work were confirmed and our plane tickets booked that the enormity of the whole thing really started to sink in.

If all goes well we will be in Australia for almost six weeks in 2017 and on the river for about five of those. I have a draft itinerary, although in reality I have no idea how far we’ll be able to travel in a day, because there are no footpaths or tracks along the majority of the river. I’ve done a lot of Google Maps-based exploration. I’ve contacted various government departments and tourist information centres about the legalities of access to the river. I'm looking for more information about whose country we'll be on. I’m talking to expedition companies about boat hire and guided tours for the sections of river that I’ve been told are categorically unwalkable. We might end up paddling more than we expected. Dan and I are looking at our kit and trying to figure out what we need to discard, change, upgrade and acquire to make sure we’re safe (enough), comfortable (enough) and lightweight (enough) to make the journey enjoyable (enough). We're going to the Alpkit warehouse in August to check their gear out in person. We’ve pencilled in several overnight walks from now until then to keep our level of fitness from falling through the floor, but I think it will be a case of the trip being its own training. I’ve got an Australian first aid book to refresh my knowledge of how to bandage snake bites. I'm trying not to freak myself out with the idea of being chased by packs of feral dogs (or indeed domestic dogs). I’ve haunted forum debates about the pros and cons of PLBs and satellite messengers - particularly concerned about coverage in remote areas of Australia. We're trying to save some money. Kate of the Katechen, based in Melbourne, is going to devise some homemade dehydrated vegetarian meals for us (there's no point trying to take food into Australia, it'll probably be confiscated by customs). I’m hoping that a few friends and family who we’ve chatted to about our plans might be able to join us for a day or two here and there or at least help us arrange food drops and clean socks and undies at strategic points. Someone might even be able to give us a lift to beginning of the walk (a 7+ hour drive, minimum) - because actually getting there would be a good start!

There’s so much that’s still up in the air, still so many unknowns. And the nature of such an adventure means that some of it will remain unknowable until we do it, or fail while trying. In the meantime, there’s a lot to organise.

Luckily, I love planning.

So, there you have it. The cat's out of the bag, or among the pigeons, or on a hot tin roof. I have a plan, which is now on the internet, so it must be official!

We cross the Maribyrnong River on our first morning in Australia, then again as soon as we return to Melbourne after a week in East Gippsland. It’s wider than I remember, the surface laid out silvery under clear autumn skies, looping beneath concrete bridges, here presided over by the golden presence of Heavenly Queen (Mazu), there sidling along past cranes and shipping containers to join the Yarra just before Westgate Bridge.

It draws us in. We walk with our friends through Fairbairn Park and cross the river to Pipemakers Park. We pass a few afternoon dog walkers on the banks and joggers huffing along the paths. Half a dozen commuter cyclists whizz by, squinting into the sun. But the river itself is empty - or rather, it belongs entirely to the pied cormorants, wood ducks, mallards and little egrets. It strikes me as odd that nobody is on the water, but not because I’ve ever seen many people on the Maribyrnong. It’s just that the familiar has become unfamiliar. I think of how every river or canal in our south-east corner of England seems to come with a floating jumble of boats - narrowboats and barges with people living on board year round, motorboats hauled up on the banks waiting for their few weeks’ use in the summer holidays, sculling teams skimming across the early morning, weekend kayakers and canoeing school groups in raincoats and oversized life jackets, picnickers clunking their wooden rowboats in awkward circles. I wonder if there are restrictions, bylaws that keep people off the Maribyrnong, but we find a launching place down on the bank. When or if we come back to live in Melbourne, I’m going to get a pack raft and go exploring.

​A couple of days later, we stop off on the way to Footscray to follow a pathway between the Maribyrnong and Edgewater Lake. The sky is flawless blue, the water still. Swallows dart above the rushes, crested pigeons and wood ducks potter around the grass, gulls and cormorants survey the park from posts and footbridge railings. The wetlands are overlooked by suburbia and a shiny new residential development, where a swanky boats rest empty in a small marina. It’s hardly secluded, yet only a handful of people pass us as we dawdle along. It feels like walking into a secret.

