lindoig - Tumblr blog

[lindoig]

My other blogs

I have created a separate blog for each of our trips and if you are interested, they can be found at lindoig.tumblr.com, lindoig1.tumblr.com, lindoig2.tumbler.com - and hopefully, there will be numerous more in the same series - lindoig3, lindoig4 and so on.  Naturally, the blogs all start at the bottom and each later posting appears further up. 

[lindoig]

Days 158 to 164

Well, we are home again so unless I get feedback that requires another post, this will be my final post to this blog and future blogs will be in separate streams.

We were in Bourke at my last post and on the Sunday, we drove a roughly triangular route down the Mitchell Highway to Byrock, then across country to Tarcoon and back to Bourke.  Byrock was a fascinating little place and we stopped in for a coldie at the very quaint old pub.  It was decorated with the usual things we see in quaint old pubs – cutsie bumper stickers, old-time mining and pastoral gadgetry, a wild boar’s head or two, a rash of locals’ and tourists’ bragging photos and of course an array of annotated caps, hats, bras and undies – even hard-hats hanging from the ceiling or tacked to the walls. What was different was most of the furniture.  It was locally collected and crafted mulga wood and it weighs a ton!  Quite beautiful and rustic (although I have sat on more bum-friendly concrete), but it takes about two beers to accumulate the energy required to move a chair away from the bar – maybe there was some method in their madness in furnishing the bar in such a manner!

Driving back on the remote roads was quite delightful and we saw quite a few birds and a couple of snakes along the way – and yet another blazing sunset as we drove the final few clicks back to camp.

Monday we broke camp and set off intending to stay at Cobar, but we were there by lunchtime so elected to keep on down the Kidman Way to Hillston where we had intended spending two nights – now it would be three.  We had stayed in Hillston a couple of times before and I enjoyed the birds and even caught yabbies there so wanted to try my luck again.  We spent a week or so there one Christmas and still need to explain to people why we choose places like Hillston, Casterton and Dunolly to hide out while the crowds are storming the beaches and major rivers in the hottest weather.

The birds were as interesting as usual and I caught enough yabbies for Happy Hour one night, but I didn’t have a lot of bait so only left the nets in one day.  On the Wednesday, we took the Monia Gap Road to Rankins Springs: another really interesting quaint little town with plenty of birds to watch and some somewhat extraordinary street art scattered around town. We added Rankins Springs and Byrock to our lengthening list of places to revisit.  We had lunch and watched the birds under some shady trees there and then drove up to Lake Cargelligo.  It seemed bigger than last time we visited, but maybe there were so many people and the noise of the traffic and speedboats meant that we didn’t have a proper look around then – even off-season, there were a lot of free-campers, but it was certainly more peaceful near the lake than last time.  We found a great birding place – a wetland only a kilometre or two from town and despite the intense heat, I spent an hour or two ticking off 20-odd species including over 20 spotted crakes: normally very reclusive birds that are usually very hard to spot!!

Next night, we stayed at Finley, just over the border in New South Wales.  We detoured a bit on the way, down to Griffith and then across to Leeton, Narrandera and through Jerilderie.  It was a very pleasant drive and allowed for some birding around the Finley lake on arrival, but it was all tinged with a modicum of regret that we were so close to the end of our trip.

We had arranged to have lunch with Karen in Nathalia and afternoon tea in Shepparton with Kate to help celebrate her 30th birthday, so we just moseyed along very slowly and caught up with both of them and enjoyed our visits, even if both were necessarily fairly short.

Our last night was in a pretty awful caravan park in Kilmore.  The sites were very small and hard to get into.  We had to park at an angle across the site with half the car across the roadway to stay connected.  At least that meant that coming home to a clean and comfortable house with all the comforts of home was a tad more acceptable than it might have been if the Kilmore park had been more luxurious.

On arrival back at Brooklyn where we have parked the van for the past few years, we found that the changes they had made in our absence meant we simply could not get our van in – and even had we managed that, we certainly could never have got it out again. Despite all the phone calls and negotiations we undertook when we were in the north-west, we had nowhere to park when we arrived home so there were a few frantic phone calls before we secured a spot in Burwood.  It is about 50% more expensive and 50% further away, but perhaps marginally easier to get in and out, certainly a little more secure, totally under cover and although we no longer have 24 x 7 access, I am sure we will manage quite successfully.  The biggest catastrophe was that whilst unloading heaps of stuff from the van into the car, the entrance step skidded away from under Heather and she crashed heavily (like a fairy?) and severely injured her right ankle.  She has been hobbling around with a stick all week as a result, but nothing is broken (apart from the step!) and she is healing slowly.  The step had slid away from under me a few minutes earlier and I had intended putting the rubber mat under it, but I got involved with other things and catastrophe struck.

What did we achieve along the way?  A thousand things, not least of which was a huge amount of pleasure and a wealth of knowledge about a wide range of things, a lot of which quite astounded us.  But in terms of specifics, we noted a few that we felt significant.  Some of them are:

We travelled almost 50,000kms

We completed visits to the four cardinal points of Australia (NEWS)

We also completed visits to the cardinal points of all States and mainland Territories except for the north of WA

We completed driving the entire length of Highway One – in Tasmania as well as the mainland

We also completed driving the entire length of the Savannah Way

We drove the Gibb River Road

We drove the entire length of the Stuart Highway

We drove the entire length of the Barkly Highway

We drove the entire length of the Great Northern Highway

We drove the entire length of numerous shorter roads/tracks, e.g., the Carpentaria and Tablelands Highways, the Tuwakam Track, etc.

We visited all of Tasmania's accessible islands

We saw over 400 bird species and identified probably hundreds of plant species

We spent 67 nights in our caravan in Tassie and 164 post that – and have now lived in our caravan for well over 1½ years in aggregate.

What were the highlights? I couldn’t even start to list them – so many and so varied that they can’t even be compared one against another. They would include our trips into the Tassie wilderness, around the Cobourg Peninsula and over the Bungle Bungles, probably our adventures on King and Flinders Islands, maybe places like Borroloola, Nallan Station and Marble Bar, our nights camped in gravel pits with a roaring campfire burning…..  The list goes on and that is without really stopping to review the trip in any analytical way.

What were the disappointments?  Not many, but two stand out.  The first was the broken axle that prevented us driving the Tanami and the second was that we had to come home – at least for a little time.

Finally, some statistics (for both components of our Ozzie Odyssey – Tassie and the Big Island) for anyone who might be interested.  If nobody else is interested in them, they are at least a record for me and I am interested.

We drove 7344 km in our car and 1498 in hired vehicles in Tassie – a total of 8842 km.  During that trip, we towed the caravan 2442 km and added another 2600 (+/-) in flights and cruises – over 11400 km all up.

On the Big Island, we drove 28472 km in our car, including 21320 towing the van, probably at least half of it on dirt.  We also added a further 4000 km (plus) on tours, flights and cruises (including the Cobourg Peninsula jaunt), making the whole trip almost 33000 km in total.

Combined, we drove almost 42000 km, including 23762 towing our mobile cubbyhouse, and nearly 7000 km in flights, cruises and tours.  At first glance, one might be tempted to suggest that we saw most of Australia during our travels, but when sketched on a map (Heather has it all set out in an app called Polarsteps), there are VAST virgin areas still to be explored.  We live in a huge country with so much to see, so much diversity, so much beauty and adventure, a thousand lifetimes would not be enough.

As for birds, we saw 126 species in Tassie, of which 23 were new ticks for us. On our longer trip, we identified 319 species (41 of which we had also seen in Tassie), including 78 new ticks for us.  That takes us to 404 species for the calendar year – that is 101 new ticks for us this year and our personal list (since we started recording in 2008) stands at 689 – plus a few Australian species that we have seen outside Australia, but not on Australian soil.  There are still so many still to see, including a few special ones that I would really love to set eyes on.  We were congratulated by the birding group we were with on Christmas and Cocos islands a little less than 3 years ago for reaching our personal ‘500′ milestone toward the end of that trip so we have identified a further 180 or so species in the last 3 years.

So, until I start my next blog………

Lindsay

[lindoig]

Mainly flowers and moss.

[lindoig]

A variety of pea flowers - but there are thousands more.

[lindoig]

Flowers, ant holes and lichen

[lindoig]

Sandstone moon, some grasses, some beasties, the Guilderton sandpit and morning rain.

[lindoig]

A selection of wildflowers.....

[lindoig]

Days 151 to 157

It is a week since I posted anything so this is an overdue update.

We have basically been running for home with some long days’ driving, almost all on bitumen, to get to where we can relax a little ready for the final leg home. We drove over 3500km from Kununurra to Bourke without unhitching the van and with few stops to admire the scenery, mainly because we have previously travelled almost all these roads before, almost half of them during our current trip - but also partly because it was so hot..

From the Barkly Homestead Roadhouse, we headed east with overnight stops in Cloncurry, Longreach, Windorah and Thargomindah before settling for a few days at one of our favourite camps: the Kidman Camp in Northy (local nickname for North Bourke). It is about 6 clicks from Bourke proper, but is a bit of an oasis in the desert, backing onto the Darling River and well isolated from Bourke’s notorious aboriginal problems.

