Cooma Coffee Break

         Yet another rainy day. Joan running in the rain along Burley Griffin Lake, which is at the heart of Canberra, where we spent yesterday visiting a few of the capital’s main attractions: the Botanical Gardens, where we encountered a lethargic kangaroo, which was more concerned with scratching itself than bothering to take notice of us;

 On to the National Art Gallery, which had a wonderful collection of aboriginal art: the War Memorial Museum, which is far superior to the Imperial War Museum in London; and finally to the top of Mount Ainslie, which provides a huge panorama all around Canberra.

         We left Canberra at about 9.15 am and set off  on a drive of a couple of hundred kilometers to Thredbo in the Snowy Mountains. “We’ll stop and have breakfast on the way,” we said.

         The place for the breakfast break was Coomba, a small town that was the epicenter (yes, I like that word) of the construction of the huge hydroelectric scheme that now goes under the name of SnowyHydro. It was a huge scheme that took 25 years or so to complete and it involved over 100,000 workers who descended on this tiny town from some 30 countries. Now the town prides itself on how it has absorbed these various ethnic groups.

         On the way into town we stopped at SnowyHydro’s Visitors’ Centre and saw a film on the construction interwoven with a pitch as to how green the company was (we guess it was privatized at some point) and how ready they were to supply peak electricity to Australia and provide irrigation to the farmers and ‘renewable’ power to the factories.

         We parked on the main street, walked up one side, crossed the street, and had two large flat white coffees and two muffins. And then back down the other side. 

         The flags of the 30 odd countries from which the construction workers came are on display, and there was also a whole line of mosaics that highlighted aspects of the town’s history.

 Then on to Thredbo, one of Australia’s best ski areas,…where a disaster occurred in 1997 when a landslip destroyed the village and 14 people were killed. We braved the possibility of rain to try to get in our daily 10 km of walking.