Mount Kosciuszko – Wagga Wagga

Got up early as it started to warm up early. Decided we needed to get to Albury/Wodonga to get the car looked at.

We were surprised how dry the hills were. We know its alpine country and is dry generally, but to see all the dead trees in large sections is strange and not what you’d expect.

Stopped at the amazing Murray 1 Hydropower Station. You can see through the glass that there are 10 turbines visible from the road. Each turbine is capable of generating enough power to run 85,000 houses! They don’t have them all running at once, but its still an amazing facility.

Passed Murray 2 Hydro on the way down the bottom of the hill. Apparently they take the opportunity to put the water through another hydro system on the way down before returning it to the Murray/Darling system for irrigation.

We headed to Albury/Wodonga and found a mechanic to have a look at the van. He said he couldn’t help with diesel’s and we should go to this other guy. We headed to his recommended place to find they didn’t do common rail diesels. He gave us a name of a guy in Wagga Wagga who was someone who could do fuel injectors. We decided we didn’t want to drive 120kms in the wrong direction and also with the van appearing to be so sick, so we went to Ford first. We asked for an appointment but they couldn’t see us till Thursday or Friday so they called ahead to Wagga and got us in for 8am the next morning.

We drove 60-70kms/hr to limit the black smoke pouring out the van. Found a place to sleep but it was terribly hot. It just didn’t appear to have cooled down between the day and the night temperature by more than a few degrees. Needless to say we didn’t get any sleep.