Until we were about 100km from Northy, it was HOT all the way – low to mid-40s all day and only down to about 30 overnight.  It was uncomfortable outside the air-conditioned car and van so we had relatively few stops to look around the roadside environs.  That is not to say that there was nothing to see, but a lot of the time, we were driving through flat, dry plains with very little in the way of bushes or trees.  There were wooded areas of course, but they tended to be rather sparse and certainly too hot to explore for more than a few minutes at a time.

After Camooweal (where we had been a couple of months earlier), it was Mt Isa, ugly as always, and Cloncurry, both of which we have visited a couple of times or more on previous trips.  The Matilda Highway got us to outback Winton where we want to come back (at least to revisit the Bladensberg National Park) and on to Longreach.  We have never liked Longreach much, drowned as it has usually been with grey nomads having their all-day happy hours.  It wasn’t so bad this time and maybe we should return to check out its famed attractions, but it is expensive (filling our gas tank cost at least 50% more than anywhere else – but if there is nowhere else to go……!)

The next day (Tuesday) was more interesting, mostly on new roads for us.  It was in the mid-40s again all day so when we arrived at Stonehenge (in Queensland, not the UK), we decided to stop for a coldie at the quaint little pub there.  Chatting to the guy running the place was fascinating and led to us visiting the Information Centre across the road.  Stonehenge was one of three places where the Australian-invented OTH radar was set up – the others were Alice Springs and Laverton in WA.  OTH is ‘Over The Horizon’ and enables surveillance out to something like 6000km – enough to have seen Japan during WWII and it could have tracked MH370 if only it had been turned on at the time! It was able to detect some rocket launches in northern China and although it is not operational at present, it is likely to get increased usage for non-defence purposes in the future: border protection for example.  We spoke to one of the contractors who has worked on the project since its inception and it really was a most interesting story.  His wife runs the Information Centre and was also a mine of information as well as a great advocate for the region.  Definitely want to go back when it is a little cooler.

She had suggested that we call in at the Swanvale Jumpup lookout just off the road as we went south. Worth a visit with 30 or 40 km views to the north, west and south – and with a storm brewing in the middle of it all. We camped at Windorah and that is probably also worth another visit in cooler weather. Surprisingly, we got a little rain overnight, but with precious little temperature relief and it was as hot, windy and dusty as ever next morning.

We went on through Quilpie (not sure if we have visited it before – possibly, but we didn’t recognise anything there) and then to Thargomindah, including about 30km of gravel – wonderful names aren’t they?  This was all Channel Country but alas, I still never saw a Letterwing Kite – another good reason to go back again.  There were a few places around there that looked interesting – Eulo being one of them, on the way to Cunnamulla.  This whole area beckons for a more thorough exploration when the temperature is in the 20s rather than the 40s.  Then it was on to North Bourke for a few days’ relaxation before the final push for home. About 100km out of Bourke, the clouds started to build and the temperature dropped from 43 to 17 degrees within about 20 clicks.  It started to rain and we needed our raincoats on while setting up our camp. We got a bit more rain over the next couple of days, but not enough to make us change any of our plans.

One notable feature of the last few days was the number of emus we have seen. Most seem to be teenagers – not quite full-size, and obviously, many haven’t yet learned how to survive the motor car – and they can’t learn it now. Road kill has been horrendous – lots of kangaroos, but even more emus - hundreds of them. I am not sure that either species is quite endangered yet – I counted over 110 emus and 40 roos on the Northy Oval on Friday – and we must have seen many hundreds of each over the last 1000km.  I also saw more than 50 red-rumped parrots on the Oval as well as a few other species so it is a very popular avian retreat when footy is not being played on it.

We have booked 4 nights at the Kidman Camp and have used the time profitably so far.  We have done a lot of cleaning on the van – washed everything except the roof outside the van and we have even washed the floors inside and removed a few kilos of dust from all over the place.  We have done quite a bit of ‘business’ in preparation for arriving home and even caught up a little with our blogs.  I have been down to the river a few times and explored the birds along the roadside and around a nearby swamp.  The caravan park is teeming with birds, all enjoying the blossom in the many great trees throughout the park.

We caught the free bus into the Bourke Bowling Club for dinner on Friday night – one of the worst meals we have had on the trip and mine was not even what I ordered anyway!  We came home on the bus again and enjoyed our home-brewed tea and coffee and home-cooked fruit cake a lot more than the Club meal.

We are now almost to the end of our wonderful trip.  I am already looking forward to our next trip – and we have already compiled a list of about 8-10 roads we want to travel and places we want to visit or revisit. Life is so short and I regret that we have left it so long to really get out and make the most of our opportunities, particularly our time in our lovely mobile cubbyhouse.

Perhaps only one (or two) more posts to this blog – although I may put up a few more photos from the trip.

[lindoig]

Days 148 to 150

Thursday, we got back on the road again.  We loaded up the car with all the things we had salvaged from the van over the previous few days, topped up our fuel at a discount bowser we found out about last time we were in Kununurra (17 cents a litre cheaper about 5km out of town), collected our van with its nice new axle, adjusted the tyre pressures all the way around and headed for Timber Creek.

We were almost 100 km back over the border into the NT when we were flagged down by a young German couple with a flat tyre.  They had bought an old Jeep Cherokee from a dealer in Perth for their Australian travels, but each wheel has a security nut on it and the dealer hadn't given them the corresponding spanner to remove it.  We tried to help, but nothing in any of our boxes of gear fitted, so we lent them our sat phone to call the RACWA for help.  They were only basic roadside service customers so we are not sure what their exact entitlements were, but after about an hour on the phone with frequent dropouts and restarts, they gave up and decided that the guy would hitchhike the 126km back to Kununurra for help while his girlfriend stayed to guard the car.  I hope things worked out for them.  It was very hot, but it was near a station gate so I suggested that the car might be safer (and she would attract less attention) if they drove the car the 50 metres off the road so it looked like the farmer's car, rather than someone broken down and potentially vulnerable.  I asked them to email us how they got on, but haven't heard anything yet.

We had been on these roads not long ago and had already made most of the detours along the way so we just kept going, made good time and just fuelled up (both diesel and greasy comestibles) in Timber Creek and kept going to the Victoria River Roadhouse where we camped overnight.  This was well over 300 clicks for the day, a little surprising given our Good Samaritan hour or so with the German tourists and losing 90 minutes when we crossed the border into the NT.

Friday, we were up early enough, but enjoyed the air conditioner while we did an hour or so editing photos for our blogs before braving the heat and heading for Katherine.  We had spent more time in Katherine on both of our compulsory stays earlier in our trip, so apart from buying some lunch, we just kept going, intending to camp ar Mataranka (or the Roper River Stockcamp that we enjoyed so much last time).  As it turned out, we were there before mid-afternoon so just kept going and camped at the Hiway Roadhouse instead, where we stayed on our way back from Borroloola. Burketown and Camooweal a couple of months ago.  Did just over 500 clicks for the day - a big day for us this trip.

Now we had a choice: to return home via Alice Springs and perhaps detour around the Eyre Peninsula or the SA/Victorian coast, or to head east and return through outback Queensland and NSW.

As it turned out, we decided to do a bit of both.  On Saturday, we drove 350 kms south to Three Ways just short of Tennant Creek, then turned east on the Barkly Highway and did the 190 km along there to the Barkly Homestead Roadhouse where we camped on Saturday night.  It was an uneventful drive with few stops and not a lot to look at.  One interesting thing though is that there is still a lot of fuel reduction burning going on with huge columns of smoke, a lot of haze and a sniff of smoke in many places.  The fires seem to generate quite a few willy-willies and it has been interesting to watch the black swirls turn orange and back to black again as they laze their way across areas of blackened earth and unburned areas still red with natural dust.  Sometimes we have seen bands of red and black in the vertical swirling mass as different strata are drawn higher into the vortex.  When we arrived at the Roadhouse, a young guy came up to me and asked if we got caught in the wind.  He said they drove through an hour or two ahead of us and encountered winds so strong that he had trouble keeping his car on the road.  They stopped, but then couldn't get the car doors open because the wind was so strong it kept the doors from opening.  I am glad we didn’t get caught up in that: I'm not sure how our caravan or the stuff on our roof rack would have coped with it.

Not quite sure of the rest of our route home, but to avoid rough roads, it is probably Camooweal, Mt Isa, Cloncurry and Winton for a start.

[lindoig]

Days 146 and 147

After a more detailed assessment, the repair shop in Hall's Creek advised that they were unable to repair our van without ordering a new stub axle from Perth, causing a delay of about a further ten days or more.  Even then, there was nobody in Hall's Creek with the welding skills to effect a reliable repair, so they asked me to contact RACV again and see if we could get the van transported the extra 360km to Kununurra!!!  RACV agreed to this, but said that we were on our own after that.  I still think this was extraordinarily generous of them.  Our motel had cost them nearly $500 and I guess the two transfers of nearly 600km would have cost something approaching three grand, maybe more - more than 16 hours work plus the cost of driving a truck 1200km - not cheap!  So thanks RACV!

I arranged the repair with Metaland, the company in Kununurra that we used for some minor work when we were up here a couple of months ago and it was all set up to happen on Tuesday.

