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lindoig8 · 3 years

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Mainly Borroloola – 23-26 June

Wednesday, 23 June - heading south

I am sure the days are getting longer now we are past the Winter Solstice, but I don’t think we have started waking any earlier so far – maybe tomorrow.

We packed up and headed south, stopping only to top up with fuel as we left the caravan park. We were heading for the Little Roper Stock Camp, one of our favourite rustic camps just out of Mataranka. We ate our lunch in Mataranka before heading the few kilometres to Little Roper, but alas, the Camp was already full. They don’t take bookings and we arrived too late. Turns out that 9am would still have been too late. I was talking to a bloke later in the day and he said he arrived at 9am and it was full at that stage – very popular for such a basic camp – Des is a great owner, but only has less than great facilities.

We drove on to the Hi-Way Roadhouse at the intersection of the Carpentaria Highway – our next bit of road. The Roadhouse was already filling fast and it overflowed by late afternoon too. The Daly Waters Caravan Park is only 20-odd clicks away and that was also overflowing before 9am as we knew it would be so we never even went in there. From experience, it is quite quaint, but it attracts a rougher crowd and I am not sure it is the sort of place we sophisticats would choose to stay – we certainly didn’t choose it the last few times we were in the area.

I walked around the camp area at the Roadhouse and identified 22 species of birds, including numerous White-gaped Honeyeaters (with photos to prove it) although they are not really supposed to be in the area according to any of our bird guides.

The facilities here were a bit basic so we decided to have a shower in our own little bathroom. We haven’t showered in it for at least 4 years, choosing to forgo the pleasure of cleanliness or just use the facilities provided. It usually has too many bits and pieces stored in there and we had previously used it mainly when we have access to ‘town water’ rather than depleting our own supply. But I have to say it was a wonderful luxury – and we doubled up with another shower in our own little cubby next night too.

We ate dinner in the Roadhouse and the meals were huge. I had the rissoles – 3 rissoles almost the size of tennis balls, with mashed potatoes, corn, broccoli, peas and carrots – the excess almost overflowed the doggybox they gave us.

Thursday, 24 June - heading east

We were almost the last ones to leave the Roadhouse next day. People seem to rush off (as early as 6am, occasionally earlier), so they can be the first to arrive at their next stop and secure the shadiest tree to sit and read all day – or chat with their neighbours – same old subjects, often with the same people – boooring, boooring, boooring!!!

I had another wander around looking for more birds, but saw nothing I hadn’t seen the previous evening.

We drove on to Cape Crawford where we had a toasted sandwich for lunch – it seemed a very long time since we had bought lunch. A highlight of the drive was seeing shiny black snake slithering across the road in front of us. Hopefully, it went between our wheels and I didn't run over it.

The road was all sealed, but most of it was very narrow and vehicles approaching us seemed hell-bent on reckless speeds so we often had to pull right off the road and stop to avoid the wall of stones flung up by their wheels. The surface was also a bit rough in places and the van swayed somewhat scarily behind us without our sway-bars attached. At one point, I had to get off the road to avoid an oncoming B-triple just where the road narrowed and I almost lost it completely. The wind from the trucks is horrendous and for a few seconds, I thought the van was going to roll. I never want to experience that 5 seconds again.

After a slow lunch, we drove on to Borroloola and were lucky to get what I think was their second-last powered site – basically parked in a roadway next to the camp kitchen, but with power and a shared tap with our neighbours on the other side. Things are tight up here with every available site being occupied every night. I wonder where the overflow goes – we may need to find out!

I wandered around and added a couple more birds to our trip list (I saw a few kangaroos over the fence in my ramblings too) and then we just sat outside the van and enjoyed our Happy Hour and a delicious dinner.

Friday, 25 June

Surprisingly, it rained overnight. We have had about ten or twelve spots of rain on the windscreen but no other rain at all since we left home. We certainly didn’t get a lot, but I heard a gentle pitter-pat on the roof during the night and the road was wet outside the van when we got up this morning.

We have decided to stay here a couple more days and then spend two days getting to Burketown. The only caravan park en route is at Hells Gate (I really liked the park there last time) but it would be a long day’s drive so we may do another bush camp instead. And the road is quite treacherous.

We went out to the supermarket and to refresh our memory of the town soon after lunch then drove down to the MacArthur River where I spent time looking for birds – but saw nothing new. Fortunately, I never saw any of those big bities out there either.

While we were out, we saw a sign with a weight restriction of 4.5 tonnes on the road we intended taking – and our rig is way over that – at least 6 tonnes. It is about 1100 kilometres on bitumen to circumvent that road, but there has been rain on the Barkley Highway too (with possible closures) so we are now in somewhat of a quandary.

We did some more research on Saturday morning and I spoke with the Police at both Borroloola and Burketown. Burketown said the Queensland side is pretty good at present and we know that the Northern Territory side of the Wollogorang Road was graded recently and is in its best condition for ages – but there is still the 4.5 tonne restriction to worry about. The Borroloola Police said the road is pretty good except for the 20 kilometres closest to the Queensland border – but there are two deep, slowly-flowing water crossings before that. ‘Deep’ means about wheel deep so that is no real impediment as long as we are careful – and we subsequently checked out the official Northern Territory Government Road Report that says there is an 8-tonne, rather than the posted 4.5 tonne, limit so we are thinking we might go that route anyway – and probably wait at the river crossings until there are other vehicles to help us cross in the event of it looking too scary.

Apart from that, it has been a pretty relaxed day with a bit of writing and discussing of options for the next several weeks. With all the latest and potential Covid restrictions, we are pretty nervous about going into the more populous coastal areas of Queensland and New South Wales where we intended catching up with about 10 groups of family and friends so our current thoughts are to get to Burketown then have our A/C and tow-bar issues resolved in Mt Isa and perhaps hole up in or around Winton for a while. We have a couple of other places we want to visit en route, but we will probably work roughly to that plan for the next 2-3 weeks anyway.

And for dinner, we ate crocodile. When we were in Alice Springs, we found this wonderful butcher that sold game and we bought a few cuts of camel (I have already reported how much we enjoyed that, especially the sausages) as well as one pack of crocodile. I ate curried croc at a pub in Melbourne about 30+ years ago, but we just pan-fried it and ate it with coconut rice and beetroot. It was a bit on the tough side, but not too bad and very tasty. It had a slight taste of pork, but was really nice and we would very happily eat more of it – better than it eating us!

We are still at Borroloola, but there is a little saga with our car that is still unresolved so I will leave that for another post, hopefully in the next day or two.

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