Maleny to Darwin Day 9 - Homeward bound!

The journey's nearly over.  Fez had warned me that they were late risers at the weekend.  How late?  Oh, perhaps 10 in the morning.  Er, well, I'll be leaving early so I'll try not to wake you!  In the end it was 7 o'clock when I crept out, pausing only to fend off the affections of Frankie, a poodle - springer spaniel cross.  He can jump very high indeed. 




Darwin proved itself civilised when I was able to get breakfast at 7:30 on a Sunday morning. Thus fortified I found the airport and the long term car park.



I'll just wait for that Jessica.
At least she'll be nice to me

Huh.  You're off, leaving me behind?


 



















I thought tropical rain storms came in the afternoon?  Well we had one at eight in the morning, and like yesterday's it lasted barely five minutes but was so heavy.  I thought it was going to erupt again as I waited for the shuttle bus but I was spared.

Caught an uneventful flight home, met by Barb, we popped over to Colmslie to pick up Nick and Jan's car (they're off to Tasmania) and drove home separately.

THE END

Details

Jess's car - a diesel Mini, didn't miss a beat.  It has very low profile tires, and on the coarse road surfaces encountered (sealed roads, but with a coarse grit rather than the smooth tarmac of suburbia) they were noisy.  A fun car to drive, very good acceleration and deceptively comfortable - my back often gets very stiff on long journeys, but not in this car.   The engine ran so slowly (a mere 2300 rpm at 130 kph in NT) that it was possible to not realise there were still one or even two gears to go.  Wonderful stuff!

Distance covered - 4047 km.  Would have been about 300 less but for the detour when the road to Cloncurry was closed.  This figure involves driving around the various towns and diversions to see this or that.

Diesel fuel used - 226 litres

Consumption - 5.60 litres per 100km (50 mpg Imperial, 42 mpg US)

Fuel price - varied from around $1.15 per litre in south east Queensland to $1.92 in one or two remote places.  I got away with paying a peak price of $1.86.

Greatest one day distance - 771 km, Duaringa to Winton.  Several other days just short of 700 km.

REALLY THE END

Maleny to Darwin Day 8 - Mataranka to Darwin

Almost there!  As I said yesterday everything becomes a blur, not because it's mind numbing but because the distances are simply so great and the road just goes on and on, and then it goes on and on again.  For me it's wonderful - or I'm somewhat sad! - but record keeping is a problem.  Perhaps next time I should use a voice recorder.  If there isn't one on my phone I'm pretty sure the mp3 player can do the trick. 


A jumbo termite mound in Mataranka


One of the things that has been striking are the termite hills.  They first became apparent after (I think) Blackwater, give or take a few hundred kilometres, and gradually increased in frequency and number until by the time I hit NT they were a continual part of the landscape. 

I've included one or two photos on previous days, but they really are a persistent feature. Unfortunately even if I had not been travelling at a magical 130 kph (no more Jess, honest, that's what the GPS is for :) it would have been impractical or unwise to stop for photos of the really good bits.  Perhaps a GoPro mounted on the roof would help, but it would have to be rearward facing to avoid being splatted into gungedom by the inconsiderate insect life.

Here in NT people, presumably the locals, dress the termite mounds.  Oh.  I don't have a single picture to show you, but they are dressed in tee shirts, rags, towels, old dresses - and judging by their condition many were dressed some time ago.  Sometimes a group of mounds will be so attired and from a distance they can look like a group of people standing around for a chat.  And I'm not sure about this, but sometimes they appear to have been carved into the shape of people, usually corpulent, although I'm willing to be corrected. 


The main street, Katherine

I did stop in Katherine for coffee.  I'd been there with Barb and her Red Hat friends in 2012 and recalled it as being a pleasant town, biggish by outback standards.  And so it is.  I had coffee in the same Coffee Club - why is their coffee always so bitter? - and used the same loo in the same mall.  They charged me a dollar!  The man said "there had been problems", implying they were keeping riff raff away.  Certainly the best loo all trip!