Once everything was arranged, Heather was pretty flat and decided to do some things in the room.  I was also flat, but needed to be doing something to get my mind off it all.  I went out to China Wall, six clicks out of town.  Interesting white quartz vein that apparently runs almost dead straight for something like 100 km.  It is less than a metre wide and stands up to 6 metres above ground and who knows how deep?  Made out of sizeable blocks, it stands starkly white against the surrounding red earth.  Yet another geological wonder.

I drove on to Old Hall's Creek, maybe 15km further out, and wandered around some of the historical markers there.  There is really only one substantive structure remaining, securely fenced off to protect it from vandals.  It was the original government office and was quite a big mud-brick building, sadly now in poor repair.  There were numerous other markers about where shops and other buildings had once been, and a relatively large structure marking the first place viable gold had been found in Western Australia.

Halfway back into town was Caroline Pool, unfortunately just Caroline at present - we need to wait for the wet for the Pool.  I walked quite a way along the Creek bed on both direction and did find a very small pool, but only saw two birds: a cormorant and a black kite.  (The brochure said it was a great birding location, but apparently it was a long weekend so very few birds were in attendance on Monday.  On the way back to town, I did see quite a lot of birds.  Nothing new, but a good variety and I had good views of several species a bit unusual to me.

We ate in the Motel restaurant, not cheap, but good food and substantial meals and retired to our room to read.

Tuesday, we were up a bit earlier than normal and packed up for the trip to Kununurra.  We bought some victuals from the bakery and drove through to Kununurra with only one stop for a few minutes at Doon Doon.  We passed our sad little van on the back of Angelo's truck on the way, but left him behind so we were in town well before him.  We checked in at the Kununurra Hotel for three nights and bought lunch in the bar.  We got an upgrade into a premium suite (not sure what it has better than a basic unit) but found that the door lock was faulty and it was missing some lights so they moved us into the room next door instead.  As soon as we finished lunch, we went to Metaland to see if our van had arrived.  It had and Angelo was just driving away as we arrived.  We rescued a few things we wanted from the van and took the wheel to a place up the road to have the tyre replaced - it was an almost new tyre, but dragging it along the road at right angles, had worn a gaping hole in the sidewall.  The costs are adding up.

We were almost at the end of our talking book so decided to go for a drive while we listened to the last hour of it.  We went out to Ivanhoe Crossing that was closed when we were up here before, but being later in the season, there was only six inches or so of water going over so we did the crossing and drove a few clicks out toward Wyndham.  The road was getting pretty rough so we explored a few side tracks and eventually headed back to the motel for a welcome shower and some relaxation before dinner.

We ate in the pub restaurant and both of us were dog-tired so we crashed and were probably both asleep before 9pm.

I got a phone call first up on Wednesday morning to say that Metaland didn’t have an identical stub axle, but could order one in – and with any luck, it would arrive about the end of next week.  That was pretty unsatisfactory for all concerned so they proposed a slightly different stub that they say is actually stronger, but it would mean that that wheel bearing would be a bit different from the other three.  He assured me that this was the best solution so I told him to go ahead and he said we will probably get the van back on Thursday morning. That is fine – although we have already paid to stay in the motel on Thursday so may need to park the van somewhere overnight if we decide to use the motel that night.

Heather worked on her blog and other tasks on Wednesday morning and I went birding around the lake. I saw 43 different species and got a few reasonable photos – but I also got very hot out in the sun for a bit over two hours.  It was nice to get back inside where it was cool and the drinks came straight out of the fridge.

We went to the mall for lunch and then set out for a drive to the Zebra Rock Gallery that Heather missed out on last time we were in Kununurra. Alas, it is closed for the Wet – still a couple of months away.  We also tried to go back to the place we had bought some rocks last time, but it was also closed.  In the meantime, Metaland rang to say our van was ready!  We were booked in at the hotel for three nights, but I managed to persuade them to refund the third night so we are off on the road again tomorrow – possibly with Timber Creek again as our campsite!

[lindoig]

Days 142 to 145 (Friday to Monday)

Friday was very hot, or at least we felt it even if it was merely normal for the locals.  We drove from Willare Roadhouse and went into Tunnel Creek en route to Fitzroy Crossing where we expected to camp overnight.  We walked to the entrance of Tunnel Creek, but didn’t do the walk through the tunnel.  People coming out said it was hard going and the water was fairly deep in places so we looked and marvelled, but didn’t go right inside.  It was nice near the entrance though, much cooler than out in the Sun and the rocks were quite beautiful – some very like the jasper we saw at Marble Bar.

We returned to the main road and went on to Fitzroy Crossing.  It is quite small, certainly a lot smaller than I had imagined and there were aborigines everywhere, many obviously pretty drunk.  We tried to book in at the town caravan park but the owners talked us out of it. There were only 3 sad-looking vans in the whole park and all had apparently been broken into.  It seems that the aborigines are out of control in the area and have stolen cars and all sorts of things from cars that were in the park.  They have even broken into vans with the owners inside and stolen things and the park owners said it was just too dangerous to stay there.  There was another van park just out of town and that had experienced similar issues, but we were assured that the free camping areas well outside town were pretty safe.

When in Willare, we had booked a tour of the Mimbi Caves, some 90km further on from Fitzroy Crossing, towards Halls Creek.  That was for 10am on the Saturday so we headed out of town and parked just off the road in pitch dark some 59 clicks closer to the Caves.  I had also tried to book a tour of Geikie Gorge, but most of the better tours had finished for the season the week before. Lots of people had told us how lovely Geikie was and it was clearly the highlight of Mum and Dad’s Big Lap in 1970 so I was very keen to see it for ourselves. There was a 1-hour Ranger tour available at 4pm on the Saturday so we intended doing that after the Caves tour and then camping at the same spot as our Friday camp on Saturday night.  You would think that booking people in to tours would be important for the town so I was surprised that the Visitors’ Centre/Tourist Bureau is only open 9 to 4, Monday to Friday.  They were trying to book us in to a longer tour of Geikie for the Saturday, Sunday or Monday – and may have done that, but by the time they did what they had to do, we were out of mobile contact and didn’t get their message to call them until well after they closed for the weekend.  As it turned out, this was fortuitous……  But it was also disappointing.

Saturday was not a good day for us!

It started well with our Mimbi Caves tour just 30 km up the road.  It is on an aboriginal Station (Mt Pierre) and we were met by our guide and our 3 fellow tourists and escorted in.  It was a short walk through towering cliffs to the cave area.  It was all very relaxed with relatively easy short walks into two caves. They are quite big and they have a few stalagmites and stalactites, shawls, columns and unusual formations, but at this time of the year, everything is dry rather than dripping as is usually the case.  We saw a water monitor and some small fish in the crystal-clear pools, and it was all pretty low key, but still interesting.  Our guide gave us a cuppa and damper after we had seen the caves and we sat around in the shade, watched the birds and he told us a few stories and sang a song for us.  He is in an aboriginal band, apparently fairly well-known, but not to us, and he sang and picked his guitar quite well.  The whole tour was about 2 hours and it was then back to the main road and a turn to head back to Fitzroy Crossing and then to Geikie Gorge.  Alas, barely half a kilometre down the highway and the wheels fell off our plans.

Actually, that is not quite correct – only one wheel fell off.  An outside stub axle broke and the wheel dragged horizontally along the road, scraping a gaping hole in our tyre.  We heard a bit of a bang, but thought it must have just been a stone until an oncoming car flashed its lights at us and I checked the rear vision mirror and saw our doom as I was stopping.  It was not a good place to stop with a narrow shoulder and a very steep drop-off, maybe 20 feet deep on the left and the road itself was not wide just there.  A few other people stopped to help and two of them disconnected the wheel and got it off the road while I was struggling with the phone.  I could then drive the car a few metres to get it a little further off the road, but not completely.

Our mobiles kept dropping out halfway through each attempt to call for help and even our sat phone was a bit problematical with me not being able to hear properly and them having difficulty hearing me too.  In the end, Heather stayed with the car and van and a really nice family gave me a ride the 89km back into Fitzroy Crossing where I was able to arrange some help.  I was more than an hour on the phone and at one stage, there was a 4-way discussion going on – RACV, RACWA, the Hall’s Creek Towing Service and me.  (There are two towing services in Fitzroy Crossing and I left messages with both – but even the one that calls itself After Hours Towing doesn’t work weekends.  They rang back some 24 hours later after we had been towed the 198 km to Hall’s Creek!  The other one, recommended by the Roadhouse still hasn’t returned my desperate call.)  Both RACs gave up trying to contact anyone in Fitzroy Crossing, hence the longer tow to Hall’s Creek.

I got a lift back to the van with another couple – and as soon as I gave him my name, he asked if I knew an Alan Doig, my cousin.  He worked with Alan in Aboriginal Education years ago and knew him well so I was like a long-lost brother after that.  The tow truck eventually arrived at about 7pm, well after dark, and we got our poor little van up on the back of his truck and we followed him in to Hall’s Creek at about 9.45pm.  He hit a roo on the way in, but fortunately there was no damage other than to the poor roo.  When we arrived at the Motel, we just wheeled in and they were waiting for us and got us straight into our room without any delay.  It had been a stressful day and Heather had spent over 5 hours alone in the heat so we were really glad to have a cold drink, a cold shower and crash into bed. We ate our lunch sandwich at about 4.30 and shared a bag of chips for dinner, but were glad to be safe and comfortable overnight.

