A White Christmas In Australia

For the past 4 days, we've been camping at Mount Buffalo with Harold and Angie. For those who are as unschooled in Australian geography as I, Mount Buffalo is about 4 hours Northeast of Melbourne. It's one of the highest mountains in Oz, which sounds impressive but actually is not. This country is known for a lot of things, but tall mountains are not one of them.

It was a beautiful drive up there, and it was an interesting contrast to the long drives I'm used to in America. On the east coast, for example, the longest you'll go without passing a city or town on I-95 is about 20 minutes. Not here. To get to Mount Buffalo we took the Hume highway which runs from Melbourne to Sydney (a 12 hour drive). There is almost nothing in between. Every hour or so you might pass a tiny little town, but that's about it. Nothing but huge expanses of flat, dry land. It was pretty impressive.

On the way to Mt. Buffalo we had a bit of a surprise. Fiona and I were tooling along in the Civic we borrowed from Harold and Angie when all of a sudden Fiona hit the brakes hard and veered over to the shoulder of the road. As the car slowed down she said, "OK, don't make any sudden moves, but there's a spider in the car. When I stop you're going to have to get out of the car slowly."

Yeah right. You can imagine my reaction after reading stuff like this for years:

As soon as Fiona said the word "spider" I had the door open and one foot on the ground. In my haste I forgot to undo my seat belt, so my first attempt at evacuation almost resulted in decapitation.

When the car came to a halt, Fiona sprang to action and killed it with a 400 page, textbook-like map of Victoria called a "Melways". I stood by and tried not to scream like a little girl.

With that behind us, we headed up to the summit of Mt. Buffalo. It took about an hour to get from the bottom to the top because of all the twisty roads, and when we finally reached the campsite it was about 15 degrees colder than it was at the base.

Harold and Angie had warned us that it would be cold, but I had no idea it would be as cold as it was. The next day it actually snowed. Seriously. Harold and I had gone for a hike while Fiona and Angie stayed in the hammocks and read. As I was making my way back to the site (Harold had stopped to talk to some people), I felt the first flakes fall. I couldn't believe it. By the time I got to our campsite Fiona and Angie were scrambling out of the hammocks trying to get everything under the tarp.

So it looks like I got my White Christmas after all. I had almost forgotten how it felt to freeze your ass off for days at a time. Now I remember, but I'm looking forward to forgetting again.

Posted by SmooveJ Zao on December 30, 2004 at 08:15 PM in Australia | Permalink