Towards Shangri-La?

And so as the sun pours down like honey on Kangaroo Valley it is time to say good bye. We have admired your wood turning, tasted your marinated aubergine and fallen into your river. Next stop Kosciusko National Park (pronounced "cossy-us-ko" in Australian but probably not in the original Polish). Amanda had painted such a glowing portrait of the park and Thredbo in particular that we felt obliged to go. Imagine living our lives without visiting Thredbo.

It's over there at the end of the bridge over ... we a field but that's because it hasn't rained much recently. Not since they built the bridge in fact.

From K-Vs lush English greenery we went up into thicker eucalypt bush then down again. Next stop Moss Vale: Gene Pitney is singing at the Wool Shed, and it looks as though it is just a shed. It's a lot more than 24 hours from Tulsa.

We stop on the outskirts of Goulburn "The Fastest Growing Inland City in NSW". Can you sense the desperation: 95% of Australians live on the coast so you aren't exactly going for the biggest challenge around, and only "fastest growing" with a current population of 42,000 isn't as hard as being "largest". Not sure what makes you a 'city' in Australia, judging by the sign it is having a McDonalds, a KFC and two Thai restaurants. Also historic abbattoir and tannery.  We decide to miss it.

Next we miss Canberra. Even the guide book was struggling ("can have pleasant weather in spring and autumn"). Canberra is a compromise: both Sydney and Melbourne wanted to be national capital so neither got it though Sydney got agreement that it be within 100 miles of Sydney and in NSW. It also has it's own port, miles away south of Sydney.

Next we missed a very big lake. Can't remember the name (Prince George?) About the biggest lake in NSW, an oval, 8 miles wide and 10 tall. We didn't mean to miss it. I was navigating and getting more and more nervous. Maybe we'd taken a wrong turn (there is only about one turn off every fifty miles) but everything looked right. Then we saw a viewpoint for the lake, so relief but still no lake. It had turned into a grassy plain. About 60 square miles of water just gone. "So it goes" as they say on Tralfamadore.

Then a series of tiny towns. You have to admire the confidence of Australians, however small the town they always have four lanes down main street even if the road in is just one lane wide. "One day", they think, "this will be a great city, like Goulburn. When the second Thai restaurant opens." But maybe not here:

Still, you can dream:

The other feature common to small towns it that there are women walking forcefully away from them. Actually not just women, the Tumut Rural News (main story "Tumut girl gets Uni place at second attempt") reports that a Sikh doctor lasted only a week before escaping back to India. A local worthy said "They came over for dinner on the second night and he was saying things like 'How can anyone live here?' and 'How do you stay sane?'. I should have seen the danger signs."

We lasted one night in Cooma. Cooma was OK. What do you say? It had shops, a couple of cafes and a shop that sold complicated equipment for doing unnatural things to farm animals. A perfectly normal town. But then we only had to stay one night. After a week you feel differently.