We were glad we had had the sat phone – even if it didn’t quite get us out of trouble at the time, it helped and it meant that I could at least let Heather know what was going on.  We were also VERY glad we subscribed to RACV Extracare a couple of years ago, because they cover the towing and most of our motel bills – and made all the arrangements for us.

Hall’s Creek is more like I imagined Fitzroy Crossing would have been.  It is a bit bigger, more orderly, better services and the aboriginals don’t seem to be a big problem – at least as far as we have seen and heard so far.  We went out on Sunday morning to collect a few extra items from the van and plug the fridge into their AC power.  We then had a drive around and bought some breakfast and a few minor goodies from the IGA, then holed up for the rest of the day in our air-conditioned room, paying bills, blogging, some hand washing and generally recovering from the stresses of the previous day.  We ate a very nice meal in the motel restaurant and retired to watch a movie on TV – the first time we have seen TV since April – and we haven’t missed it at all!

We have noticed that they have weird way of measuring distances around here.  Tunnel Creek supposed to be 83km off the highway, but we arrived after driving only 64.  Mimbi Caves is supposed to be 119 or 90-odd (depending on which map or sign you read), but was actually only 87.  Numerous other examples have been noted along the way, but we seem to have established that our odometer is consistently at least 2% fast ever since we left home.  Alternatively, all the measured kilometres in Australia are really only 980 metres long.  Either way, our 23000km trip so far is probably about 500k more than that!

It is now Monday, 18 September, and we will know late today roughly how long we will be here.  Best guess at this stage is that we could leave on Wednesday if no parts need to be ordered in from Perth.  They think we will be OK, but if parts are required, they only get one delivery a week so it will be the end of next week at best if that happens.  It has really thrown a spanner (a whole toolbox in fact) into our plans for the trip home – we will have to review that entirely once we get the word from the workshop late this afternoon.

And just an update on birds…..  We haven’t seen anything new for well over a week, but current count is 304, including 71 new ones for us.  That is an average of one new species every 75 km for the trip or one new bird for us every 320 clicks – just a different way of looking at our discoveries.

[lindoig]

Days 133 to 141

Firstly, a couple of minor things I should have included in my last post.

Our arrival in Mt Magnet was just in time for lunch and being Father’s Day, we decided to shout ourselves to a pub lunch.  Alas, all three pubs in town were closed (obviously not the place to be for fathers!) and there was nothing else open so we enjoyed sangers in the van again.  But there was another little milestone to celebrate – we had ticked up over 20000 km this trip on the way in from Sandstone – justification for a bottle of bubbles.

And we called in at The Granites just north of Nallan on the way to Cue – yet another fascinating area of dramatic and unusual hills and rock formations, very colourful and craggy, and we drove several kilometres around the area to see a few of the different sites.

We quite enjoyed Cue, but stopped in Meekatharra for lunch and drove out to Peace Valley: so-called because they had a big town picnic out there to welcome the diggers back after the end of WWII.  Would you believe, there is an area adjacent to it called The Granites – déjà vu all over again!  Two Granites in one day: coincidence or just plain lack of imagination/creativity? It could be confusing if you arranged to meet your mates for a picnic at The Granites!

After our bush camp and campfire near Kumarina, we went on to Newman.  There was one really pretty area not far out of town though – a few square kilometres of pink!  Absolutely stunning display of small pink flowers as far as the eye could see – vivid pink and crowded against each other so it was like a bright pink sheet across the whole landscape.

Wednesday was a stop-start day, with many more pauses to inspect plants than usual.  I chased birds a couple of times too, but we were mostly in spinifex country so escapades in the bush were a little painful.  At one point, we saw something we wanted to inspect a bit more closely and there was a place I could get off the road immediately in front of us so I hit the brakes hard and pulled into it.  When we got out of the car, we noticed that the caravan door was open with the keys still in it.  Seems that we never locked up securely when we started for the day and braking hard allowed the door to fly open.  Not much of a problem in normal driving because the wind is always pushing the door closed, but braking hard had the opposite effect.  Fortunately, no damage, but something to watch, especially because locking the door securely is getting a bit difficult at present. Another day, we had a somewhat similar surprise when we checked our mirrors and saw that our little fold-down table on the side of the van had dropped open – obviously, I had not locked it securely after doing the cooking the night before. Maybe I am getting forgetful?

We had lunch at a wayside stop and went on to Newman, unrecognisable to me, having visited it in 1981 or ‘82 and thinking I would see at least something that rang a bell with me. It is probably even uglier now than it was then, but maybe that is the way of mining towns anyway.  Maybe an extra shop or two, but still pretty ugly, even for a dormitory town.  Certainly not a place that holds any attraction for future visits, just a rundown version of what I saw when it was all pristine so long ago.

From Newman, we went on to an overnight camping spot under Mt Robinson. Not really a great camp: a bit crowded, about a dozen other campers, some being a bit rowdy too, and with poor facilities.  This was complicated by me jack-knifing the van trying to get it into a spot that afforded us a little privacy and the gas cylinder dented the car near the left-hand stop-light.  Not really a bad dent, but frustrating anyway.  It also bent the weakened sway-bar anchor that had been repaired in Port Hedland 6-8 weeks earlier so we drove the next 1300 km with no sway-bars.  We had enjoyed many short stops that day to look at plants and flowers and thought it would be nice to relax and review our photos around another fire so I set our fire-pit up on top of the place the previous people had had their fire.  I was just going to drop a match into it when I saw the sign that said ‘Strictly NO Fires’.  More frustration - and then we found our toilet wasn't operating properly so we had to use the long-drop at the far side of the parking area.  One way and another, it was a disappointing end to what was otherwise a really nice day, enjoying the best of what nature had to offer.

Next morning, we spent an hour or so fixing the tap over the sink.  One of the anchor bolts had come out and the whole tap was loose and couldn’t be positioned properly.  When encountering a difficult task, my Dad used to say ‘if only man had been born an octopus’.  Better believe it!  Inserting one bolt and tightening another shouldn’t be that hard, but it was almost inaccessible and it took both of us ages to get the job done.  Fnigres corsesd that we don’t have to do it again in the near future.

Then it was on to the Munjini Roadhouse to set up, do some washing, empty the toilet and give it a good clean so it operated a little better – and a wonderfully welcome shower after 4 days without one!  During the afternoon, we went out to visit a couple of the absolutely gorgeous gorges in Karajini National Park.  The roads in the park are diabolical and the distances are considerable, but despite the atrocious shaking about in the car, the sights were fantastic.  I am not good with heights so standing on a flimsy grating overhanging the sheer cliff, looking 4-500 feet straight down into the gorges was a real challenge, but definitely ‘highly’ rewarding.  They are quite spectacular, really beautiful, and we saw the best of them almost on dusk – utterly magical!  We also saw quite a few birds, including some black-faced cuckoo-shrikes that looked a bit odd to us until we realised that they are a different species in quite a small area just where we were.  Another little tick for us.

It was quite dark as we drove the 150 clicks back to Munjini and we saw a few large birds that we were unable to identify as they flashed past.  We also saw a couple of snakes on the road and I don’t recall seeing snakes on the road at night before.

Next day, we took our lives in our hands and went across country to Roy Hill and up the Nullagine road to Marble Bar.  Nobody at the Roadhouse knew anything about the road and expressed some doubts, but it turned out to be quite good.  It was very narrow in places and the massive road trains from the mine don’t move over for anyone even in badly damaged areas, but we survived and actually enjoyed the drive, particularly the second half after the mine turnoff.  The main road through Nullagine to Marble Bar was probably worse than the Munjini-Roy Hill road, but we survived that too.  Several people had recommended that we visit Nullagine, but in retrospect, we wonder why.  It was a bit quaint in an old-fashioned rundown way, but maybe we just failed to note the big attractions there.  On the other hand, we did enjoy Marble Bar and stayed there three nights.

Lots of amazing hills along the way that day (are there days when this beautiful country could be boring?) The heat seemed to hit us hard that day – maybe because Marble Bar is noted as the hottest place in Australia, but it has stayed hot ever since with maximums in the mid and high thirties.  Interestingly, I saw more birds in this area than we had for weeks – maybe they just like the hot weather more than us.  We had lunch beside a big lake near Cooinda, accompanied by a small herd of cattle and lots of interesting birds.  There was a lot of fairy martins flitting back and forth picking up mud and returning to add it to a large colony of nests under a huge branch of a tree not far from us, all very busy with their construction work and household chores.

Next day was basically R&R in the van with the A/C going flat strap all day. Can’t recall much of what we achieved, but we went out late in the afternoon to get fuel, to suss out the town and check out one of the three town lookouts – at the water tank immediately above the van park.  We called in at the Ironclad Hotel for a pre-prandial libation – a really quaint place, made from corrugated iron and decorated with a wildly diverse collection of kitsch and memorabilia, mainly about the town and its history.

