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After two days in Alice Springs I was restocked, repaired and ready to move on. I first drove out to the East MacDonnell ranges and had a look at Emily's gap. This is not what you're thinking, but is another gap in the mountain range along with Heavitree, Simpsons and Jesse gaps all located within a fairly short distance of one another. Some of the gaps and gorges in the West MacDonnell ranges have pools in them but Emily's gap was dry (ahem). There was some aboriginal rock art present that represent caterpillars and have some dreamtime significance for the aboriginals.
The logical and sensible route back to Melbourne would be to go down the well made Stuart highway and turn left at Port Augusta. The route I wanted to take was through Simpson's desert, travelling over the sand dunes, which would take me through to the Birdsville track. This route is a serious four wheel drive route, and should really only be done with two or more vehicles, and I really wasn't well enough prepared to tackle it.
The route I ended up taking involved backtracking up the Stuart highway and then taking the Plenty highway east. The Plenty highway is really the most direct route to take to Brisbane, not Melbourne, but my plan was to go as far as Boulia and then turn south towards Birdsville and the Birdsville track. The route I was planning to take was longer, considerably rougher, more chances of punctures, windscreen breakages and other damage, much dustier, has more expensive fuel and little radio, phone or TV reception. But I haven't been this way before so to me it was the more interesting way to go (but not at all logical).
The first days travel got me as far as Jervois station on the Plenty highway. Jervois is a working cattle station but offers fuel for sale and has a camping area (with $2 hot showers too!).I got talking to the lady running the campground and some other campers and they all said the road further east got rougher than the road so far. This was a disappointment as the drive in was quite enjoyable over good quality gravel roads.
The next day I managed to get a reasonably early start and managed to cover about 350km. This doesn't sound like much but it still took over five hours of driving over some at times ordinary roads. There were numerous bulldust patches which could sometimes be covering up some deepish holes, so it's not recommended to drive into them at high speed.
Crossing the border into Queensland meant a change in time zone and also a change in the name of the road from the Plenty highway to the Donohue highway. This was the last time I planned to be in the Northern Territory for this trip. It was interesting to observe that some of the issues currently being debated in the Northern Territory are issues that have come and gone in the rest of Australia possibly 10 to 20 years ago.
The open roads in the NT have only had a speed limit introduced in the last year or so. Prior to that you could legally go as fast as you like but now the limit is 130 km/h which is still considerably higher than the rest of Australia. Interestingly (and tragically) the road toll so far this year in the NT is considerably higher than last year, even with speed limits being introduced.
Last August when I was here, all the talk was about a drivers licence demerit point system being introduced for the first time. A demerit point system has been in place in the rest of Australia for the last 20 years or so (I believe?). There is still no requirement in the NT to wear a bicycle helmet but I don't believe there are any plans to make it compulsory (as it is in the states). Now the issue of the day is about introducing restrictions on fireworks on the annual formation of the Territory day but only after years of fireworks related injuries.
The letters to the editor in the "Northern Territory News" often have the theme of how the "…Territory way of life…" is being threatened. I gather the Territory way of life means how there are more freedoms from regulations in the NT than "down south". Or it's just more lawless in the NT, depending on the way you chose to look at it.
I was planning to stay near the border at Tobermory station but they no longer have a campground anymore. I ended up staying about 100km over the border at Georgina River. The river is quite wide and looks as if it could be deep but it was in fact completely dry when I was there. The whole country looks very dry but I was told by some people whom had travelled over the Plenty highway about two weeks ago that there had been rain, and the road was very muddy. The soil looks very fine grained and clay like and also looks as if it would turn to mud very quickly after rain.
It was a 100km run into Boulia the next morning over a progressively improving road. Boulia is a small town servicing the surrounding pastoral stations. It is also the home of the "Min Min encounter show" at the visitors centre. This show explains what Min Min is but I didn't stay long enough to watch the show but my curiosity was aroused enough to look it up on Wikipedia. The Min Min lights apparently are a phenomenon in the surrounding channel country that have been seen before and after European settlement. Apparently there are several theories to what causes the lights but no definite explanation.
The Diamantina Development road takes you south from Boulia to the even smaller town of Bedourie 200km away that was to be my stop for that night. The surrounding pastoral area is known as "Channel country" and is characterised by vast open flat, clay land. The land has "channels" all through it which are depressions in the land where, during rain, the water flows through. The landscape was testing my depth perception as I drove along. Often there is very little between you and the horizon and objects all tend to appear to be far away. If you drive towards an object, it tends to be hard to gauge how far away it is until all of a sudden you are close to it. The difficulty in gauging depth is hard to observe visually, let alone try and capture properly in a two dimensional photograph.
