Tobogganning at Mt. Buller

I’m still too incessantly busy to piece together a proper travel post, but pictures and some smaller details would have to suffice.

So on the 6th September, a Sunday, I got up at 4.30am (had only 2 hours of sleep) to get ready for my Mt. Buller trip organised by my accommodation—we had to pay $20 each, which was considered to be very cheap for the transportation to get there. In fact, I had been expecting a couch, but at 5.30am as some of the residents from Walsh West and Walsh Main gathered outside (my housemate Gloria came as well), all we saw was just a van by my accommodation.. >_> I guess we get what we paid for.

Ah—and I went on a self-imposed trial using GPSToday in my phone to track my journey via GPS and later on, using date/time set-offs, imported GPS co-ordinates into my pictures, and I think it worked brilliantly. :)

There were 12 or 13 of us in total, and we’re all predominantly made up of Malaysians, Singaporeans, Chinese, or Mauritians. >_>

We stopped at a petrol station for a toilet break somewhere at Euroa, wherever that is. Even though the petrol station’s outlook was similar to Malaysia’s, I thought the interior was better presented, larger, and definitely way better and cleaner toilets.

When we’re on higher altitudes, the scenery outside of our van’s window changed rapidly too. This pic was taken at Gooram, Victoria.

Ahh pretty landscapes.

We were stopped at Merrijig, with only one reason..

..’cause our driver-cum-staff of Rooms was caught speeding 10kmph above the speed limit by the police wtf. When the policeman asked how many tickets she had gotten, she told him “None” and he replied, “By your display of driving, I was surprised that this didn’t happen earlier” hahahaha wtf. And ‘cause she just graduated, she was supposed to have an Australian driver’s license but she didn’t have it and I think she was fined for it too wtf. It was $120 or something for the speeding ticket.

We also took about 4 hours to reach as we had longer-than-expected stops—such as when my housemate, Gloria, had to puke when she felt queasy, and Jessie being caught speeding by the policeman wtf—when it should normally take 3 hours and 30 minutes or less.

When we finally paid the entrance fee to get in (Jessie paid it anyway), I was initially surprised that it wasn’t that cold when we stopped at the car park, until a shuttle bus brought us right up to the snowy area 10 minutes away and I regretted what I said on the spot wtf.

After going to the toilet and purchased a sightseeing chair-lift pass for $21, Jessie, Karmini (from Mauritius) and I went on exploring on our own, while the rest went skiing or snowboarding.

This was my first experience with snow and a temperature of 0 degree Celcius, and um.. it was okay I suppose, apart from it being deathly cold especially when the wind blows. That, plus my nose kept leaking liquid all the time WTF.

At the Blue Bullet station. We were also stopped multiple times when we tried to get on the chair-lift at other stations ‘cause our passes only limited us to two stations. =/

Me standing in snow. I also have to mention that I haphazardly used a shoe glue to glue a part of my shoes that were peeling off together, and it seemed to hold on pretty well despite it being done very crudely.

Jessie and Karmini.

It was also my first time photographing snow, so apart from having to deal with freezing temps, I had a problem with my pictures overexposing too much after reading and following some articles online as my pre-photography research wtf.

Another scene of Mt. Buller.

Snow was actually melting, so we can also see graveled dirt, etc. And it was pretty cloudy that day and was forecast to rain in the afternoon—but thank god it was just very light showers.

Bollywood-ing among the trees.

It’s also worth noting that my fingers, despite being wrapped in Ethan’s insulated gloves, still felt the extreme chill—so did my toes.

A weird structure.

Me imitating said weird structure.

Karmini fell down, and Jessie had to lift her up. Karmini was fairly talkative and I actually had a fair bit of insight into the Mauritian life and their languages—apparently they speak English and French, and a fusion between the two called the Mauritian Creole. Fascinating. But to my untrained ears, the Creole doesn’t sound like French at all, except for certain common words that they do use like “avec”, “vous”, etc.

We walked a little out of the way here for our own private place to toboggan. We also had to go back all the way to the car park to grab a toboggan board from the van (instead of renting it).

A snowman with the face of :/.

I was initially a little afraid ‘cause I have no prior experience and was afraid of heights, but it ended up pretty fun! There was only 0 skillz involved so if I can pull it off, so can you wtf.

Me about to reach the foot of our small ‘hill’.

Hahaha Karmini’s face is priceless here—I was seconds away from being collided by her as she went all the way down uncontrollably.

Some pretty rad snowmen we found in front of someone’s house/flat—the snowman on the right of this pic even had headphones on hahaha.

The kids who found us outside of their home (who were the ones who made the snowmen along with their dad) posed for us for a pic. A lady came out and Karmini asked, “Do you mind if we take a picture of your kids?” and the lady nonchalantly replied, “Sure”.

We went to a public restaurant/canteen sorta place and ate our meals we’ve packed from home. My pair of toasted bread wasn’t enough for me, along with an apple, but Jessie and Karmini offered me their sardine.

A jumping pic.

From Horse Hill station which was near our car park—after tobogganing at a fairly mild area (that was mainly reserved for kids and their parents I assume, judging by the vast amount of people from the aforementioned category), we returned to the car park to stash away the toboggan boards as we weren’t allowed on the chair-lift if we brought them.

From no snow to a little more snow..

..to completely covered with blindingly white snow.

Lying down on snow.

A mini-snowman the three of us constructed.

The three of us with our snowman. My transition lenses were completely dark—for the first time since I’ve begun wearing it a few months ago—which goes to show how high the level of UV rays were about 1500m above sea level. When I took off my glasses just to see how it’ll look like without said UV protection, everything was so bright and white.. >_>

Karmini.

Me attempting to wrest the sun away.

At a fairly high peak of the mountain.

It’s hard to capture what we saw appropriately, but the sun looked like a small moon from where we were.

A weird apparatus that people place in between their groin to be carried upwards wtf.

Returning to the Horse Hill station.

Aboard a chair-lift at the Horse Hill station.

We went on another round on the chair-lift again as it was soothingly relaxing to just sit there and take in the surroundings. Not to mention that we wanted to maximise our usage of the pass, having paid $21 for it wtf.

We were up at the higher part of Horse Hill again, before going down.

And this just in—Jessie sent me our group photo via e-mail.

We were supposed to leave at 4pm, but other people arrived quite late to the car park, and we finally left only at about 4.30pm or so. On the way home, I ate my Malaysian Indian neighbour’s (forgot her name.. sorry!) bread and tuna (which was laced with curry powder, yum)—she offered them to us as she couldn’t finish it. That was pretty sufficient enough to double up as dinner.

In fact, throughout the day in the car, I was sleeping a lot—too much, probably—that I felt pretty tired and lethargic by the time we got home at about 8.30pm+.

This is a poorly written travelogue, but forgive me as my writing creativity is being drained by the amount of studies and research papers and a major assignment that I’ve to do right now.

Edit: A map pulling all pictures from my Flickr set.

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