The following day was really nice.  We took our breakfast out to Marble Bar Pool, dropping in at Chinaman’s Pool on the way. Heather had a swim and really enjoyed it, but I chickened out, guarding our towels and food instead.  After brekky, we scrambled around the jasper rocks from which Marble Bar owes its name (the original explorers were not geologists and thought the huge reef of rocks were marble rather than jasper.  I am also not a geologist and thought they were stone).  Some of it is quite beautiful, with dazzling colours, particularly when wet, with intricate webs of mainly red, orange, black and white threaded through the stones, mainly all treacly smooth to touch, but with some areas heavily textured as well.  Quite unique and we spent maybe an hour exploring the Bar.  There are huge penalties for defacing or removing any stones from the area, but there is an area nearby called the Jasper Deposit where you can go in and chip away to your heart’s content.  We explored some of the lower slopes, but the heat and spinifex made it hard going.  Heather collected a few nice specimens before striking up a conversation with a guy who had collected some nicer pieces from way up on the cliff and he gave Heather a couple of really nice pieces.  He is an artist from Augusta and visits the area each year for inspiration and ideas to paint when he is at home.

We then went to the Comet mine – or ex-mine, now a museum.  The guy who runs it is a strange coot in his 80s, but told us all about the history of the mine, some yarns about local people and events (some of which may have contained an element of truth) and we spent a fascinating hour or so, sitting on the verandah with him, listening to his stories and swatting flies.  It was a really interesting story and we learned quite a bit more about both the history and the techniques of gold-mining.

We called in at the pub again, hoping for a nice roast or similar for lunch, but unfortunately, they were short-staffed with no cook at present so we went away hungry.

Monday, we were on the road again, again taking the road less travelled through Muccan and back on to the Great Northern Highway north of Pardoo.  The dirt road was quite good all the way through to the highway with numerous changes of scenery and lots of stops and starts to look at things by the roadside.  We thought we would have a bush camp at the same place we camped on our way south – with memories of my first disastrous attempt at cooking a ‘brick’ damper, but it was still early when we got there so we drove on another 200km and camped by the side of the road 118km north of Sandfire.  Whilst setting up, something happened to our power and we lost all DC power so spent the night with no lights other than torches and candles, no hot water (needs DC to fire the piezo), no pump for the water, no DVD on the telly, etc., etc – but we were creative and managed pretty well: very well as it turned out.

Tuesday, it was an uneventful drive into Broome.  I had previously booked the car in for its 80000km service early on Wednesday – it was not quite there, but we had driven 12000km since the last service and I wanted Toyota to check out a couple of things, including possible metal particles in the fuel filter bowl.  We booked into the same park we used on the way south and arranged to have the lights fixed on the van and get a full service on it immediately after the car was serviced.  The best laid plans of mice and men…..  We did a bit of shopping in the afternoon, knowing that we wouldn’t have the car the following day – mainly groceries, but a few other little things from Bunnings and a sand flag from ARB just in case we needed it on the Tanami – we could have used one on a couple of occasions earlier in the trip.

Wednesday was a crazy day!  Up around 6am and left before 7 to take the car to Toyota for the service.  I thought I could wait and get it back in a couple of hours and return to the caravan pretty quickly, but it was scheduled as a major service with a 2.30pm pickup!  This was a problem because I had pulled all sorts of strings to get the service on the van at 12.30!  Frantic phone calls to try to delay the work on the van, but with limited success.  We had to wait and see!  That presented us a problem because checkout time at the van park was 10am and we didn't know whether we would need another night or not.  The Toyota courtesy shuttle got me back to the van around 8.30, but we still didn't know if we could get the van serviced later in the day or if we would have to stay another night.  We packed up a bit and attended to quite a bit of business, including phone calls, one of which lasted well over an hour arranging our travel insurance for our trip next year.

I negotiated a late checkout at the van park, but it was all a bit embarrassing.  I had a few phone calls from Toyota and they eventually told me I could pick up the car early at about 1pm - but their shuttle couldn't pick me up until after 2pm!  I decided on a taxi and was assured that one was on the way.  30 minutes later, still standing out in the street in 35 degree heat, the people from our neighbouring van saw me sweltering and offered to drive me down to Toyota.  Very thankful for the offer, I jumped in and cancelled the taxi.  I collected the car (almost $1000, but happy to have the work done before hitting the Tanami Track) and drove back to the van park, only to see my taxi waiting for me!!!

I had confirmed at last that we could still get the van serviced and Heather had done a wonderful job, packing up almost everything while I was collecting the car, so we connected up, checked out of the van park and raced off to the workshop to get the van attended to.  Alas, they discovered major issues with the undercarriage alignment, another tyre completely cut out, mashed springs, loose and bent U-bolts - and the job would not be finished for 4 or 5 hours.  We still had the car so went shopping again!  Spent an hour cruising in Bunnings, called in at ARB again and drove around to kill some time.  It was a very hot day so we sheltered in a shopping mall where we could buy drinks and ice-creams. Even bought a few little Christmas pressies!

Very quickly bored with the mall, we drove around some more and ended up at a bar where we had a drink, made some phone calls and sent a couple more emails.  We then decided to go out to the Port (close to the caravan servicing place) to watch the Sun go down, but by the time we got there, it was well and truly down and it was completely dark.  We sat in the car overlooking the ocean (overlooking is not quite the right word - it was pitch dark so there was no looking, over or any other way) and wrote a bit for our blogs until the guy rang to say the van was ready.

We had to repack a lot of things he had removed to do the work and there was some paperwork to do to ensure he got his $1300 from us so it was almost 8pm before we got on our way. They had replaced our sway-bar anchor so we were back to driving a safer more stable rig.  We only needed to drive 30km or so to the Roebuck Plains Roadhouse where we stayed the night.  Not easy getting the van into another very tight spot in the pitch dark, but we managed with no more damage.  A bush camp may have been better, but we had to return to Broome next day to get two new tyres to replace the ones that had been completely scrubbed out due to the alignment problem.  It was nice to have a shower and a huge meal and crash into bed after such a hectic day.  At least, with the new tyres, we are very confident that we are as set up as we could be for the next phase of our adventures.

We drove back into Broome to get our tyres on Thursday - but we should have let our fingers do the walking before we left camp.  We went to 4 of the 5 places you can buy tyres in Broome and rang the other one and NONE of them had suitable tyres in stock.  One woman tried to sell me 16 inch tyres for our 15 inch wheels, but I declined.  We then tried Willare Roadhouse and both suppliers in Fitzroy Crossing without success, although they said they could probably order them in within about four or five working days.  

We ended up ringing a guy in Derby who was able to help.  He couldn't match them exactly, but had suitable compatible ones in stock, so we decided to do the 115km detour to get them fitted on Friday.  We had expected to bypass Derby on the way up, but having reliable shoes and socks for both car and van is pretty important when you are going off the grid for 1000 clicks or more.  As it happened, we made good progress along the road, made it to Derby, replaced our two scrubbed tyres (a tad more cheaply than expected) and still got back out to the Willare Roadhouse that had been our intended campsite for Thursday in the first place.

[lindoig]

Days 124 to 132 (Monday 28/8 to Tuesday 5/9)

It is about 3 weeks since I posted anything, but we have had some adventures and things get busy even when travelling.  Busy is not the best word, but some days really are busy with all the overheads that need doing – paying bills, answering email, minor maintenance on the car, van and equipment and so on. And we always fill so much of each day that we don’t have time to write much at the end of the day – even if the brain was capable of ordering our thoughts. Nonetheless…….

We were up early on Monday for final loading and connecting the van and with hearty thanks and goodbyes to Judy and Garry, we hit the highway and took the rig to Dometic to have the hinges on the fridge replaced, the door reset and some of the shelves replaced.  It only took about 30 minutes, but we strolled down to a lunch shop around the corner and had ourselves some brekky.  I also took the opportunity to return a call I missed on the previous Friday from our caravan storage company in Melbourne.  It seems they had a major break-in to the yard where we store our van (several things were stolen, including at least one caravan) and they need to reorganise the area to make it more secure – and we may not have a place to park when we get home.  This is a really big catastrophe for us and we are anxiously awaiting further information about whether we will still be able to be accommodated in the newly secured yard or not!  We certainly hope so!!!  (Twelve days later, they contacted me again and assured me that all would be well and our place in their plans is secure – we were mightily relieved and thanked them accordingly!)

We collected the van with an operational fridge/freezer and headed for our pre-booked hidey-hole back at Guilderton.  We arrived in time for lunch and set up in a quiet area of the caravan park and I went fishing!  Must be at least 10 years since my line got wet.  I always think it would be good to give it a go, but it usually seems a lot of work getting ready and I don’t have a clue how to catch fish anyway.  It is largely an opportunity to stand somewhere quiet near the water and watch the birds.  At least my luck held with my fishing – same as all the other times, I caught nothing.  (I tried again the next day with identical results so at least I am consistent.)  I had a couple of half-hearted nibbles, but that was it!  Next time I might have to try with some bait on the hook or something equally scientific. I did watch quite a few birds, many venturing very close to me – pelicans, Pacific black ducks, welcome swallows, silver, crested and Caspian terns and lots of cormorants flying past. Also saw a couple of kestrels, a little eagle, an osprey, a white-bellied sea eagle and numerous small birds flitting about in the middle distance.

