Bourke & Beyond - Day 9
Oct. 13th, 2020 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
waitingmanDay 9 Ardlethan to Eden
Up reasonably early to see our friend off to school, then showered, packed, said goodbye to the dog, then drove about 250m to the coffee shop our friend recommended as being the better of the 2 in town. Certainly the food was nice, simple fare, but the coffee left something to be desired - like a barista who knows how to heat soy milk without splitting it & making the coffee almost lumpy & pretty much undrinkable. Julia didn’t touch hers, I made it about halfway through mine before giving up... I needed the caffeine!
Southward ho towards Wagga Wagga, a town I hadn’t visited this millennium & Julia hadn’t seen since 2005. It had certainly grown larger, for both of us & also had the first traffic lights we'd seen in what felt like ages... & it was red, of course. We stopped at the mega-mall shopping centre & were overwhelmed by the sheer number of people in the place - more than we’ve seen in any of the towns we’ve been in for the last 8 days... probably combined. We got what we needed, then got out of there as fast as we could. God knows what we’ll be like when we get back to Sydney...
Turning eastward from Wagga Wagga we passed through fields of canola - the golden (figuratively & literally) crop of the Riverina area. The colours are amazing in Spring & the fields were obviously not far from harvest time & looked almost a solid yellow colour until you got close to them. We've read recently that the farmers & local authorities are up in arms about everybody not only stopping to photograph the fields, which is fine, but many people are climbing over fences & going into the fields to take selfies crushing the crop... which is not fine... but you can be fined for it!! We, of course, just took our photos from the side of the road...
One field farmers probably wouldn't mind you walking through is this one... While the purple flowers are lovely & a striking colour to see on a cloudy day, the plant they grow from isn't called Patersons Curse for nothing. It takes over pastures & is also toxic to livestock, so unless you get on top of it quickly, it spreads like nobody's business. We saw plenty of fields full of it & long stretches beside the road as well
After a few hours, we left the canola fields behind us & began the gradual climb into the Snowy Mountains via its eponymous Highway. Not far along, we found the little town of Adelong, outside of which were the ruins of an 1800s gold crushing plant next to what were called ‘falls’ but were really just steep rapids. The place was no less impressive for the misnomer, with the remains of the plant almost blending into the bushland by the river. Apparently, a huge flood came through about 20 years ago, destroying some of the buildings, but what's left is somehow even more of a testament to either man's determination, ingenuity, or lust for gold... Or a mix of all 3
From there, the highway twisted, turned & climbed up into mountains that still had snow on them, which stood out starkly against the denuded landscape, still very much affected by the bushfires at the beginning of the year, The huge, absolutely huge areas where all you could see was blackened stumps & trunks & barren, brown-grey ground, where it seemed even the soil had burned, was sobering & still a little frightening, to think of the ferocity of fire that could wreak that much destruction. Every now & then, there would be small pockets of bushland that seemed to be untouched by the fire, but there wasn’t much... as even those little areas had obviously been back-burned to a degree, to create a fire break against the maelstrom. There’s evidence of some early regrowth, but it’s going to take years & years before any return to ‘normal’ & decades before the scars fade
Eventually we arrived in the little town of Cooma, which we’d visited on our way back from Melbourne in December last year, just as the fires were getting started in the area & we’d threaded our way over the Snowy Mountains, between 2 fire fronts, via a dirt road that wound its way through the ranges & along the Snowy River. If we’d come along a week later, there was no way we’d have made it through - everything was on fire by then... Anyway, Cooma marked the ‘Nearly There’ point for today's travels, as it meant we were about 2 hours from Eden, on the New South Wales south coast. The temperature outside gradually climbed from the 3 degrees Celsius it had been at the top of the mountains, to a positively tropical 9 degrees, as we descended & headed out of the high country. Then the rains arrived, at around the same time as we were part of a little convoy winding down the escarpment to the coast. These things combined to slow us down a bit, so it was about 7.15 pm & dark when we eventually arrived in town - the first time we’ve done any driving after sunset on this trip. It would have been kind of comforting to have seen kangaroos, or wildlife on the roads in the area... it would mean that there still is some, after the fires...
Checked into a Motel we've stayed at before, then dinner at the Fisherman’s Club in town, strangely deserted tonight, but the school holidays start tomorrow, so enjoy the quiet while you have it...
