Cool mornings, condensation on the tent, but is all that crap really ours?

We are at Lakes Entrance, a rather bland East Gippsland (Victoria) seaside town, thronged with the multicultural masses of Melbourne, as well as the usual army of grey nomads (including us!).

Lakes Entrance is on the north side of one of the arms of the group of waterways lying just off the Australian version of Ninety Mile Beach. It's a bit built up around the town, but there are plenty of natural areas left along the other arms. The network of waterways is connected to the sea through an artificial channel (hence the name of the town "Lake's Entrance") It's a bit like Southport's (Gold Coast) Seaway.



The entrance to the Gippsland Lakes from high up on the Princes Highway.

As this coast is on one side of Bass Strait, the entrance has a fearsome reputation when the weather gets nasty and the tide is ebbing. We reached the entrance this morning along a sandy footpath through the coastal Banksia scrub, full of honeyeaters and whipbirds, and it was ideal for going either in or out.

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Contented pelicans on the Cunninhame arm of the Gippsland Lakes

There was hardly a breath of wind out in Bass Strait and there was only a lazy metre of swell breaking on the beach on either side of the channel. There was just a bit of turbulence through the channel, although admittedly the current was pretty strong.



Lake's Entrance as the tide flows strongly in

We are at 38o South now, so the nights are getting cooler and the mornings, especially when the sky is clear, have been pretty nippy. Just to confirm the latitude, we saw a couple of fur seals hunting for fish at the entrance to the lakes.

We are now only 300 odd kilometres from the outskirts of Melbourne. It would only take 4 days to bike in if we went straight along the Prince's Highway, but we have been getting off it as much as we can. From the last town in NSW (Eden), the traffic has been quite light, as the highway has passed through largely unpopulated state forests and national parks.

Victoria has a number of good cycle trails along disused rail corridors, so we joined one of them at Orbost, a small town on the banks of the (once) mighty Snowy River - the East Gippsland Rail Trail. It was a bit bumpy, but nice and flat and passed a number of old timber trestle bridges built for the original railway.



The East Gippsland Rail (Cycle) Trail



O'Grady's wooden trestle bridge on the rail trail

Strangely, we only saw one either cyclist in 40 km of cycle trail, despite it being a long weekend. Perhaps everyone was down at the beach. It certainly seemed that way when we arrived at Lakes Entrance! We also saw quite a few wallabies and more sadly, a dead wombat - one of a few we have seen by the roadside. But how did a wombat get killed on a cycle trail?

The Snowy River down at Orbost is only a shadow of its former self. It's a reminder of the complexity of water issues here in Australia. The river rises high in the Australian Alps and passes through mostly wilderness on its route through to the sea at Marlo.

In the 1950s, the Snowy River hydro scheme, at the time considered an engineering marvel, tamed the upper river and diverted over 95% of the flow at the Jindabyne dam through to the west side of the Great Divide. Most of this is used by irrigators in the same way as the Murray-Darling largely gets used up before it even catches sight of the sea.

The once mighty Snowy rarely flows strongly enough to break through to Bass Strait these days and when it does, it allows salt water to flow up river for 30 km, changing the riverine ecosystem and preventing any more river water from being used for irrigation. Victorians are trying to get at least a quarter of the upper Snowy flow down in its age old direction.



A shadow of its former self, the Snowy reaches the end of its course towards the ocean.