We walked down to the beach a couple of times while we were at Guilderton and noticed how radically different the mouth of the river (the Moore) was from day to day.  The river flows out of the estuary, but the tide also comes in – at least the breakers flush large volumes of water back into the river.  The first day, the river was winning and the surf was strikingly brown from the tannin in the river – you can see less 50cm into the water it is so dark!  Next day, the sea was winning and the waves looked sandy and the river was a little clearer – and well over half the sandbar where I went fishing was under water.  Nature never ceases to amaze us and there is a lesson every day if we just take the time to observe and think about the differences and the reasons for them.

Heather did a lot of cooking while we were there and we are enjoying the spoils as a result – delicious! We have also caught up with email and our blogs are more current than they have been for weeks.  I went out to explore what seems to have been an old sand quarry on Wednesday.  It is just a couple of clicks out of town and it is mainly yellow sand that has obviously surrounded dozens of odd-shaped sandstone rocks.  They have mined a lot of the sand, leaving a fascinating landscape of yellow sand and white sandstone pillars.  There were lots of invisible birds there – plenty of bird-calls, but it was outstandingly hard to find the birds – but I also enjoyed finding wildflowers. In particular, I found an area of donkey orchids, lots of cow-slip orchids, some snake creeper, one lonely kangaroo paw and a variety of other exquisite flowers hidden away out of sight. The quarry is perhaps 400 x 100 metres and just off the road.  I saw a memorial plaque hidden way in toward the back for someone unknown – but I noted a sign saying that the area had been replanted (by a well-known funeral company) as a memorial park in 2001.  I guess very few people would ever take the time to visit it, but I was delighted with my hour or so there and would like to go back for another walk around. While I was out in the car, I explored a bit more of Guilderton and discovered that it had more to offer than we thought with access to Silver Creek (a minor tributary to the river), with more water-birds to see and more river to explore.

The downside of my sand quarry excursion was that I scraped an invisible post near the caravan as I was leaving and bent the passenger-side side-step/running board and that will need replacing at some time.

I have just realised that I completely forgot to mention an important detour we made on the last day approaching Perth.  We visited Cervantes (quite a pleasant little burg) and went to the stromatolites that fascinated my Mum when she was alive.  We took her there in the caravan after Dad died and she really enjoyed that – but it is now very different.  Instead of just stopping on the road and pushing through a few bushes for a squizzy, it is now built up with an extensive parking area, picnic tables, a boardwalk, signage and a 2-kilometre circuit around the lake.  We were as fascinated this visit as we were last time and did the circuit – with many stops for photos and closer examination of plants as well as the stromatolites and thrombolites – even checked out some birds along the track, but there were not many of them.

We took advantage of the picnic tables and ate our lunch there while working out some more details of our next year’s travel plans.  I don’t pretend to understand a lot about stromatolites, but the idea that the things we were looking at are so many hundred million years old, with perhaps billions of generations of micro-organisms living and dying to produce the columns and mats of living cyanobacteria we see today (along with a few small fish) quite astounds me.

After two and a half delightful days at Guilderton, we set sail for Moora on the Thursday – but spent a couple of hours detouring around Guilderton before really putting the foot down. We went back to the places I had found on the previous day and I think Heather enjoyed them as much as I did. Silver Creek was nice, but we spent at least a couple of hours wandering around the sand quarry again.  Lots more photos, a few birds and other creatures – and we even got quite wet when it rained on us, but didn’t slow us down. We found a couple more memorial plaques hidden around the rocks and bushes – even a tin pooh-bear – who knows who or what he commemorates.

We thought we would camp at Moora that night (we had to go there anyway to collect the mail), but arrived earlier than expected so decided to put a few more kilometres under the wheels and set off on the Miling road, intending to follow the Great Northern Highway. Unfortunately, someone moved the road (or hid the turn-sign) and we ended up quite a few clicks up on the Coorow road.  We had to back-track a little, but eventually found our way through to Dalwallinu via some odd twists and turns and camped in a really nice quiet van park there.

Next day (Friday) was a really interesting one.  We headed north to Payne’s Find and bought fuel and ate our lunch under a tree near the old gold battery.  It was open to tourists and we spent a fascinating hour or so with the woman who runs it.  It has been in her family for over 100 years and she still does a bit of crushing, processing and refining in the only privately-owned battery in Western Australia. She is also the only woman ever to run a battery in Australia and she does all this at an age I suspect is at least 5 years more than mine!  It was a great tour and we had a good look at everything and got a lot more information about hands-on gold processing.  Once I told her about Dad’s time in the mines, that opened a whole new stream of discussion.  Very interesting and educational to boot.  We had not really planned to go in there, but we were really glad we did!!

From Paynes Find, we did a major unplanned detour 200-odd km to Sandstone. We had been trying to organise a rendezvous with some friends from Melbourne.  Barbara was the key government person we dealt with while at LACVI; and her husband, Jeff, is an artist who has just completed illustrating the Australian Bird Guide: a wonderful new Fieldguide that we purchased prior to publication and that is sitting on our table at home.  We have met with them socially a few times and were looking forward to having a ‘home away from home’ with them whilst we were pursuing our respective travels in Western Australia.  We had arranged to meet them at Nallan Station near Mt Magnet, but timing wasn’t quite perfect so we decided to catch up with them at Sandstone instead – but being out of mobile range, we couldn’t tell them of the change in plans.

The map showed the road to be potentially dodgy so we asked about it at the Payne’s Find roadhouse with somewhat lukewarm results, but it turned out to be in superb condition, easily the best dirt road I have ever driven on.  A great drive with lots of changes in scenery – a really enjoyable day all round.

We had a wonderful night in yet another gravel pit, 101km from Sandstone.  It was only one day to the full moon and we camped a couple of hundred metres from the road in a very safe and comfortable place, well isolated from the two vehicles that passed (like ships) in the night.  I found a few birds and at least one flower we hadn't seen before and we had a wonderful fire that we kept going for several hours.  We sat out under the stars to have dinner (another great Dream Pot meal) and discussed life and all sorts for a couple of hours before retiring to a movie on DVD.  The silence of remote places, with only the occasional bird-call, a gentle breeze and the friendly crackle of our fire is simply beautiful, romantic, exotic, even erotic, but completely wonderful, irrespective of the adjectives.

We drove on to Sandstone next morning and booked into the caravan park, in a site almost opposite Barbara and Jeff.  Of course, they weren't expecting to see us until two days later and 300km later so when I did my 'Doctor Livingstone, I presume' thing, it was a big surprise to them.  We were welcomed most warmly and once we set up our van, we shared some victuals - Barb's tea, coffee and scones and Heather's fruit cake.  That took a couple of hours and we shared lots of stories from our respective journeys and a good deal more.  Later in the afternoon, we headed out in Barb's car, 50 clicks up the road to where Jeff thought we might see one of his major quarries: the Western quailthrush.  Finding and photographing this species is a big deal for Jeff, so it was a bit disappointing, but it was fun tramping around the bush looking at other birds and photographing flowers.  As it turned out, he caught a couple of distant glimpses, but none of the rest of us saw so much as a feather.  Back at camp, we indulged in some bubbles and more and ate our respective dinners together, with more chat and laughter before retreating to our caravans for sleep.

They left for Mt Magnet a bit before us next day and we agreed to try to meet up again at Nallan Station two days later - they were booked in there for three nights.  On our way in to Mt Magnet, we saw 12 wedgies and would you believe, a female western quailthrush flew across in front of our car and settled no more that two metres from our car.  I was unable to stop, but still got a good look at it and was itching to tell Jeff.  We had a minor problem 100km from Mt Magnet when a warning light came on in the car, telling us (again) that our fuel filter was clogged and needed replacement.  Not a big deal, but we didn't want a lot of crap feeding through our injectors so decided to stay overnight in Mt Magnet and get it replaced on the Monday.  We ran into Jeff and Barb again as we were driving into town and they were driving out so I got to tell him that we saw the illusive quailthrush that he was still chasing.

We booked into the caravan park on Sunday in time for lunch and caught up on the washing and I had a delightful couple of hours wandering along the river photographing birds, including a couple of new ones for us, as well as some flowers - all while the washing was drying.

I was down at the local mechanic's place by 8.30 next morning and by nine, the fuel filter was replaced and I had had a lesson in how to do it in case I needed to do it myself next time.  We carry a set of filters with us in case we need them along the track, but knowing how to fit them is a bonus.

We had quite a bit of restocking to do at the local IGA and then we were off to Nallan Station a mere 12 km further north.  We camped across from Jeff and Barb and we were the only people there.  It was wonderful!!!  Nallan is a working Station and has showers and toilets and easy access to potable water, but it is rustic and really quite delightful - just our sort of place.  Not quite 3-star, but quite lovely with free lemons and grapefruit thrown in as a bonus.  The grapefruit are/were the yummiest I have had anywhere.  Delish!

