Lakes Entrance
A five hour bus ride from Melbourne on the Victoria Coast one can find the Great Lakes National Park. The "lakes" are a series of brackish lagoons protected by sand dunes going far inland providing plenty of space for water sports, swimming, lake cruising etc.
The main town in the national park is Lakes Entrance, so named because it is situated where the lakes meet the ocean, making for some very nice scenery. Unfortunately that is just about all that Lakes Entrance had to offer to two travelers on a limited time schedule. The Esplanade plays host to lots of ugly motels and motor parks, there's just one backpackers, the Riviera YHA. YHA ho
stels are generally clean and well run, but can be very expensive and are usually large establishments with a very impersonal feel. The Riviera lived up to the YHA reputation, being expensive, having a surly manager and on top of that the room we stayed in wasn't exactly the sort you expect from YHA; the decor was very dated (late 70s/early 80s) and the bedding didn't look quite clean. We had no option but to stay the night since our bus arrived in Lakes Entrance at 23:30 and none of the caravan parks we contacted would let us show up so late.
In the morning we ran away from the hostel as fast as we could to the first caravan park we found - the Main Lakes Entrance Caravan Park. The on site vans looked like they were lived in permanently rather than being holiday abodes, and the camp kitchen left a little to be desired, but at least it was cheap ($19 a night for two people) and our tent was pitched in a quiet corner under some shady willow trees.
As I said before there isn't much to Lakes Entrance besides the scenery, and with the rain clouds that blew in on our first day at the Lakes we didn't get to enjoy that either! The Great Lakes park is definitely an area that needs to be explored in a car to get the most out of it - all that we saw was Cunninghame Arm, the sand spit that forms the mouth of the lagoon; and the aforementioned Lakes Entrance esplanade with its motels and overpriced tourist-oriented shops.
Its a pity that our first experience "solo" in Oz was a bit of a lame duck, but as they say, you live and you learn. We are now making sure there's plenty to be done within easy walking distance or with decent public transport connections before we make a stop on our journey along the east coast of Australia.
P.S. The first picture is a blurry shot from my mobile of a large spider that made its home in one of the public phones in Lakes Entrance. Its snacking on a moth!
Cooma
We're traveling up the Eastern Seaboard with a bus company called Premier Motors - they have a backpacker's pass that for £336 takes you from Melbourne to Cairns with as many stops as you like along the way. The only catch is that the bus routes go from one state capital to the other, so they travel overnight. If you want to stop somewhere along the way then you'll probably get there in the very wee hours of the morning. This is just what happened to us en route to Cooma in the Snowy Mountains - we were dropped off in Eden at 3:00am, and our connecting bus to Cooma wasn't till 7:00am. All that standing around on a cold bus stop has given me a small insight into what it must be like for the homeless - sleeping on a cold bench, waking from your half sleep with every noise, a cool wind blowing… But the four hours eventually wound away, we got onto the warm bus and slept all the way to our destination!
Cooma is the most affordable town in the Snowies, the other small towns are skiing resorts, so prices are much higher than normal, and there isn't much life outside of the ski season. Getting to places like Thredbo isn't easy by bus either - the only way to get there is by hopping onto a school bus for $40 each way! That was enough to rule out any further exploring of the Snowies for us, instead we used our one full day in Cooma to take a walk through the bush.
The informative brochure provided by the Visitors Centre says that along the walk you can occasionally see several Australian natives like the Gippsland Monitor Lizards and the Echidna. The rarity of the sightings spurred us on to keep our eyes peeled for the elusive wildlife but all we saw were Cockatoos, and after camping for a few days we had quite grown over the novelty of the raucous the birds make! While on this walk we got first hand experience of how disorienting the Australian bush can be - the reserve we were walking in had plenty of small paths shooting off from the main tracks and somewhere along the way we took a wrong turn. It took us about 15 minutes to realize that the path we were on was taking us in the wrong direction. We tried to backtrack and got even more lost! After another half hour of retracing our steps and playing bush ranger we managed to find our footprints coming from a familiar fork in the road - we'd found our way back to the right footpath! From there it was easy to make our way to the entrance to the reserve and start to walk back to town for some refreshments…
… but that would have to wait as Justyna realized she'd lost her sweatshirt along the way! We figured we'd powerwalk to the farthest part of the path that we'd followed, if she had dropped the sweater before we got lost then we'd be sure to find it, but if it had fallen while we were lost, then it was gone forever! Not wanting to get lost again, this time without water, we employed all the route-finding tricks we've learnt from watching so much Born Survivor (Bear Grylls), we clearly marked every turn of the path that we made as we walked along the trail. The sweater was happily recovered - Justyna had dropped it at the end of the trail, where we decided to turn back and make our way home (and subsequently got lost). With all our trail markers along the way it was easygoing back into town for a much needed cold drink and some tucker!
All in all Cooma proved much friendlier that Lakes Entrance - the locals certainly were more helpful to a couple of tired travelers, and there was certainly much more going on around town to keep us entertained.
From the Snowy Mountains we caught a bus to Canberra, where we would be spending the Easter weekend.
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