Day 227 - Up to the mountains.

Hi People, good to hear from you all.

Today was a day of ups and downs. I say this, as I drove for 5 hours in the snowy mountains, and boy, did I drive up and down a lot. I'm just so happy that I was driving and not the passenger, I might have been sick.

But I digress. I left Wagga Wagga with a smile on myself. It was good to get out of there. It was a pleasant day's driving, with the weather going up to about 18 degrees.

My first stop of the day was to Yarrangobilly Caves. That's right, another cave. But there was a difference. I got to walk through a lovely cave, by myself, with the lights coming on and off as I moved through. I was a little scared that they wouldn't come on, but all worked OK. It was actually a really big cave system, the only down side was that with all the rain of late, I got pretty wet in there.

To make up for getting wet in the cave, I went to the other feature of Yarrangobilly, a thermal pool. In the middle of the bush, they have a nice large pool, where the water comes from down deep, and is at a constant temperature of 27 degrees. Lovely.

After that, I spent quite a bit of time going up and down mountains. It was here that I saw my first snow for the trip, and hopefully will see lots more tomorrow. I also drove past the statue of a giant trout, as the area is renowned for trout fishing.

When I got to Jindabyne, I headed in to the tourist centre to talk about tomorrow. I want to climb to the top of Mount Kosciuszko, but hadnt found out a definitive answer on how to go there, there's about 5 different ways. So, here's the bad news. The short trip, 5km each way, is totally snowed over, and there's no markers. The only way up is the 9km each way trip, and for about 10km of that trip, I'd need to wear snow boots. I went next store, to look at the boots, and worked out that I probably can't walk that far in them. So tomorrow I'm go up there and just walk as far as I can.

From there, I grabbed my fishing rod, and went fishing for some trout. For about 3 hours I sat there, and didnt lose a bait. Doh! But I'll try again tomorrow.

Thermal Pools

Giant Trout