 Until Katherine traffic had been sparse for days, ever since Duaringa back in Queensland.  Around the bigger towns there'd be local traffic, but it would fade rapidly with distance from the town.  It was unusual to catch up with or be caught up by other vehicles.  There'd be the occasional four unit road train but not much else.
 
After Katherine the traffic increased markedly and signs of human habitation became more frequent too.  Sometimes I had to slow down for the vehicle in front.  Gosh!
 


From The Lookout at Pine Creek
This is a (deliberately) drowned gold mine

I stopped briefly at Pine Creek to see what was there - a small tidy town given over to the tourist trade.  It had briefly been a gold town and the open cast pit has been deliberately flooded to avoid acidification.
 







Then there was Adelaide River.  Not an unpleasant place, but I was unable to identify the hotel where we had stopped for coffee in 2012.  It was striking that now the towns were within easy distance of Darwin everything was cleaner, tidier, sharper.
 
I saw signs to numerous World War II airfields to the west of the Stuart Highway.  Most seemed to be accessed by unsealed roads so I passed them by.  Purely by chance I stopped at a broad dirt track that seemed to stretch parallel to the road for a kilometre or more.  Something had begun to rattle and it was really annoying!
 

A fighter squadron

 
What I didn't realise was that this was Strauss airfield, a roadside airstrip dating from WWII.  Better still there was a display of three fighter planes of the time in the form of two dimensional cut outs, and they were really, really good!






These really were 2-D cut outs!



 

 
 A few minutes before I stopped I had driven through a torrential downpour lasting less than five minutes, but sufficient to cause a near white out.  This is the receding cloud.

 
 

I was  nearly there!  A pause to fill up on the outskirts and then I arrived at Ailsa and Fez's place at 3:30, and was made very welcome.  Fez insisted we awash the car!

Ailsa was away for a week at an Aboriginal settlement so it was Fez, Khaya, Mpumi and I who went out for dinner at the sailing club.
 
 
Tomorrow - homeward bound!

Maleny to Darwin Day 7 - Threeways to Mataranka

Wha ... wha ... what's going on? 
Last thing I remember I was up a
tree taking a rest. 

The stretch from Threeways to Mataranka wasn't all that far, just over 500 km, and I was in no rush.  On the other hand Threeways was not very comfortable and I was on my way by 6:00.  This was NT time and it was only just getting light.





Nice sunrise though!

No rush perhaps, but I have to confess that by this time one town was blurring into another. 


Renner Springs - I stopped to take a picture, can't remember why but there is a big puddle.  Late extra: I remember now - I had an appalling cup of coffee!




Elliott - I don't think I stopped.  Lyn next door said her husband had a night there much disturbed by noise some years ago.  I recall it being a bigger place than I expected and looking quite pleasant!

Daly Waters - well how many servos have a plane parked outside?  True it was in need of a little attention, but so what!




Larrimah - remember the name but nothing else.

Mataranka - yay!  It's a long stretched out place, with lots of green space, in the sense of grassy swards (nice word that).  There were two, perhaps three servos, not all of which had wire mesh over the windows.  The supermarket did though.  I arrived in town around noon and found my pre-booked motel/camp site with no problem.  It was very pleasant and they were perfectly happy for me to sit in the outside covered bar and plug in my laptop.  They gave me a jumbo fan to blow away the innumerable flies, and when I asked for a beefburger and chips - hey! I needed feeding! - but without the bun they thought me very odd, but happily acceded to my perversion in exchange for cash.  They couldn't stop themselves including the obligatory beetroot salad.

The cabin was nice.  It was advertised as being built of rammed earth, which was new to me though I'd heard the expression.  It felt unusually solid and quiet, and rather pleasant.  Still an excess of insects but on the plus side although there was no Channel One, I did get ABC 1, 2, 3 and News 24.  Win some lose some! 

Barb had been very excited at my coming to Mataranka - not clear whether she came here years ago or planned to but never made it.  I was under very strict instructions to visit the hot springs and take lots of pictures. 

