Driving from the Coast

Australia is a big country. Sometimes you can drive for hours and feel like you've been driving in big circles around the same tree. The Pilliga scrub is like that, as I have mentioned earlier.

Sometimes, however, it's not like that.

Last year we drove from Pambula on the New South Wales south coast, to Canberra via Bombala. It's a road I've never driven before, but well worth it. Once you leave the coast it's a climb up the Great Dividing Range through temperate rainforest, with tall eucalyptus trees and tree ferns. We didn't have time to stop, but we got some half decent photos from the car. This forest has seen some savage fires over the last 10 years and is just starting to recover, but you can kind of see what it's supposed to look like.

Once you get to the top of the range it all changes. The trees don't thin out as much as stop as you cross the watershed. This is the Monaro Plains, and you don't need to be told that this side of the mountains gets less rain than the other side.

It looks empty, and feels it too. Which makes it more surprising that the white vehicle on the road ahead is a school bus.