1995/11 Australia trip - Return to Sydney |
|||
Next morning, Tuesday, we were busy repacking the camper, and saying our goodbyes, which is never easy. Surprisingly, we did get away by 10 or so, and John escorted us across Dandenong to our exit road. We’d chosen an interesting route through the hills rather than a direct blast up the highway. We had to be close to Sydney by the following evening, but it didn’t really matter how late we would be.
This was just as well, as the road took us through Healesville, which has a wildlife sanctuary. We thought we’d just stop and take a look, but stayed there for 4 hours. It’s really a kind of zoo, but most animals are in paddocks or large aviaries that the visitors walk through. They even have an underwater platypus exhibit, showing them in their natural environment. They’re largely nocturnal, so it was too dark to take pictures, but we could see them swimming and chasing yabbies (crayfish to us).
 |
Healesville Sanctuary (14.08) |
 |
|---|
They had all kinds of kangaroos, loads of birds, echidnas, Tasmanian devils, and all sorts of little furry things that live underground in the desert. As well as the captive birds, there were flocks of other local birds, such as ibis, that came and went, and made the place seem natural.
This stop had, of course, destroyed our schedule, and we now had no hope of getting to the Snowy Mountains by dark. The road was interesting, climbing and winding through a forest of towering mountain ash, but not very fast, particularly with all the picture stops. Eventually, we called it quits at Wodonga on the Murray River at the border of Victoria and New South Wales.
It rained most of the night, and was still wet on Wednesday morning. We couldn’t bring ourselves to take the direct but boring freeway route, and, despite the dreary weather, chose a big loop of the Snowy Mountains Highway to Cooma, and then through the ACT and Canberra. We stopped off at Adelong to look at the waterfalls.
This area was part of the NSW gold rush, and the gorge still has remnants of the mine buildings. We couldn’t get over to them as the water level was so high, it was flowing around both ends of the bridge. It looked like it had been raining here for days. (It had. In our friend John’s Xmas letter from the ACT, he mentioned that his ceiling fell in on this day!)
I
t was a really steep climb up into Kosciusko national park. The views were good, but limited to the lakes below us, as we were up at cloud level and unable to see the mountains around us. This is another empty area, with no towns or lodges, just a few skiing buildings closed up for the summer. At the road’s highest point, the trees disappeared and we were in open country similar to England’s moors, green and wet, with the streams overflowing from the rain. I was tempted to take more of a look despite the weather, but we were rapidly running out of time.
|
Snowies in the rain (15.10) |
 |
|---|
We descended into Cooma, the first town in a hundred miles, and suddenly we were in teeming high street traffic. It didn’t seem that big a town, so everyone must have been in the one street! We had a very late lunch, and set off north into the Australian Capital Territory and Canberra, out of the rain at last. The ACT was greener than I expected, though John had said that the whole area goes brown in the summer.
I would have been happy to bypass Canberra, but my navigator must have wanted to see the city as we wound up circling the Australian parliament 
building a few times looking for a signpost to anywhere. We didn’t find any, so we left this outstanding example of North Dakota restroom architecture, and took the first road out. With a few U-turns, we were soon on our way to Sydney.
|
Canberra to Sydney (4.02) |
 |
|---|
From Canberra, the road was relatively fast, but we didn’t want to end up in the centre of Sydney as the campgrounds are all on the coastline. Our chosen route to the coast looked good on the map, but eventually we started to see warning signs about its unsuitability for certain vehicles, and then it plunged from plateau to sea level in one very long sequence of short switchbacks. The camper could only just make the corners by using all the road, which was exciting in the dark, especially as there was some traffic grinding its way up.
But, sure enough, the road did eventually turn into freeway, which promptly climbed back up to the plateau again! Then we came down again, and made our way into Cronulla, looking for a campsite. Yet again, the book was wrong, transposing the description of the area’s two sites. So, we were at A looking for the street names for B. After lots of U-turns, Sandie stopped at the local police station in the hope that they could at least tell us where we were. Even they got the instructions wrong, but we did find it eventually, in a one-car wide alley at the back of a gas station.
If we’d actually had a caravan we’d have been out of luck as this was the most crowded and compact site we’d seen. Their major business was renting out on-site caravans (which never move), but they were good enough to find us some room on their back patio “under the palms”, and gave us the OK to wash the camper there.