Well.  The road to one - the Bitter Springs - was cut off by water over the road and I don't know how far away the swift water rescue teams are in NT.  The second - the Thermal Pools, I missed initially as I was talking to Barb at the time and walked right past the path.  When I turned back I'm afraid my enthusiasm drained away - one path was closed and the other looked uninviting, and I just felt tired.  When I reported back to Barb she demonstrated the art of glowering over the phone!

On the other hand I did see some ... wallabies?  Help me out here!

Tomorrow - DARWIN!

 

Maleny to Darwin Day 6 - Mt Isa to Threeways

Woohoo!  I'm going foreign!  Well, leaving Queensland and entering NT.  Isn't that going abroad?

This was the view from the veranda of my cabin at Mt Isa.  It was a shame to leave.


The distance to Threeways was 700 km, not the furthest I'll have covered in one day, but the one where watching the fuel tank would be most critical.  There are only two possible fuel stops - Camooweal just inside Queensland, and Barkly Homestead.  The longest leg is between these two places, at around 270 km.  This was not actually a problem but it was more important than usual to keep the tank filled.



At Camooweal.  This is not the servo, but the only slightly
grottier property next door.  There was another servo
as bad as this, abandoned.

I have to report that nothing went wrong!  I checked oil, fuel, water and tyres (yep, there were still four of the buggers) like a good driver and all was good.

The main problem has become the availability of coffee.  At Camooweal I was served by an unshaven but perfectly pleasant chap, but I saw no coffee machine.  I had to go for tea and raisin toast instead and in fact they were both excellent, belying the rather rundown air of the place.




Woohoo!  Going foreign!

At Barkly Homestead, now in the Northern Territory, the feeling was a lot more salubrious.  I was attended to by not one but TWO English girls.  Pointing out that she was a long way from home in a very remote place I asked one of them if she was enjoying herself.  Oh yes, came the reply, I was here last year and wanted to come back!
 

They don't stand out that well, but the Homestead had
old steam boilers and engines on display as decoration. 
This was not uncommon.

As I drove at 130 kph from Barkly towards to Threeways and the Stuart Highway - miles from anywhere in the bush - I saw this plume of smoke from afar.  Being a good citizen I stopped to call triple zero. 

No connection, no signal, for the first time since leaving home.  I needn't have worried though, as more and more appeared and the SES were bound to be aware of them.  I saw no signs of commotion, so perhaps they were planned burn offs.  Certainly there's been so much rain fire would seem unlikely to spread easily.

I got to Threeways at about 4 (Queensland time).  The cabin or motel room, I'm not sure what to call it, would have been OK but for the plague of insects inside as night fell.  I found that if I left the bathroom light on and nearly shut the door they gathered in there and left be in reasonable peace.  Nonetheless this was not my favourite stop over.  The 5mm gap below the door did little to deter the bugs, and this was the only time I was asked for a key deposit.  The only TV channel available was Channel 1!

With time to kill I nipped down to have a look at Tennant Creek as it was only about 25 km away.  No photos.  I got there and kept driving till I found somewhere to turn round and go straight back.  It was very depressing - lots of bottle shops and people just standing around aimlessly.  It wasn't threatening, just very uninviting and really quite sad as the town buildings and layout were potentially quite pleasant.

Tomorrow, Mataranka.  I'm under orders from Barb to take pictures of the hot springs.

Maleny to Darwin Day 5 - At Mount Isa

For Mt Isa I had booked ahead for two nights in a campsite cabin.  When I arrived towards noon yesterday there was no one in the office, but then just as I was about to drive off to kill time it opened after all.  Everything was in order and I let myself into the cabin to be met by a blast, not of heat but of coolth.  Whoever had made up the room had not only left the aircon running, but running set to 19°C.  Brr

The next day - today - the bear demonstrated why aircon is such a good idea, especially in Mt Isa.  Yep, Mt Isa is very, very hot.  There are few people on the streets, giving the impression that nothing is happening.  In fact most shop frontages have very dark glass keeping both the heat and sticky beaking at bay.
 




