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.
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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..