Kosciuszko National Park

Michael and I took a road trip down to Kosciuszko National Park. Despite lots of little things going wrong, we had some good highlights. 

We stayed at the Yarrangobilly Caves House, which was comfortable. The only issue was that we didn't realize they don't have any food for sale there. They have a beautiful kitchen where you can cook, but we just weren't expecting there to be no food. The ranger station sells some food, but they were closed when we got there. Luckily, we had some food with us that we were planning to cook while camping on the way back, so we had a no-frills cous cous and canned tuna dinner. We had also bought a box passionfruit at a fruit stand at a rest stop, so we ate a bunch of those. So much passionfruit. 

The caves house is also a short hike from a "thermal pool", which turned out not to be very warm. We went for a swim anyway, since it was warm out, but it was far from the steaming experience we had seen in the photos. Evenings in the caves house are quiet, since there are no TVs, no internet service, and no restaurant or bar. It's a good place to knit, read, or play a boardgame, and go to bed early.

Another issue we didn't realize beforehand was that the caves house is still a 2 hour drive from Mt. Kosciuszko, which affected how much time we had there. We took the ski/mountain bike chair lift up at Thredbo and then did the four hour roundtrip hike to Australia's highest summit in the cold wind and pouring rain. To our surprise, there was still some snow towards the top, and one part of the trail was even covered with it (this is at the height of summer). 
We took a quick picture at the top before turning around as quickly as possible. We were surrounded by beautiful alpine meadows, but at most times our visibility was only maybe 10 meters in front of us. At one point when we were on our way back down, the clouds lifted briefly in the valley we were in, only to taunt us. 

We did see lots of wonderful wildlife in the park. Michael can now be referred to as the platypus whisperer, since he has now seen them at three separate locations across Australia: Yungaburra, Lake St Clair, and most recently in the Yarangobilly River. Here is a short video:

We also saw numerous kangaroos and wallabies, and at one point a family of five blocked our trail so they could eat breakfast. We saw lots of familiar birds, and saw our first gang-gang cockatoo. We didn't spot any wombats, but we did see some infamous square poop left by Harley, the caves' resident wombat. We tried to peek into his burrow, but couldn't see anything.

Finally, we got to tour North Glory Cave and Jersey Cave at Yarrangobilly, Jersey having the more spectacular formations of the two. There's nothing like geological time to make you feel insignificant in a good way. 

The original plan was for us to drive back through Canberra and camp there for the night on the way back. Since we decided to do two cave tours, we left later than we originally thought we would. That was no big deal except that we realized a few hours into the drive, we had not been driving directly towards Canberra. We had thought it was the same direction as Sydney, but found (when we finally had phone service) that we had travelled two hours out of the way. This was disappointing, but I made the executive decision that it wasn't worth it to go backwards to Canberra, since we wouldn't have much time to do anything there anyway, and we came home early. Michael didn't get the camping trip he wanted, so I owe him one.