Anyway, this was my day off.  How to do Mt Isa in one day?  The information centre - when I found it, it's on the main road well hidden in plain view - was great!  I declined the two and a half hour underground tour of a display mine and did the dinosaur experience and the above ground exhibition of Mt Isa's mining history instead, both on the information centre site.
.

They were, of course, very well done.  I shan't weigh you down with detail but I do like the scene on the right.  Miners mining?  WRONG!  It's proper academic palaeontologists fossil hunting!

It seems that splitting rocks by drilling a serious size hole, packing it with explosives and lighting the blue touch paper causes less damage to the fossils than going at the rocks with a sledge hammer.  Well, who knew!




Not unlike Broken Hill the town is overlooked by a hill and enormous spoil heap.

The recent rains had made the town - and the whole trip - uncharacteristically green.











Mt Isa has two artificial dams for its water supply and in the afternoon I drove to the nearer, Lake Moondarra.  You're meant to say ooh and ahh.












It was still hot!  The brrr setting on the aircon was beginning to make sense, and the bear was having identity problems in the heat.  He seemed to think koalas really are bears like him.  Certainly he shares their propensity for sleep.











Heat was the main theme in Mt Isa.  It really was too hot to do much outside.  I commented to someone that the town doesn't seem to have the café culture we expect further south (cafes are extremely thin on the ground), to which his response was that it was too hot, we have pubs instead. OK, but why was Coffee Club doing such a roaring trade? 

Oh, I nearly forgot, the accommodation. It was "just" a cabin, somewhat rundown but clean, and it was great.  It was intended as a budget holiday stop for a family of four, so it was fully equipped in the kitchen - I didn't bother with the electric frying pan - and had a real table and chairs to spread out on.  And as noted at the start, the aircon worked!

Right. Done Mt Isa.  Tomorrow NT and Threeways, where the Barkly and Stuart Highways meet, only 700 km..


 

Maleny to Darwin Day 4 - Cloncurry to Mount Isa

Today was almost a rest day - less than a couple of hours to Mt Isa.  A very uneventful leg compared to yesterday.  The highlights in pictures, as I spent most of the afternoon lolling.  Much more tomorrow!


My motel for the night - the Gidgee Inn Motel 

When I pointed out the lack of microwave I was told

"we don't do self catering cabins. 

They advertised a grill and bar, but not that the chef

was off on an extended holiday!



A memorial to Burke and Wills on the road to Mt Isa ...





... with a council bin tastefully positioned

A picture of a nice tree













Termite hills were becoming more numerous

Did I mention the scenery was getting better and better?


  

 













.

Maleny to Darwin Day 3 - Winton to Cloncurry

The day dawned as per usual - sunny and hot by 6:30.  Weather conditions - ie rain and flooding - are a continual concern on this trip, but so far I've been lucky.  The nice lady at the rather run down motel had assured me that the day before the road to Cloncurry had been open "with caution", and that a number of her guests had set off and none had come back.  Perhaps turned back would have been a more appropriate choice of words, but I got her drift.


So, off to the servo.  A rather confused stick insect wandered over and took a close interest in one of the wheels.  I think it's important to be aware of the finer details of the trip.










Water over the road?  What water over the road? 
I was looking forward to a dip.

Before leaving I had a final drive around Winton.  It's quite a big place - lots of back streets - but no big supermarket - a medium sized Foodworks was all I found, and several pubs. 


The bear seemed to be settling down and was getting somewhat blasé.  And yes, that is a concrete cow in the distance.





The streets are remarkably wide, the main street and several others being dual carriage way with centre parking, and this turned out to be typical of the towns I was now passing through.  To my eyes Winton was a rather tired looking place though undeniably clean and tidy.  The only café I found was closed until March or April, and is closed anyway on Mondays.


Smart bear, huh? 
Watch it, you might get that dip after all.

