The Day When Everything Went Wrong...well almost

I was quite pumped up at 5am today when I made sandwich, grabbed my Uncle Toby bars, and headed to Ellery Cresent. Since a couple to days back, I imagined this day to be filled with wonderful memories of a smooth hike up the tallest peak in Australia, peeing in Australia’s highest public toilet, taking a group picture up the summit, and gazing at my ‘I climbed Mt Kosciuszko’ cert while enjoying McD on the way back to Canberra.

Well, God has its plan. It turned out to be nothing as I had pictured.

The journey was fine. The bus driver played Rabbit-Proof Fence, an multiple award-winning Australian movie. Not too boring.

We stopped in Cooma for breakfast. Didn't stop in McD again on the way back as originally planned since everyone just wanted to go home straight away.

Just before arriving at Thredbo, we were greeted by a nice scenery.

Then, Glen our tour guide introduced himself, along with the bad news: the wind was too strong (about 134km/hr) that it would be too dangerous to hike up Mt Kosciuszko.

So we had to branch out from the main route into a safer one which doesn't lead us to the toilet and peak. Not sure if it has better scenery but one thing for sure: bye-bye to Australia's highest summit and public toilet.

As we were taking the chair lift up from Thredbo, the wind was so strong that I thought the chair was about to give way. A couple of hours later, the chair lift system was shut temporarily because of the weather and we had to go down via a 4-wheel drive. Boy, that certainly felt a lot safer!

While hiking, the sudden strong gust almost blew me away, seriously. Some of us had to had to resort to squatting and walking at the same time.

Gust and the minus one degree temperature probably caused this man's leg cram. We started to lose with touch our hands and our ears began to hurt. Instead of enjoying the walk, we were merely surviving it. One of the Chinese students up ahead even asked Glen for help when the wind blew his glasses away.

It was amazing how this Italian dude survived with just his three-quarter pants. He later changed into his jeans before we departed home but still, he was up the mountain with a portion of his leg exposed all the time.And Glen, our tour guide in red still had the mood to explain about species of flora up the mountain when some of his words got lost in the wind if you know what I mean. The best thing was this fairly old hiker didn't seem to be shaken much by the strong wind, admirable indeed.

Understandably, it wasn't long before Glen received a call from the control centre, asking us to turn back. Apparently, some trees ahead of us were falling down because of the wind.

So I bid goodbye to the last scenery which somehow reminded me of LOTR and made a U-turn.

We were compensated with a free bobsled ride.

Going up sucks. It hurts your backbone but the journey down was awesome.

Lots have gone wrong today but thanks to this trip, I got to take a picture with these cute baby bear sculptures, know some people like Min Poh better and befriended a few Chinese, 2 Italians, and 2 Filipinos, one of which happens to know Jason, Kai Xun, Su Yin, and Dianne =p

And despite the wind, the numb fingers could still snap me a few nice shots up there. So with $70 bucks I paid, I ended up with a lot more weird adventures than I thought.

Oh, have I mentioned about this guy in green jacket with his precious teddy bear (lets call him G)? As we started to alight the bus in Thredbo, I heard someone screaming at the top of his voice. I thought perhaps there was an accident along the road but all of my tour-mates were staring at G. He looked just fine to me. No sign of anger. Ann Bell looked at me in confusion,wondering what just happened. I threw the same look back at her since I couldn't even make up what G said when he was screaming. "Was that actually mandarin?" I thought.

Just a few seconds later, G screamed again. Awkward silent followed and the bus driver had had enough. He went and talked to G. Guess he must've said, "Hey, no screaming in the bus boy". Couldn't help myself, I then asked Alex Fong what happened. According to Alex, the guy sitting beside G touched his teddy bear, thus agitated him. Wow...talk about overreacting.

Oh well, here's to a day I'll never forget. Cheers.