Plenty of birds around, including some not often seen and we could wander anywhere we liked around the Station.  We spent the day with Barb and Jeff - Heather mainly with Barb and me mainly with Jeff, but we also all did a bit of exploring on our own.  Just on dusk, we all went out to a waterhole where some Bourke's parrots were supposed to visit.  We had good views of a few birds, including some mulga parrots, but by the time the 30-odd Bourke's came in, it was really too dark to see them, even with the full moon.  We did see yet another fabulous sunset though.

We returned to camp and lit a roaring fire that we kept burning for a few hours.   Heather had cooked our meal, but Barb cooked their sausages over the coals.  I suspect that they ate semi-raw snags, but we spent a few more hours enjoying their friendship, chatting around a perfect campfire.  I think the time we spent with them changed our work colleague and birding authority relationship into one of real friendship.  They are both lovely people and we enjoyed every minute of our time together and hope there will be many more similar times.

They were off to Walga Rock next morning so we said our goodbyes soon after Jeff gave up trying to find some white-browed babblers.  We stayed on for an hour or so and enjoyed some interesting birding - including seeing Jeff's missing babblers.

Then it was on to Cue and Meekatharra, both interesting places, particularly Cue.  This trip has taught me a lot about WA geography.  More importantly, it has untaught me a lot I thought I knew about where places were, how big and/or important they are or were.  I always imagined that Cue was out near Leonora, rather on the Great Northern Highway and some of the other towns we have seen or bypassed are hundreds of kilometres from where they should be according to my childhood mental map.  It has been very interesting to learn so much about the State I grew up in and to encounter so many places, rivers, ranges and other landmarks that echoed 60+ year-old memories and evoked thoughts that hold a wealth of forgotten romance for me.

We had a magic bush camp that night, just off the road about 28 clicks south of the Kumarina Roadhouse – another fantastic night under the stars.

[lindoig]

Days 120 to 123 (August 24-27) - Family time!

Our stay in Perth was wonderful – even if it was fairly brief.  It was a great opportunity to catch up with many family members who we rarely see. Indeed, we rarely have any contact at all with most of them unless we are in Perth, but that is one of the wonderful things about family.  They are all so much a part of us that despite the time between visits, we can almost finish the sentence we started, but never quite finished, on our last visit. Some friends are like that too, but with family, it hardly matters what happens between visits.  It is always the same when we get together again, as if it was only yesterday that we spoke.  It was wonderful too that all the blokes were happy to give us both a hug – no biggy for the women, but times have certainly changed for the guys and most handshakes developed quite naturally into a hug, not all of which were initiated (but very happily reciprocated) by me.

We had a comfortable dinner with Judy and Garry on the Wednesday and made it to bed at a reasonable time.  We had quite a few jobs to do while in Perth – caravan maintenance and minor modifications, heaps of washing, a little cleaning, printing and copying emails, and soon.  Garry and Judy were very helpful – Garry was particularly creative in coming up with or confirming solutions to some of the minor issues we had with the van – very thankful, Garry. We had shopping to do, groceries as well as more substantial items and we did most of that during the day on the Thursday and then took Garry & Judy and Kerry & Murray out to dinner at an Italian Restaurant in East Victoria Park.  It was quite wonderful for just the six of us to chat easily about all sorts of things – from family to politics, science and medicine, travel and religion, just relaxed and comfortable; like old friends as much as family.

Friday we had arranged to go out to dinner with (ex B-i-L and good mate) Steve and Pam Holden in Freo and were to ring them when we were ready to meet for our meal.  (Does your B-i-L become your ex B-i-L when you are divorced from his sister?)  Heather and I had a busy morning shopping and catching upon email, phone calls and so on – even drove past the house I grew up in. We always visit it when in Perth and sit outside reminiscing about my childhood – but this time, it has been drastically redeveloped and even the neighbouring houses are unrecognisable so it will probably be the last time we drive past – the nostalgia is quite gone, destroyed along with the original little old building I remembered.

We arrived in Freo for a late lunch and I was just thinking that we could possibly bump into Steve and Pam when I got a tap on the shoulder and there they were! We chatted for a while then separated and all went off – with us to to cruise the Markets and visit the Bank and Officeworks and a couple of other things we needed to do. Parking was problematic for us because our car is too high for all the undercover carparks, but we found a 3-hour spot and sat in the car for a while until it was time to meet for dinner. Next thing, there was a tap on the window and there was Steve again.  They had also been sitting in their car the same as us!  We had a really great meal with them – Italian again – and chatted on for ages – another wonderful catch-up, comfortable and happy.  Steve’s Mum (my much-loved mother-in-law) died a few months ago and in the past, I have always visited her when in Perth, so catching up with Steve and hearing a bit of family news that way was special too.

Saturday was our big family get-together and almost all the immediate family were able to gather at Judy’s place.  Craig and family travelled over 400km to be there and we met Dean’s new bride and caught up with almost all our closest loved ones in Western Australia – I think there were 20 of us there for lunch, all organised by Judy and Kerry – many thanks! It was a wonderful occasion and I think I got to speak with everyone there – unusual for me, but a truly rewarding day, hopefully for everyone else too.

Sunday was busy for everyone.  Judy and Garry went to church and we arranged to meet them at a coffee shop for a cuppa afterwards.  Garry and I than went to Jenny and Michellan’s place to collect a desk that needed repair and passing on – to Linda I think.  Back across town for lunch and then Heather and I retraced the excursion back to Kerry and Murray’s place for another great relaxing afternoon of gossip and reminiscing.

Back to Yokine for dinner and then an evening of whist.  Neither Heather nor I had played it before, but it is very similar to other games we have played so it was very quick and easy to learn and fun to play.  A final bit of organising after that so we were ready to head out early on Monday morning.  We had to be at Dometic in Wangara by 8am to have the freezer doors repaired before we left Perth for the start of our long circuitous journey back to Melbourne.

Our few days in Perth were quite wonderful, catching up with family and friends, feeling much more organised for the trip home and enjoying the time with that branch of our strange convoluted family.  They say it takes all sorts – and we have all sorts and love them all.

[lindoig]

Days 113 to 119

From Hamelin Pool, we had an easy drive to Kalbarri, stopping to photograph flowers and explore the roadside on numerous occasions.  I really love those slow days when we take the time to just look at what is around us without worrying about where we are going to camp at night.  As it was, by the time we got away in the morning, it was afternoon!  We had to do some careful checking of a proposed itinerary for our trans-Asia trip next year and that took quite a while, including writing up the numerous questions and amendments we noted.

The van park was very crowded and it was hard getting on the site – and it was on quite a slope both front to back and side to side.  Whilst setting up, I was behind it fixing the stabilising legs in place (actually only one works) when the van rolled off the jockey wheel and started down the hill into the van behind us.  I put all my weight against it and stopped it whilst yelling to Heather to chock the wheels. Of course, no matter how frantically I yelled, she couldn’t hear me and the woman from the van behind came out to see what was going on – and she helped hold the van until Heather could get our chocks under the wheels.  It was a very scary minute or two and I could almost see our van knocking the one behind us off its perch and rolling down the hill domino-style.  The sites in most parks were designed when the standard van was a 12-footer and although ours is only 17’6”, some are 25 foot and more. It makes getting on the sites quite difficult and incidents like this are becoming more common.  We often see vans and cars positioned in what we think are dangerous situations simply because the parks aren’t designed for today’s bigger rigs.

Heather felt like a steak so we elected for dinner at the pub – and then it was lovely to have a long hot shower after 3 days without one!

Friday was a lay-day. As much as Kalbarri’s attractions beckoned, we needed to catch up with a lot of business matters, bring our blogs a few weeks closer to current and take further action to lock in our 2018 travel plans.  Late in the afternoon, we went out to the supermarket and had a drive around the town and the nearby bush, ending up at Red Bluff as the Sun sank behind some low cloud. As we looked out, we saw quite a lot of whales, probably at least a dozen or so in what appeared to be two separate pods a kilometre or so apart.  We saw one breach only a kilometre or less from the shore so we now reckon we have seen more whales this trip than we saw on our whole Russian Expedition – even if they were not much more than smudges on the ocean from the shore, instead of looking almost straight down on them from a ship.

It rained on and off all Friday night so it was a soggy job packing up to leave on Saturday morning. I was a little concerned that once I lifted the stabilisers at the back of the van and jacked up the front, the van might restart its journey down the hill before I could connect the car. Fortunately, our chocks held and we were able to set off with the caravan safely in tow.  First stop was for fuel – at a servo that had two rows of bowsers, one of which was obviously completely inaccessible for anything bigger than a family sedan.  We needed to enter the other lane so our filler was within range of the bowser and to do that we had to wait while two other cars fuelled up and left while Heather stood guard, not letting anyone follow them in to delay us even further. I manoeuvred the car and van in with a good deal of difficulty and topped up our tanks – only to find that it was absolutely impossible to drive through and out onto the road.  We hit one of the stanchions they had erected to protect the bowsers (very gently with minimal damage to the van) but I then had to reverse car and van out onto the road the way we came in – while Heather did her traffic management duties, stopping the cars on the main road so I could get out again.  I noticed that there were many deep gouges quite high on both sides of the driveway on both the entrance and exit pillars so there have obviously been a lot of caravan and truck owners who have learned that it is a very expensive way to buy fuel in Kalbarri!