At last I got moving in the direction of Cloncurry and 5 or 6 km out of town I came across this.  Oh dear!  While I was pulled over a ute coming the other way stopped and confirmed the water was 600 mm over the road in places.  It had been ok the day before but had risen quickly overnight.  He'd passed parked vehicles which been waiting through the night.




What to do?  Well I knew that these floods can fall as quickly as they rise, so what else but to go back to town and try to find some coffee.

Yay!  The Winton Bakery does (good) coffee, and better still a really good sausage roll.  It was a surprisingly large, spacious shop, high ceilinged and echo-ey.  It was also fiercely air conditioned and was a welcome respite from the heat outside. 

Fortified, an hour or so later I tried again.  Still closed.  This time I had a conversation with a Maori chap on his way from the Gold Coast to Mount Isa.  He advised me to drop into the shire council offices - which I had seen - to get the most up to date information available.  This I did and the delightful lady there couldn't have been more helpful.  Yep, the road was closed.  Thanks very much!  However the road to Hughenden was open "with caution", and from there I could take the Flinders Highway to Cloncurry.  But, protested I, isn't the Kennedy Development Road (to Hughenden) a dirt road?  The poor lady was almost hurt, oh no, it's sealed all the way now.  Silly me!



I called the next shire council, which happened to be in Hughenden, and they confirmed the road to Cloncurry to be open, though the stretch between there and Julia Creek was "with caution".  What the hell!  It only meant a doubling of the distance.  What's a few more hours driving!

  

That's it on the left - the road - as seen through the windscreen.  You might make out a tiny speck in the distance.  I had deliberately pulled over to let a couple of designer 4WDs go past and lead the way.  If anything was on the road deserving of caution I'd like them to give me early warning.  In fact the road was perfectly ok, with a few puddles on some of the floodways.

 

 
Hughenden was a slightly more alive place than Winton, and it did have a couple of old windmills as street furniture or sculptures in the main street.  I didn’t linger, though, pressing on first to Richmond and then Julia Creek, both of which struck me as unremarkable. 

I was fixated on Cloncurry!  The road after Julia Creek was “with caution”, so on I sped.  The only danger on this section seemed to be that of driving off the road while distracted by the stunning scenery the closer I got to Cloncurry. 

 

I arrived shortly before 5pm whereas I had intended to be there by lunchtime, but hey, the 340 km journey had stretched to 620 km because of the road closure!

 

 

This is Jess's car pulled over on the road to Hughenden.  I show it partly because my editor back in Maleny insisted on more pictures of the scenery, and partly because I thought there should be evidence that the car was actually there!

 

 

 

Cloncurry was very ho-hum, big on fossils and dinosaurs.  It did have a Woolworths though.  The shelves were partly bare following a power cut the night before.  I did say ho-hum!

 

Maleny to Darwin Day 2 - Duaringa to Winton

Surveying Duaringa - more or less all of it

Went to bed early, woke up early.  I had coffee in the motel room and was on my way by 6:30.


The ursine overseer maintained his somewhat aloof air, so I'm not really sure if he had a good or a bad night.  Being concerned not to cause a temper tantrum I did return him to his place behind the front seats before setting off.


Road reports said there was water over the road at Winton, my target for the day, but that's not the same as saying it was closed. Having followed these reports for the last week or so I knew that the situation changed daily and it was best to just get a move on. 

I wanted to be in Emerald for breakfast, for no other reason than I'd passed through a few years ago and thought it a pleasant place.  But it is a small town and this was Sunday, so I didn't know what my chances were.

This was not yet proper outback and there were small towns - villages to my British way of thinking - every few tens of kilometres, positively built up and high density compared to what I'd encounter later. That said, I was surprised at the size of Blackwater, for it had at least three servos, a back street and a KFC or MacDonalds (I think - I didn't take proper notes). 

