Part One
Day 1, Sept 14th 2012. We fly out of Orks at 6.30pm to Sydney where we are met by Tony, the man who has agreed to our scheme of doing a bike swap, and has generously also picked us up from the airport and put us up for the night. We meet his lovely wife Sue and have supper and a few nips of American Honey with them before crashing for the night.
Day 2, Saturday. We load our stuff onto “Wee Willie” and depart Sydney heading south to Nowra where we have our first lunch, fish and chips etc, more than we can eat! On the advice of Tony we head SW thru the Turpentine Rd also known as the Braidwood Rd. Soon we come to a waterfalls where we have to stop for a look. Here we discover, thanks to the tight turning in the carpark, that the handlebars on LHS contact the tankbag activating the horn button and what a horn it is! I am sure Tony has pilfered it from a freight train, and so are the people we have just scared witless! We continued on to Braidswood and stopped for a cuppatea, still a bit underwhelmed with the weather, which we thought would be way warmer than home. Not that it was a problem as we did not feel the need to be ripping all our gear off every time we stopped! We continued on through the Araluen road to Cooma which was mostly gravel and turned to hard packed clay as we wound through the forest portion. We were astounded by the number of dead roos and wombats on this stretch of road and realized that we did not want to be hitting any of these very large road obstacles! Cooma turned on another cuppatea and then we pushed on for Jindabyne through Berridale. This is where we realized that we had made the mistake of not doing enough research and had arrived in full ski season/school holidays! So there was no accommodation available at all! We had to backtrack to Jindabyne east, in the dark and freezing cold, where we scored possibly the last room in the area.
Day 3, Sunday, We got up and consumed the breakfast that was thankfully included in the most expensive accommodation of the trip, and after scraping off the frost fired Willie up and pointed him at the alps! We only got as far as Ski Tube, just shy of Thredbo, before effectively getting turned back at National Park entryway. Our preferred option of the Barry Way was also not an option due to slippage so we decided to head SE instead of SW and miss out on the Alpine Highway for now which I had been looking forward to. So we followed the Snowy River Way to Bombala which was very open and rural up high in the hills. So far we had managed to avoid the long straight roads and just stick to secondary or rural roads. Bombala was our early lunch stop and then we headed 3km out of town on to the Delegate road where there was a Platypus reserve. Nobody else was there and contrary to the displayed info, which informed us that we needed to be there dusk or dawn, there was a Platypus swimming mid river as well as some very noisy but invisible frogs and several basking lizards.
I was keen to do the delegate road but hadn’t enough fuel so we went down the Monaro highway for a little bit before heading due east on the Imlay road. I should mention that most of the roads we took are specifically mentioned in Tony’s HEMA motorcycle atlas of OZ which he had sent over to us in NZ much earlier. Imlay road is through forestry areas so we are advised to watch out for logging trucks but it is Sunday and no-one seems to be working today! The road goes through a couple or three state forests and we made the most of it pulling off to take a break and hunt for critters. There were only a couple of cars on the whole road which made it seem a lot more remote than it is. We hit the Princes highway and turned south and headed for Victoria where we turned left at Genoa to head for the coast at Mallacoota. Yet another cuppatea and we headed back to the Princes Highway to turn off at Orbost to stay the night at a lovely seaside town called Marlo at the mouth of the Snowy River.
Day 4, Monday, We turned west on the Princes Highway again and stopped at Lakes Entrance for brekkie and a quick wander across the estuary, hopefully to molest the as yet unphotographed pelicans. Nope, they proved too smart for us! So we saddled up and headed off through Bairnsdale, and the south end of the coveted Great Alpine Rd, to Sale where we deserted the Princes for the South Gippsland Highway to Welshpool where we went to the port and had a slightly disappointing scallop pie. Well in fact I had 1 and ¾ pies. So not too disappointing then! Some linesman guys there told us to do Wilsons Promontory which apparently is a good place to encounter wombats. Unfortunately we were already running out of time as we needed to be in Mel for the night. So we cracked on for the Bass Highway via Tarwin Lower and Venus Bay through to Inverloch. I should mention that there are an endless supply of great holiday spots here such as Venus Bay and Marlo etc. Guaranteed they will be booked out at Xmas time. So, Bass Highway to Melbourne then but this is where we started to use our sat-nav, who we have come to know as Bitch-face! We got diverted through Koo Wee Rup for apparently no other reason, other than to irritate us. She eventually found Jesse and Katherines place and from there we found a nice flash place to stay in Toorak Rd and do some laundry etc. Kath and Jesse took us out to some Grill place that I can’t remember the name of and then we crashed in our city apartment for the night.
pic 1 We took loads of sign photos
pic 2 We took loads of roadkill photos
pic 3 I appear to defy gravity in this photo. Or was I dancing?
pic 4 Us and Tony and Sue the owners of "Willie" I had washed him that day
pic 5 It's a sign!
pic 6 Can't get over the size of the gas bottles here! How do you lift them?
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