A few years ago, the height restrictions in the local planning regulations changed and low-rise apartment blocks have sprung up in almost every street. But it seems the council is keen to preserve something of the historic character of the streetscape, so many of the new blocks bubble out the back of old single-front timber clad houses, like geometric steel aliens trying and failing to fit themselves into human bodies, wearing human faces without quite getting it right.

​The changes are disconcerting. This doesn't feel like the suburb I moved to when I first came to Melbourne, the homeliness has been stripped away. Driving down Union Street and Brunswick Road, some intersections are unrecognisable. The sky is hemmed in by steel, coloured concrete and glass. I mourn all the back yard lemon trees and hills hoists and despise the creeping inner-city-ness of it all. It’s all changed so quickly, I think. It’s all different. (But it’s not. There’s always been a mishmash of architecture here and I’ve always loved it. And later, when I take the streets at walking pace I start to enjoy the changes, the way the old houses with their lace-trimmed verandahs act as a familiar, friendly entrée to a menu of contemporary apartments.)

Top: View over the plains west of Bairnsdale. We took a few minutes out of our drive to detour down a wide gravel road off the highway, hop out of the car and admire the landscape. I've never explored this area, but this view made me want to go back and do so.

Middle left: "The Canoe Tree" at Howitt Park, Bairnsdale. Aboriginal people removed a 4m long section of bark to make a canoe, creating this scar.

Middle right: We stayed at my aunt and uncle's place on the Mornington Peninsula, meeting up with lots of folk from my dad's large family for my cousin's baby's naming day. This is my aunt and uncle's backyard, with my cousin's tent in the background.

Bottom: The old shearing and milking shed on the river flats at the bottom of my parents' place. There used to be more fences here, when they had sheep to shear, cows to milk and a vegetable patch to protect. There was no electricity - Dad did the milking and shearing the old fashioned way, by hand.

Top: Temperate rainforest. We went for a scramble along the creek bed that runs through my parents' place, down to the river. Closer to the river, deer (non-native animals) are making a bit of a mess of the valley.

Middle left: A pied currawong. Currawongs are handsome birds with large beaks and fierce, curious, bright yellow eyes. The name is onomatopoeic, it sounds a bit like their usual warbling call (they can also imitate some other birds).

Middle right: View across the Orbost river flats with the Princes Highway on the right and the old wooden railway bridge on the left. We visited a fantastic exhibition in Orbost, all about the history of the railway (the last trains came to Orbost in the late 1980s) and we signed a petition to have this bridge looked after. The line from Orbost to Bairnsdale is now a rail trail, which (obviously) does not use the dangerous bridges.

​Bottom: A tiny white jelly fungus spotted in the rainforest. There are thought to be over 250,000 species of fungi in Australia, though only 13,000 of them have been recorded. 

Driving through Melbourne and out to the Mornington Peninsula, I notice - for the first time in my life, really - the diversity of eucalypt trees. The freeway is lined with the short, scrubby kinds, multiple limbs springing up from the base, Mallee-style - trees that curl and wave and seem truly alien to eyes accustomed to oak, birch, spruce, hazel. I suddenly develop some sympathy for John Glover: I can understand, now, how he and others might have grappled with the unfamiliar proportions and anatomy of Australian trees, unintentionally emphasising the weird, writhing otherness of eucalypts in their paintings.

Down on the peninsula and through South Gippsland, I crane my neck to look up the elegant, smooth-skinned trunks of spotted gums, their pale, almost pastel pink skin covered in large splotches of smooth grey or creamy bark. Driving through the La Trobe Valley and into the plains around Sale and Bairnsdale, the dominant colours change to burnt orange and brown. We find river gums here, the broad, solid trunks covered in bark at the base, but sloughing it off in great, hanging ribbons at the top, where smooth boughs emerge a rich, tannin-y cream. The wavy Mallee branches have disappeared. After Lakes Entrance we pass through forests of stringybark, stringybark and stringybark, grey and rough coated, straight and slender, here blackened by the bushfires of a few years ago, with young, leafy branches springing from the burnt trunks.

