Hi from southern New South Wales. Daughter Jessica and I are
about as far south in southeastern Australia as the road goes. It has been
raining hard for the last five days, and we have had to look through the mists
and clouds as we drive through the Snowy Mountains, a part of the Great
Dividing Range that splits the populated east coast off from the less populated
interior “Outback”.
There
are still some patches of snow up in the Snowy Mountains as Australia moves
toward late spring.
It is mid-November
now. Jessica and I are bundled up in coats and rain gear, but down in the
valleys the weather is warming up It has
me wondering how Santa will get around in his sleigh during the hot part of
December.
The ski resorts are closed. They are small looking things
and Jessica has been wondering if there are anything other than green or easy
blue runs here.
It is windy and cold
and rainy, and the trees are stunted here in the Alpine regions. Mostly, the
trees are a variety of small eucalyptus called Snow Gum.
We have done some small hikes in the Snowy Mountains, coming
to lookout points where we can see small streams and cliffs way down in the
mists.
We drove down to Melbourne,
going through a tremendous traffic jam which reinforced my strong dislike
for cities, and we went on down to Phillip Island which is about as far south
as a person can go without jumping over to Tasmania. We have had a great time
here, and have found lots of koalas sleeping in the big gum trees.
Sometimes one will wake up and yawn and look around lazily.
They eat the equivalent of a bowl of cereal a day (all of it eucalyptus of
course), and on such a limited diet it is hard to be very active.
Last night we went to see hundreds of cute little penguins
coming home from the sea where they had spent the entire day gorging on fish.
They fought the surf as they came out of the ocean and, once they had gotten
their little feet on land, they went waddling up the hillsides to their burrows
where their babies waited patiently for some regurgitated fish to eat. Yum,
warm food.
We are headed for the state of Victoria today. I hope the weather warms up.
Ron