Blackwater is a railway and a coal town, and I was beginning to twig that I was going to be paralleling the railway for ... well for hundreds of kilometres.  I didn't mind the railway at all, but it's electrified as far as Emerald which means an endless procession of power poles marching into the distance.  Not quite what I was anticipating.  Perhaps I should have gone via Dalby and Roma!

Emerald is BIG.  Well, big enough to have not one but two small shopping malls, one with  a Coles, the other with a Woolworths.  And I did get breakfast there at 8:30 on a Sunday morning, so three cheers for Emerald! 

This is where electrification ran out and the view became unspoiled by the poles.  It was now that the real drive began, becoming miles and miles of miles and miles.


Following the recent rains few places were as dry and parched as they had been, and for the most part it was positively green. 







Sometimes the flat or rolling landscape was broken by hills in the distance.  There were far more trees than I'd expected










Driving on from Emerald the distances between towns began to open out.  I stopped briefly in Alpha - big letters on the map, small town in reality - where I'd got a decent cup of coffee at the bakery when passing through in 2009.  It's closed on Sunday.




In Barcaldine I saw the sign for the Tree of Knowledge but failed to stop.  Wasn't it poisoned a few years ago?  I don't recall much else of this town.  I think I realised that as it was Sunday a lot of places would be closed, and in any case by this time I was man with a mission - Winton or bust.  Well, sort of!



No idea - these were outside a Winton real estate agent
They seemed be nailed in place


Longreach - I didn't even stop. 

Stockmans' Hall of Fame?  Done it.

Quantas Museum? Yep. 

Where's Winton? 

I got there just before 5 pm.  What water over the road?  I saw nuthin'!      


Line shafts displayed outside one of the several pubs in
 Winton.  I'm guessing they came from a shearing shed.

For some reason I felt very tired, rather like yesterday.  Perhaps 770 km and 11 hours on the road has something to do with it.  I found a motel and once again slept rather well.    

Maleny to Darwin Day 1 - to Duaringa via Rockhampton

So, I left Maleny bound for Darwin on Saturday 17 January (this is being written a few days in arrears).  I say "I", but  more properly it's "we" as Jess had provided me a companion. 

You should just be able to make him out keeping an aloof eye on me from between the front seats.  You might also discern that the back seat was pretty well packed tight with some of Jess's belongings. 





She, being the kind soul that she is, had left me the whole of the front seat for my bag - though not the foot well.  That was allocated to the washing basket.








I'd debated with myself which route to take.  They all converge on Cloncurry and Mt Isa, but Maleny is positioned such that going via Dalby, Roma and so on makes equal sense with a route through Gympie and places more directly north.  I went for the latter on the grounds I had been on the Warrego Highway a few years ago.

Off I went and I must confess the first few hours on the Bruce Highway were tedious. I got up to the Bundaberg region, and that was tedious, then Gladstone and Rockhampton where I stopped for fuel. All very ho-hum. 




I had stopped off for a break near Gin Gin.  A Jeff Seeney election car was there and I'm ashamed to confess that, depending on your sympathies, I neither polished his windscreen nor let his tyres down.  Sorry.



There's massive building of elevated roadways at Rockhampton, and surely flood waters would never reach that high ... well I think the entire east coast would be submerged if they did!  No photos I'm afraid. Too busy driving.

From Rockie I headed west on the Capricorn Highway.  Now this is what it's all about.  The traffic petered out after Westwood -  50 or 60 km out of Rockhampton - and I had the road to myself much of the time and was able to just sail along. 

What I had not expected were the coal trains, quite a lot of them and very long ones.  The line is electrified as far as Emerald and appears to serve mainly the needs of coal.  I was very struck by how clean they all were: the implication I read was the effect of environmental concerns.

I'd hoped to reach Blackwater by dusk but when I got as far as Duaringa I called it a day - 700 km seemed far enough.  There was a pleasant looking motel with a sign on the door directing potential inmates to the adjacent servo.  Having paid my money and received a key I made it into the room just in time to beat the torrential rain that descended for about half an hour before stopping and wandering off elsewhere.

For some reason I felt tired and slept really, really well.