Canberra To Jindabyne 1^stDecember 2014

Canberra to Jindabyne

We hadn’t quite finished with Canberra and since the trip to Jindabyne wasn’t particularly long we went up to Mount Ainslie that overlooks the city and got a bird’s eye view of the plain on which Canberra is sited. (A recommendaton from a colleague at work, who has travelled extensively in Australia.) This area used to be inhabited by the Ngunnawal aboriginal tribe and was a meeting place with their aboriginal neighbours.

Canberra from Mount Ainslie with ANZAC Parade in centre

From the mount we descended down to the Australian War Memorial and entered the building. This has got to be one of the best organised and presented war museums we have ever seen. It presents the various wars that the Australians have fought offering a perspective from the ANZAC point of view that one rarely sees in Europe, particularly their experience in Papua New Guinea and Singapore. We undertook a cursory view for about an hour and would have needed a whole day to do it full justice but we needed to make tracks.

ANZAC Parade

We left Canberra behind and headed south to Cooma and then south west onto Jindabyne passing through a much flatter landscape than we had seen before but with the same parched fields on either side of the road. 

Road from Canberra to Cooma

A hailstorm let rip at one point in the journey and having picked up a car with numerous roof and bonnet hail-dents we decided to stop and take a quick lunch break in the car. Within seconds of the storm abating the temperature was up to 28C and rising to 32C. Down the road it hardly looked as though a storm had happened.

Just outside Cooma we visited the Snowy Mountain Hydro Discovery Centre. The hydro scheme links up various mountain water resources with 7 major power stations, 16 major dams, 80km of aqueducts and 145 km of tunnels to provide hydro-electric power. The system was started in 1949 and took 25 years to build. We hope to visit part of the system in our journey tomorrow. The Centre provides a realtime summary of inter-state electricity requirements, transfers and the current dollar price/MW.

Realtime power requirements & transfers across Australia

We arrived in Jindabyne, on the edge of the Snowy Mountains, just as a storm was brewing over the mountains followed by thunder and lightning.

By the time we went out for dinner the storm had passed and the sky was clearing across the mountains and Jindabyne Lake, itself part of the Snowy Mountain Hydro System.  The town is not quite at the foot of the mountain but there are plenty of ski and snowboard hire shops in the town.

The wine for the evening in an Italian Restaurant was a Tyrrell’s Moore Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2013 and very acceptable. Looking on their website it looks as though they are not available to be bought directly by the general public. Tyrrell’s is quite a famous family of wine producers and have interests in the Hunter Valley.

Our accommodation was at "Rydges Horizons Snowy Mountain", just on the edge of the lake. After our evening meal we walked down to the lake to catch the last of the evening light.

Lake Jindabyne