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Here is the first of the promised travel stories about our trip over to Canberra, through the Alpine and Kusciuszko National Parks of Australia.

We set off from Melbourne and headed through the gravel and burnt out bits to Jamieson, the details and photos can be found in the previous post. A few days later, we decided to head to Mount Buffalo and see what was up there.

We got to the top and discovered lake Catani.

A beautiful place, with a really good camp ground next to it. There are heated showers and barbecues as well as a freshwater lake! It was alleged that there were some trout in the lake, and as all the signs on the shower doors said that it was hardly worth bothering with them, I went the next day to buy some fly-fishing equipment, and a fishing license.

Licenses in Victoria are bloody cheap, being about $10 for a month. Fishing equipment (as the world over) was less so, costing me about $250 for the most basic rig and a few flies.

However, when we got back up the mountain in the evening, I decided I would try a few casts. Linda has never been fishing with me, in fact, as we met at university when I had neither the time or the money to go fishing, I have only actually been once since I have known her.

She knows very little about fly fishing, so I prepared her for the worst. “Pretty much, what I’m doing is attempting to imitate the emerging flies on the surface” I said “I probably won’t catch anything, though, but that’s not the point. It’s relaxing and that.” Because you will NEVER catch a fish on cue.

However, on only the second cast, a fish swallowed my fly and I managed to strike properly, setting the hook. Easy! I landed a pretty nice brown trout. Linda, I would think, now suspects that fly-fishing is easy…

At Lake Catani I suspect there have been very few flies cast at these waters, and the fish hit everything you send out (when they are rising) as if it is the best meal they’ve ever seen. Perhaps this is due to the Aussie fixation on throwing huge lures out with spinning rods? Perhaps it is because the water is hardly ever fished? I don’t know, but the sport is fun.

The area around the lake is really nice too, being on a high plateau near Mount Buffalo’s summit. The lake is overlooked by an Obelisk.

The day after the fishing evening, we climbed up to the obelisk.

This strange geological anomaly provides an excellent view over the lake and surrounding alps. However, the steps up it are now closed “for health and safety reasons.” A bit of a shame, but when one looks at the precarious nature of the great stones berth, it is not hard to see why! It is really mind boggling exactly how the rock remains in place.

On the way up there, we saw the famous, and most shy, liar bird. It looks not unlike a pheasant with a curly tail, and led the way up to the obelisk on foot!

After this we climbed to the top of mount buffalo (mostly in the car) and the view was phenomenal! I’ll put those pictures up in my next post.

There is a ski centre near the top, which had been completely burnt out.

The next day I spent fishing, and as if to prove my point that it isn’t easy, lost most of the ‘takes’ my fly received, though it was a really nice and tranquil place to throw out a fly line in any case. Or, rather, it was, until the evening. While chatting to a a couple from Queensland, a helicopter came over and stole some of my water!

Actually, it was good to see these things in action, having watched them on the news etc. It is a pretty good bit of flying! Linda took this photo, its a fairly good action shot I reckon. Actually, we managed to capture it on video, and I’ll post it up here for those of you who know how much fun hovering a helicopter 4 metres above water is…

It is funny how often we manage to be in “the right place at the right time” to see these things! It is also interesting how things like this make parts of the trip really memorable. The day would otherwise have been uneventful, until this happened, and it cheered us all right up.

That is all for now, but if anyone gets the chance to visit mount buffalo, I’d say go for it. Apparently the skiing is good (for Australia) as well. Because we went after the recent fires, there were no fees to get in (bonus) but many paths were closed (not so good). This also meant that I had exclusive access to fish the lake- which is excellent sport as I said. If you have a fly rod, get up to lake Catani, you won’t regret it (but take some waders as the water is hard to access in many spots).

By the way, we’ve got hundreds more photos and videos which I’m uploading somewhere else. I’ll put a link onto this site soon to the full size images that are on there. This saves my bandwidth, which is expensive, or you could help out in the usual fashion.

Until next time…