There were a few more showers as we headed south, inhibiting us from stopping as often as we may have, but it was at worst a minor inconvenience.  We remembered enjoying Horrocks and Port Gregory last time we were in the area so we did the necessary detours to see them again and we reckon we would both like to spend a little more time in the area, especially at Port Gregory.  Last time we were in the area, we had good views of flocks of both banded stilts and red-necked avocets at Port Gregory.  This time, we saw some avocets – along with black-backed stilts and a couple of species of duck – but no banded stilts.

We rolled into Geraldton in mid-arvo and booked into a van park for one night only.  It was right on the beach so we had a look over the dunes to a fairly wild sea – then slunk back to the van as rain started threatening again. It was wonderfully cosy to be warm and secure inside, yet still able to hear the waves crashing 100 metres away. We could hear the waves a little at Kalbarri too, but not like at Geraldton.

A bit of heavy rain overnight, but we were very snug in our little mobile cubby.  It had been getting a bit cool overnight in the past couple of days so we had put our thick cuddly quilt on the bed and we enjoyed snuggling down while the rain rat-tat-tatted on the roof – like kids enjoying the rain on the tin roof when we were growing up.  Fortunately, it cleared up by morning so we had a drive around the town and then headed for the sand-plain country around Mullewa, Morawa and Mingenew. We stopped and explored numerous times and found some wonderful wildflowers (and four new birds), but not as many as we had hoped.  The guy at the servo in Morawa said this had not been a good year for wildflowers due to lack of rain so maybe, with the rain over the past several days, there will be more to see when we return to the area in 10 days or so.  But we did see 5 spider orchids and lots of cow-slip orchids where we had lunch and quite a few other things along the way, wherever we stopped to prowl around the bush.

We camped at Mingenew on Sunday night – a quiets caravan park surrounded by trees and I explored them fairly comprehensively, but unsuccessfully, looking for different birds.

Monday was a nice day driving and stopping numerous times looking at flowers and chasing birds through the bush.  We stopped for a couple of hours at Andanooka – the place with the best display of massed wildflowers I have ever seen – but it was when I was a young teenager and there were very few around this time.  We had a look around Three Springs and Carnamah – wheat-belt towns I loved as a kid – and then on to Eneabba – the first place they found shale oil in Western Australia, if I recall correctly.  We detoured to Leeman and stopped lots of times along the road and ended up at Green Point overnight.  We intended having fish and chips for dinner, but the fish and chips shop closes at noon on Mondays and the pub had sold out of fish that day anyway – despite their sign out the front advertising fish and chips for $12 – and when I asked them, they said that only applied to lunch orders, despite their sign failing to mention it.

Tuesday was another slow day, driving and stopping, walking in the bush, photographing flowers and looking at birds.  We called in at a couple of places I knew as a teenager and they gave me the creeps. I went fishing at Jurien Bay a few times with my brother-in-law Steve when we were teenagers – when there was a 5-metre jetty and 2-3 shacks.  Now there is several thousand houses, a marina with a few hundred million dollars of pleasure craft, a carpark for maybe 500 cars…….  Simply horrible – every aspect of it had irrevocably despoiled the natural environment I loved so much 50 years ago.  The following day, we saw Yanchep – another ugly sprawling city that I remember simply as Caves House and a rustic picnic area next to a small lake – our traditional family picnic location every New Year’s Day.  The underground caves were its only real attraction in those days and Caves House sold tickets and light refreshments and provided a modicum of high-priced B&B type accommodation – and there was a rough track down to the ocean beach. Now it is simply a gigantic urban monstrosity that I will avoid at all costs in future.

We stayed at Guilderton overnight – in a small quiet caravan park we saw on a previous trip several years ago and said we would come back at some stage.  It was quite delightful, overlooking the mouth of the Moore River about 100 metres from our caravan.  We liked it so much that we booked to come back for a few days on our way out on the Wednesday morning.

Perth, here we come. That was Wednesday and we took most of the day to travel the 60-odd km to Judy and Garry’s place (my sister and B-i-L). We just ambled along, stopping as and when we wanted so as not to arrive too early because we knew they would be out much of the day.

One interesting detour that day was to the Gravity Observatory.  We were there a few years ago and it is a fascinating place – a sort of Questacon/Powerhouse/ Scienceworks hands-on display focussed mainly on the science of gravity.  It has numerous outdoor displays (including a leaning tower equal to the height of the one in Pisa that allows patrons to replicate Galileo’s experiment by dropping things off the side) as well as several inside that anyone can play with.  There is also a fairly expensive paid display, but we didn’t want to spend the time to indulge ourselves in that one.

It was really wonderful to park the van in Judy and Garry’s driveway and enjoy all the advantages of their home as well as our own little mobile house.  And of course, it was wonderful to catch up with the family too.

[lindoig]

A mermaid at Python Pool (out from Karratha), a square foot of tiny cockle shells and part of the shell quarry at Hamelin Pool.

[lindoig]

Days 110 to 112

We set off from Carnarvon heading for Denham, but on reviewing our plans for the next few days and our preference for less crowded areas, we decided to camp at Hamelin Pool instead – and it was wonderful.  We had a great spot in the extreme corner of the fairly sparsely-populated park and set ourselves up to make the most of it.

Of course, the first thing we had to do during our Happy Hour was to crack a bottle of bubbles, having ticked off yet another momentous achievement some 20-odd kilometres earlier. Once on the Denham road, we had travelled every inch of Highway One – over less than 10 years anyway.

We arrived early in the afternoon so Happy Hour had to wait a little.  We walked down to see the nearby stromatolites – prehistoric structures somewhat like coral.  They were the precursor of life as we know it and stromatolites are the remains of zillions of cyanobacteria that have built up over the millennia – and continue to do so today – not that we witnessed a lot of activity in the half hour that we watched. On the other hand, we watched the tide come in, wetting the feet of a big bunch of seabirds.  We also got some great photos of the Welcome swallows that were flitting around the boardwalk within a metre or two of us. My Mum was quite fascinated by stromatolites and we took her to see them at Cervantes in our old caravan soon after Dad died.  I know she saw the ones at Hamelin Pool as well and it was nice to see and remember yet another of her favourite things while we were there.

The area is also famous for its shells – trillions of tiny cardiid cockle shells that have formed banks several metres high and hundreds of metres across for several kilometres along the shoreline.  They survive well in the hypersaline water in the bay (and the salinity inhibits their predators) and their shells are washed up to form massive deposits that eventually fuse and are mined (albeit not too heavily) as shell blocks for local construction and for shell-grit and similar purposes.  Hard to imagine the numbers involved, but it must have been life and death for the little critters for millennia to form such huge deposits of such tiny shells.

We drove up and down the road to Denham, calling in at every available side-road and stopped many times for closer examination of the wildflowers and scrub along the road edges.  One place at which we called in was a lookout we had visited on our last trip here 10 years ago.  It is high on a cliff overlooking a couple of small islands and last time we saw a lot of birds (we think probably brown boobies, but we were never sure) and many sharks just cruising past.  It now has a great boardwalk running right along the edge of the cliff to a very high lookout, but all we saw was one lone shark a long way out.  Notwithstanding, it was a really great day, just enjoying the natural environment all day.

For some reason, Western Australia’s ‘north west’ is officially defined as the area above the 26th parallel and we crossed and recrossed it several times during a few days. We have crossed and recrossed the Tropic of Capricorn numerous times this trip so this was just another mini-tick on the list.

A MUCH bigger tick happened on the next day – Wednesday.  We wanted to go to Steep Point, the westernmost point of mainland Australia, but the Useless Loop Road was closed on the Monday and Tuesday.  (There are some great names in Oz - we were at No Name Range at Tom Price and we have been to Nowhere as well.)  It opened late on Tuesday so we rang early on Wednesday and got permission to give it a go – along with heaps of warnings about how wet, sandy, corrugated and risk-prone the road was and how we had to carry recovery gear, water, etc., etc, etc.  Next thing was fuel – after our previous day’s driving, did we have enough for the trip?  I thought it a little doubtful, or at least risky (as it turned out, we would have had sufficient), so we drove over 100km there and back to Nanga Bay to top up.  When we got there, they were in the process of changing from one generator to another so we had to wait around for about half an hour before the bowser became operational.  Eventually on the road, the intrepid travellers set course for Steep Point and made it in time for a late lunch.  The road was certainly challenging and we would not have made it with a lesser car, but conditions were perhaps not quite as bad as the warnings indicated. We saw about six other cars coming back – they had been stuck out there for a few days while the road was closed – but I think we were the only people heading west that day.

This was a big deal for us – but alas, we had run out of bubbles, so were unable to celebrate it in the required style.  We have now been to the southernmost, northernmost, easternmost and westernmost accessible point in Australia and every State and mainland Territory with the exception of northern Western Australia.  We never quite made it there – Wyndham was as far as we got. Another exceptional day for us and although we slept extremely well that night, we see it as another big achievement for us.

After 11 days without adding a single bird to our list, we saw 11 the last 3 days. Our count is now 273 for the trip and 62 new ones for us. We also ticked over 17,000 km since leaving home, making it the longest trip we have done – we did just under 17,000 on our first trip in our then new caravan in 2007-08.