At Orbost, we leave the highway to head out over the river flats, where blue-grey stands of coastal grey box dot the paddocks. Up the Snowy River, the rocky hills are striped with stringybark and ironbark while the lush valleys host tall mountain grey gums. On the way back to Melbourne a week later, we pass through the Dandenongs and acres of towering mountain ash, Eucalyptus regnans, one of the tallest trees in the world.

There are dozens of other species, too - eucalypts, acacias, banksias, others. The whole time, I ask my sister, the horticulturalist and gardener, “What’s that tree? What’s that tree?” She gives answers that satisfy me, but she also reminds me that there are hundreds of eucalypt species in Australia and only a specialist could keep up with my demands. When we reach my parents’ place, I ask them the same question, hoping that almost four decades in the area will have given them time to identify the local trees. They pull a few useful books off their crowded shelves - Forest Trees of Australia (1979 edition), Native Trees and Shrubs of South Eastern Australia (1984 edition) - editions new enough to have some full colour photos, though most are still black and white. I wonder what’s changed in the world of tree classification since their publication. I start Googling tree names, but Wikipedia has scant knowledge on some species and I’m not sure it’s any more accurate or up-to-date.

This sparse information makes me wonder if there's a big difference between my two countries. In the UK (at least, where I live), people go on bluebell walks and badger spotting evenings, they discuss what happened on Springwatch (or Autumnwatch, or Winterwatch), go on foraging and wild food cookery courses, happily spend an hour and a half watching a film about a year in the life of an oak tree, take part in outdoors campaigns (like #30DaysWild), get involved in citizen science (like the Big Garden Birdwatch) and read enough books about outdoorsy, naturey things that bookshops often have a “nature writing” section. There is a whole, loosely defined genre of media dedicated to nature. If I want to find out what bird I’ve just seen in the UK, there’s a pretty good chance the RSPB will have it on their online bird identifier. For butterflies there’s a Butterfly Conservation charity, for bats there's the Bat Conservation Trust, for bumblebees there's the Bumblebee Conservation Trust. There are countless pocket guides and wallcharts of wildflowers, birds, trees, insects, fungi and forage-able food. 

Compared to that, mainstream Australian culture seems to lack curiosity: there's very little desire to explore or connect with everyday nature. (This week, it feels like the petition to save a Lemon-scented gum on Flemington Road in Melbourne has not taken off as quickly as it would have done in the UK.) I wonder what that’s about. Is it fear? Do people worry about being called greenies? (Remember those car stickers, "Fertilise the bush, doze in a greenie" and "The only true wilderness is between a greenie's ears"? Remember how some shops in Orbost refused to serve anyone who looked like they were on the way to or from protest camps to save old growth forests?) Or is it anxiety about the bush itself, a relic of the colonists’ adversarial relationship with Australian landscapes, flora and fauna (lost in the hills, bitten by a snake, starving to death)? Is it a deeper cultural uneasiness, an unsteady repercussion of the new settlers' campaign to wipe out any intimate, long-term, traditional knowledge of Australian ecosystems along with the Aboriginal people who carried that knowledge? Is it simply that we’re taught that Australia is so big and there is so much bushland, so much desert, so much coast that we take it for granted? Are we just blasé?

Perhaps in the UK we can - and must - focus so intently because there is so little to focus on. Messing around on the Woodland Trust’s website a few days after returning to England, I read that there are two species of oak native to the UK, three species of native conifer and several species of native willow (which can hybridise, making identification tricky). The list of UK native trees, including photos, fits on a webpage that I can scroll through in a few seconds. I flick back through my photos from Australia, looking at all the trees I couldn’t identify there. Sure, most of them are eucalypts or acacias, but with several hundred species of the former and almost a thousand of the latter, the task of identifying them seems impossible. After looking at those tree books at my parents’ house I know even less about Australian flora than I did before.

