Around Australia 2012: Corryong 18/4/12 to 21/4/12

Corryong( Colac Colac) has so far has been the best caravan park we have stayed at. So good that we stayed an extra night. It was good to stop and not have to do anything after our busy time in Sydney and Canberra. The boys spent many hours building dams in the creek that ran through the park. We also could have fished if we got our act together. I have promised them fishing in Corowa/Rutherglen. The park had heaps of shade from the beautifully coloured trees. There were even some cows lazing on the other side of the creek adding to the country ambiance. The hosts Phil and Raelee were very welcoming (we aren’t just saying that because we gave them our blog address either). The boys can confirm that as they had a ride in the golf buggy on day one and caramel dumplings on day two and we had the papers delivered each morning. One of the nights Phil and Raelee organised a BBQ for all of the quests at the park, which was us, another couple and 5 guys that were there from Melbourne as part of a construction crew. Good company, great night and delicious food, especially the caramel dumplings as mentioned earlier.

The park was even more welcomed at the end of what was a fairly stressful drive from Canberra. Where do we start?. Doug wanted to go via the Snowy Mountains so we could see some spectacular scenery. We started out in the fog and ended up on some very steep and windy roads. Then to make it even more interesting we had to back up the caravan on one of the small mountain roads as the road ahead was closed due to it being recently washed away. We spent some time beside the road ringing police and the caravan park to work out an alternate route. Luckily a ranger drove past and was able to confirm route. The new route was extremely steep, narrow and windy and it had some wild life. A brumby crossed the road ahead of us and a stag came charging out of the scrub and was on a collision cause with us, luckily he turned off and headed back into scrub as Doug braked. Eventually we arrived at our destination after 7 hours on the road; only travelling 360ks. Boys were most concerned as they hadn’t had lunch and didn’t get it until 5.50pm which ended up being lunder (lunch/dinner).

Our Corryong camp site

Cows in the mist

Dam builders

We had a fairly relaxed time in Corryong. We did visit The Man from Snowy River museum which we were all very impressed with. The Man from Snowy River (Jack Riley) lived in the mountains near Corryong in the late 1800’s. We also took a drive out to Khancoben where the Murray 1 station for the Snowy Mountain Hydro Scheme is. Wow! What an amazing feat to build the Snowy Mountain Scheme was. It took 25yrs from 1949 to 1974 to complete and over 100 thousand people were employed to build it, with around 60 thousand of these migrants.

The Snowy Moutains were just beautiful. I loved driving through them. Carpets of green on the rolling mountains and the rivers at the base that meander through them.