Kilometres travelled: 551
Up reasonably early to see our friend off to school, then showered, packed, said goodbye to the dog, then drove about 250m to the coffee shop our friend recommended as being the better of the 2 in town. Certainly the food was nice, simple fare, but the coffee left something to be desired - like a barista who knows how to heat soy milk without splitting it & making the coffee almost lumpy & pretty much undrinkable. Julia didn’t touch hers, I made it about halfway through mine before giving up... I needed the caffeine!
Southward ho towards Wagga Wagga, a town I hadn’t visited this millennium & Julia hadn’t seen since 2005. It had certainly grown larger, for both of us & also had the first traffic lights we'd seen in what felt like ages... & it was red, of course. We stopped at the mega-mall shopping centre & were overwhelmed by the sheer number of people in the place - more than we’ve seen in any of the towns we’ve been in for the last 8 days... probably combined. We got what we needed, then got out of there as fast as we could. God knows what we’ll be like when we get back to Sydney...
Turning eastward from Wagga Wagga we passed through fields of canola - the golden (figuratively & literally) crop of the Riverina area. The colours are amazing in Spring & the fields were obviously not far from harvest time & looked almost a solid yellow colour until you got close to them. We've read recently that the farmers & local authorities are up in arms about everybody not only stopping to photograph the fields, which is fine, but many people are climbing over fences & going into the fields to take selfies crushing the crop... which is not fine... but you can be fined for it!! We, of course, just took our photos from the side of the road...
One field farmers probably wouldn't mind you walking through is this one... While the purple flowers are lovely & a striking colour to see on a cloudy day, the plant they grow from isn't called Patersons Curse for nothing. It takes over pastures & is also toxic to livestock, so unless you get on top of it quickly, it spreads like nobody's business. We saw plenty of fields full of it & long stretches beside the road as well
After a few hours, we left the canola fields behind us & began the gradual climb into the Snowy Mountains via its eponymous Highway. Not far along, we found the little town of Adelong, outside of which were the ruins of an 1800s gold crushing plant next to what were called ‘falls’ but were really just steep rapids. The place was no less impressive for the misnomer, with the remains of the plant almost blending into the bushland by the river. Apparently, a huge flood came through about 20 years ago, destroying some of the buildings, but what's left is somehow even more of a testament to either man's determination, ingenuity, or lust for gold... Or a mix of all 3
From there, the highway twisted, turned & climbed up into mountains that still had snow on them, which stood out starkly against the denuded landscape, still very much affected by the bushfires at the beginning of the year, The huge, absolutely huge areas where all you could see was blackened stumps & trunks & barren, brown-grey ground, where it seemed even the soil had burned, was sobering & still a little frightening, to think of the ferocity of fire that could wreak that much destruction. Every now & then, there would be small pockets of bushland that seemed to be untouched by the fire, but there wasn’t much... as even those little areas had obviously been back-burned to a degree, to create a fire break against the maelstrom. There’s evidence of some early regrowth, but it’s going to take years & years before any return to ‘normal’ & decades before the scars fade
Eventually we arrived in the little town of Cooma, which we’d visited on our way back from Melbourne in December last year, just as the fires were getting started in the area & we’d threaded our way over the Snowy Mountains, between 2 fire fronts, via a dirt road that wound its way through the ranges & along the Snowy River. If we’d come along a week later, there was no way we’d have made it through - everything was on fire by then... Anyway, Cooma marked the ‘Nearly There’ point for today's travels, as it meant we were about 2 hours from Eden, on the New South Wales south coast. The temperature outside gradually climbed from the 3 degrees Celsius it had been at the top of the mountains, to a positively tropical 9 degrees, as we descended & headed out of the high country. Then the rains arrived, at around the same time as we were part of a little convoy winding down the escarpment to the coast. These things combined to slow us down a bit, so it was about 7.15 pm & dark when we eventually arrived in town - the first time we’ve done any driving after sunset on this trip. It would have been kind of comforting to have seen kangaroos, or wildlife on the roads in the area... it would mean that there still is some, after the fires...
Checked into a Motel we've stayed at before, then dinner at the Fisherman’s Club in town, strangely deserted tonight, but the school holidays start tomorrow, so enjoy the quiet while you have it...
Kilometres travelled: 551
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