Tuesday, December 1st, Driving from Cooma to Lakes Entrance

Bob:

Knowing that it would be a long day's drive, we started before 9 o'clock and drove pretty much due South on the Monaro Highway through a wide, shallow, and surprisingly dry valley. I had thought that since we were still quite close to the Australian Alps the land would receive plentiful rainfall, but instead it looked rather arid, although not totally parched. We stopped for a bathroom break at a small roadside park that had old, painted farm implements for the kids to play on. That was certainly fun for me as I'm just an overgrown kid at heart, but it looked as if it would be awfully dangerous for impetuous toddlers (e.g. my granddaughter Rowan!). The implements were those turn-of-the-century, iron-wheeled types of plow and tractor, and they had plenty of sharp edges and steel projections to whack oneself on.

Just a couple miles further down the road, we saw a sign for a platypus refuge and checked that out as we had not yet seen platypuses (platypussies? platypi?) in the wild. But we didn't see any signs of them, and reading the information provided at the observation post it turned out that they are nocturnal animals and sleep in their burrows during the day. Oh well.

As we approached the southern edge of New South Wales, we drove through very pretty and heavily wooded mountains in the South East Forest National Park on the New South Wales side of the border, and the Coopracambra National Park on the Victoria side. The land seemed to get gradually wetter after that, possibly because we were in a range of coastal mountains that tend to capture rainfall.

Just North of Cann River, we stopped to check out an old 1-room school house. I always enjoy those because my mother taught in one during the early 1920s in the Thumb area of Michigan. Although the old schoolhouse was locked, my best peeking inside through the windows indicated that the blackboards were still intact and the rows of desks looked like the children had just left them to go to lunch. The one noticeable difference with the old schoolhouses I have seen in the U.S. was the large galvanized iron water cistern in the back which was directly fed by the rain gutters on the edges of the roof.

Once in Cann River, a small, highway-crossroads type of town, we had a light lunch at a cozy little cafe. After lunch we headed due west toward Melbourne on the Princes Highway, the main route along the southern coast of Victoria. The scenery remained wet and woodsy, and when we reached the mouth of the MacKenzie River, we stopped again to take a short, 1-kilometer walk into the rainforest along a soft, loamy path, some boardwalks over the wetland areas, and even suspension bridges over the streams! We were well rewarded for our little jaunt as we found hauntingly beautiful tall, canopied trees with a lush jungle-like undergrowth of tree ferns and other bushes. Very pleasant.

I was very surprised by the loud, continuous, and varied sounds of birds, bugs, and I don't know what else that greeted us when we got out of the car and never stopped for a second during our entire walk! The noise was just like on those old Hollywood "Tarzan of the Jungle" films that I had always thought to be pure fiction, but that's pretty much exactly what this rain forest did sound like. Unbelievable.

Two suspension bridges took us across deep, dark, slowly flowing streams and into mossy grottoes underneath the huge trees. I learned that the balance of maintaining the rain forest depended on how often fire swept through it. If fires occurred frequently, the fire-resistant and open-air loving species like eucalyptus trees took over and displaced the rain forest. But if fires were kept at bay, the rain forest species gradually took over from the eucalyptus species, a curious balance. All in all, it was a very strange, unworldly experience, at least for this city boy who grew up in a totally man-made environment. Except for one point where we were plagued by hungry mosquitoes, we were not troubled by bugs or snakes and had an enjoyable, even if surpisingly noisy, walk in the woods (jungle?).

We detoured over to the sea shore a bit and stopped off to see the ocean rolling in at Ricardo Point. Here we also saw the first of many warning signs, that were everywhere, telling you how many ways there are to get into trouble at the beach in Australia. But reassuringly, perhaps, the signs omitted any mention of man-eating sharks, deadly jellyfish, salt-water crocodiles, or poisonous shells that can all kill the casual beach-goer up in Queensland! (moderate rapture!)

A little farther on we stopped for more pictures of the inlet beside the sea at Frenchmans Narrows another very pretty spot. Two beautiful black swans were swimming in the inlet while farther on you could see the ocean.

Finally, exhausted by all the driving, we fetched up for the night at Lakes Entrance, a pretty little coastal city, where we obtained an oceanfront suite with free Wi-Fi for a couple of nights and settled in for the evening.