14 October 2012 - Albury All Seasons Tourist Park, Lavington, New South Wales

The weather did not disappoint this morning, and so we remained on track with our plans, away from the city before 9 am, initially heading back toward the Hume dam on the road travelled yesterday. Again we crossed the bridge below the dam, passed the entrance to the migrant centre, then turned eastwards onto the Murray Valley Highway, following the shore of the southern arm of the lake.

We paused at Tallangatta to learn that this small township of just 950 folk, originally established in the 1870s as a rail gateway to the Mitta and Murray valleys, was relocated to this spot beside the lake between 1952 and 1954. It was not until the expansion of the weir and the reservoir area that the original town was threatened with submersion, although uncertainty had reigned ever since the weir was mooted back in the 1920s. The old town across the lake, just eight kilometres west, is barely discernable today although it was more so during the drought years when the original streets rose out of the falling lake levels.

Soon the valley carved out by the Mitta Mitta River veered south and left us with the lower western reaches of the Snowy Country to climb over. A wonderful looking rail trail stretches from Bonegilla to Tallangetta, and from there evidence of a past railroad remains but undeveloped as yet for tourist traffic. The Cudgewa rail line once wound up over the hills to Shelley, the highest rail station in Victoria at 781 metres ASL. We walked into one of the several trestle bridges remaining although barricaded off for safety reasons and imagined the cost of restoring this to current safety levels would make the restoration of the rail as a cycle trail uneconomic. Pity really.

We descended into one valley after another, the Cudgewa and the Corryong, both spectacular rural lands, so reminiscent of those through New Zealand’s King Country. We paused in Corryong at the most eastern extent of the Murray Valley Highway and walked about this centre which hosts the annual Man from Snowy River Bush Festival. Corryong is famous as the final resting place of Jack Riley who is considered to be the hero of Banjo Patterson’s poem The Man from Snowy River, and plays on this fact (or fiction) for all it is worth. The two sculptures each end of the town celebrate the Man and he is again depicted with a more impressive sculpture on the town green.

We walked up and down the town, naturally very quiet on a Sunday afternoon. It is a more than adequate service centre for those who choose to live in this relatively isolated area, however many still choose to drive the one hundred and twenty odd kilometres to Albury-Wodonga from time to time. The delightful chap in the Information Centre confessed to doing so once a fortnight and he is no doubt pretty typical of many. Corryong does have a population of just over 1,200 so we should not have been entirely surprised.

From here we drove on over the Towong Gap at 450 metres ASL and down to the state border, crossing the bridge over the Murray previously visited when we travelled the Alpine Way from Jindabyne at the end of April this year. We parked beside the river and ate our lunch. The river seemed more impressive than when we were last there, fast  flowing with the first of the spring melt and the rainfall of a couple of days ago.

The far off snowy caps of Mount Kosciusko

We returned to Victoria via a loop travelled back then, and followed the Murray River downstream through the valley that was alternatively narrow and slightly less so.  The countryside was quite beautiful; the lush green farms populated by dry stock with a few canola crops to break the monotony. Looking back to the east we were able to see the snowy tops of Mount Kosciusko or at least that part not covered in cloud. It was indeed a sight to behold.

There are several reserves along the river offering recreational areas; we called into the Clarke Lagoon reserve which was not as impressive as other lagoon areas we saw as we proceeded on downstream. We passed Pine Mountain, a gigantic rock monolith reputedly one and a half times as large as Uluru, standing 1,062 metres ASL and then pulled into the Mount Lawson State Park and walked a short part of the Flaggy Creek Walk, just to the top of the ridge from where we could look up and down the valley. Here the Murray River had morphed into the northern arm of Lake Hume, here much shallower and revealing the submerged trees, many still alive and obviously the residue of the drought times. The road winds along the southern shore of this arm for well over fifty kilometres, emphasising how extensive this reservoir is. We finally reached the Bethanga bridge at Bellbridge, a 750 metre long steel truss bridge built in 1930. It is quite impressive.

As we had approached the end of the lake we saw great palls of dense black smoke rising however were unable to identify exactly where it was coming from. I thought that perhaps a powerboat had caught fire, or even a car. It did not seem to be a bush fire. Much later we learned a fire had broken out in a high voltage transformer at the power station. More than one hundred and forty people were evacuated from the nearby caravan park and the Lake Hume Resort which was hosting a wedding. We missed the action!

Once back across into New South Wales, we headed back to camp. We had spent about seven and a half hours covering this delightful loop of about three hundred and ten kilometres, travelling in an anti-clockwise fashion. To travel up or down river was a quandary, but in retrospect we would suggest two trips, one each way, that way optimising all viewing options.

The sun was still shining and the temperatures had climbed to a pleasant 20 degrees; it looks like we might be in for a warmer week.