Friday, June 6, 2008

Jindabyne and Kosciuszko national park, May




These photos are courtesy of Kyra. Mine are mysteriously absent from my camera card for about a week. Kyra's are better anyway. These scenes of snow and winter hats may seem out of place. Read on.
From the east coast we drove inland to Jindabyne. Our friends Cindy and Sean have a condo in this nice little ski town. They kindly offered it to us. Thanks again you guys! Jim met us there and we stayed 2 nights enjoying food, tv, laundry and birthday cakes. These photos however are not of Jindabyne, no snow there yet. After parting with Jim (always a sad event), we headed west driving through Kosciuszko on our way towards Melbourne. Kosciuszko is really hard to spell and it is the largest national park in NSW, 675,000 hectares, with Australia's highest mountains and only ski hills. This time of year the ski hills are getting ready, Thredbo is the trendy ski town.
We passed through Dead Horse Gap and the girls enjoyed freezing their hands and making snow balls from the few patches of icy snow, delighted to see snow for the first time in 14 months. This was the only place we were able to access any snow.
The mountain roads are winding and beautiful through forests. We stopped at the Tom Groggin camp site where we watched dozens of kangaroos grazing among the trees. They allowed us to get close but kept an eye on us. A few of them had joeys peeking out of their pouches.
We spent the night at the Geehi camp sites nearby. This time of year we had our pick of spots, it's much too chilly for most campers. We had a pretty spot by a wide river. Dozens of kangaroos were in the nearby field, some were around the campsites. A particularly large lone male grazed near us for hours. We spotted much wombat poo (cube-shaped!) and a wombat den but no wombats. The stars were beautiful. A frog mouth night bird landed on our motorhome (not an owl!). It was a great place and we had a wonderful campfire but we were freezing in all our sweaters ('jumpers') and winter hats.

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