Still, a eucalypt is a eucalypt is a Eucalyptus (or a Corymbia, or an Angophora, or...). The leaves always give off that shock-sharp scent when you crush them between your fingers or add one to a billy of tea. On our first full day at my parents’ place, the summer fire restrictions end. Dad and my sister light a big bonfire, hosing down the nearby tree trunks to keep it under control, raking dry branches into the flames. Up at the house, Mum starts to boil the kettle for tea, but I suggest we take a billy down to the fire instead. We dig around in the cupboards for a suitably billy-ish vessel, spoon tea leaves into a jar, grab some milk and some cups and head out for an afternoon adventure. The billy takes time to heat up, wedged among the coals, collecting a bit of ash and developing a fine, smoky flavour. The tea leaves go in when the water starts bubbling and, without being polite enough to check with the others, I throw a gum leaf in as well. The thing about billy tea is it has to be a bit dirty, a bit over-brewed, a bit tanniny, or it’s just not right. This tea? Is amazing.

We sit around on old planks and stumps of wood, staring at the fire as it dies down, chatting about this and that. I show Dad how to make a drink can stove, probably the first time I’ve ever been able to teach him anything remotely Boy Scout-ish. My sister disappears up to the house with Mum and they return carrying foil-wrapped potatoes, a pot full of rode kool (red cabbage, a nod to our Dutch heritage) and - best of all - piles of buttered bread, slices of cheese, tins of baked beans and a jaffle iron. The potatoes go in the ashes to cook slowly, the rode kool nestles at the edge of the fire. The five of us construct jaffles and jam the iron under the red hot coals, leaving it in a bit longer, and a bit longer still, to get that extra crunch on the bread. I bite into mine when I know full well it will be too hot, burning my fingers and tongue with impatience. After stuffing ourselves with food, we make another billy of tea, this time with Earl Grey teabags and two box leaves, which is perhaps not the best combination. By the time we finish our cups, it’s dark. We head home, full, tired, happy and infused with the smell of eucalyptus smoke. As Dad winds the hose back up to the garage, the rain begins.

Top: Dawn, looking east from the garden down the paddock and over the trees to the lightening sky.

Middle left: Under the bridge. When I was a kid, our drive crossed two bridges on its way to our house. The bridges were wood, planks of timber laid across two huge tree trunks. They rumbled and juddered under the car as you drove across, they were very slippery after rain and the gaps between the planks made walking a bit hazardous, too. They were picturesque, but slightly terrifying (especially the longer, higher one, which we imaginatively called "The Big Bridge"). Eventually, my parents had the bridges replaced with these culverts. They are big enough to walk through, as we did on our adventure down the creek to the river.

Middle right: Billy tea, brewed and stewed, stirred with a stick, flavoured with a gum leaf.

Bottom: I set off to explore the mysterious Other Side Of The River (for about two minutes). Although I lived here for the first eighteen years of my life, I don't remember ever bothering to swim or wade all the way over the Snowy - only ever to the sandbank in the middle. UK summers have hardened me up enough that an overcast autumn day in East Gippsland is plenty warm enough for a swim! The next day I even convinced Mum to come along with me.

Top: A superb fairy wren. Yes, that really is their name, though we tend to call them little blue wrens. This is a female, with a cute bandit mask around her eyes. Mature males have bright blue and black heads and blue tails. They are jittery little things, flitting restlessly through the garden in search of food, bouncing comically across the grass. As I always do with cute small birds, I stuck my finger out and demanded they come and sit on it. As always, they didn't.

Middle left: We saw many of the wild animals I'm used to finding around my parents' house - a lyrebird, wallabies, and this wombat. Unfortunately, the little beastie has mange - a horrible condition.

Middle right: Swans on the Yeerung River, near Cape Conran. I have missed seeing black swans, with their ruffled wings, hidden patches of white feathers and bright red bills. They have quite a nice call, too. Also at the Yeerung, a sea eagle flew low overhead. That was very special.

Bottom: The Yeerung spends a lot of time cut off from the ocean by the sand. This means the sun has time to heat the water up, making it a lovely place to swim. When we visited, a shallow strip was open between the river and the sea. You can see where the tanniny, iron-rich water of the Yeerung meets the clear, blue-green water of Bass Strait. This is also a popular place for kayaking - we arrived just as a group was departing to paddle back up to the put-in place.