The landscape also has vast areas of what is known as "gibber plains". Gibber plains are plains of land with a layer of medium to small sized rocks (i.e. gibber rocks) on top. Apparently gibber rocks are the remains of mountains that once existed. This is a most inhospitable and alien looking country and is the closest I reckon I'll ever get to a Martian landscape. Yet this landscape apparently supports numerous species of native animals and cattle also somehow live in the gibber plains.
The town of Bedourie began as a watering hole for cattle being taken to market in Adelaide. The Bedourie hotel, formerly known as the Royal hotel, was built out of sun dried mud brick in 1886 and is still an operating hotel. I ended up paying a visit and had a meal there. The bar area is small and Spartan but does have the large plasma TV up in one corner which I don't believe they had back in 1886.
The caravan park must be the best value park in Australia. A powered site cost me $6.50 and included having a largish artesian fed hot tub right next door. The last thing I expected to be doing at the end of that day, in the middle of a harsh gibber plain and on the edge of the Simpson Desert, was to be sitting back in a hot spa drinking a beer!
The next mornings 200km drive to Birdsville was over a mixture of bitumen and good dirt road. This was some of the best roads I'd driven on since Kununurra probably and was quite welcome. Birdsville and Bedourie are actually very similar except Birdsville seems to have got all the publicity which means Birdsville has the tourists. There is one caravan park in Birdsville and there would have been a good 100 or more people staying there the night I was there. The travellers there were a mixture of the ubiquitous grey nomad towing the caravan and also the more adventurous four wheel drivers, coming or going on a Simpsons Desert adventure.
The Simpsons desert track (the French line) terminates in Birdsville about 38km to the West. One of the towns attractions is Big Red which is the name given to a large sand dune at the start of the Simpsons Desert track. The track goes over the top of the dune and is a place where people seem to like to test their cars out and "conquer" Big red by driving over it. I took the drive out to Big red but contented myself by walking over it. The view from the top is quite good and worth the climb. The desert dunes are all aligned in a north-south direction and stretch out to the horizon. I read that some of the dunes are about 250km long.
The drive out to Big Red was made interesting by all the standing water in the area. I wasn't expecting to have 5 water crossings to negotiate either. The rain occurred over a fortnight ago and has caused the country side to look greener but the water still hasn't drained away. I believe the clay like soil doesn't drain very well and the land is bowl like in places which means it can remain wet for some time after rain. My journey back to Birdsville was behind a group of motorbikes that had been out in the desert. The first and last water crossings had at least one bike bogged but I was able to get through without a hiccup? I would have thought that I would have got bogged before a motorbike, but there you go.
Birdsville also has one of the more interesting museums that I've been to. The Birdsville Working Museum is a privately owned museum that offers 3 tours daily. The proprietor is an enthusiastic and knowledgeable man whose tours involve not only an explanation, but also a demonstration of some of his historic machinery, contraptions and appliances that he has collected. The tour takes about 50 minutes but is fast paced and the impression is of a slightly eccentric bloke showing off his stuff. The items included a cardboard record player, gas powered fan, solid carbide (Acetylene) lights, a simplex engine driving a drag saw and a mule driven chaff maker. And there was much, much more…
One piece that interested me was the water tank dispenser on wheels made by J.Furphy and sons. Apparently these water tanks were used commonly by soldiers whom used to gather around the water tank to chat and tell yarns.From the soldiers came the expression that when a tall or dubious story was told, they were said to have told a "Furphy".
Birdsville's most recognisable feature would probably be the pub. The pub was built in 1884 which is only 2 years before the Bedourie pub. Like Bedourie, it is still an operating pub but unlike Bedourie, the inside is reasonably large and has an interesting collection of mementos', photos and paintings decorating the walls. I dropped in for a beer but didn't sample the food.
Birdsville doesn't have a hot artesian pool but does use the heat and steam from the underground water to generate some of the town's electricity. There is a 150Kw (not Mwatt) steam plant in town, which is powered by the hot Artesian water, but I didn't find out how much of the towns power demand this plant actually supplies.
The Birdsville track starts in Birdsville and heads south 540kms to Marree. The track passes through the Strzelecki desert, Sturt Stony desert, and the Tirari desert and runs beside the Simpsons desert. I was therefore not surprised to find the countryside not all that lush. Not far from Birdsville is the SA border and another time zone change. There were also a few signs there which explained some of the land uses and information about land erosion. I found out that the stone Gibber acts like plants to reduce erosion of the soil underneath.
The 320 km drive was unbroken by any visible sign of human life. The only signs of life of any kind were the road and the odd cattle waterhole along the way.
At one point I happened along a family with a flat tyre and the car fallen off its jack. A few other people stopped after I had stopped and between us all we managed to get the spare wheel onto the car. After helping with someone else's flat tyre, I only got anther 40 km before I got my third car tyre puncture for the trip. I got the tyre changed with some morale support from some other travellers and then got the last 60km to Mungerannie without further incident. Mungerannie is a hotel with a campground but also has a tyre repair service. The puncture was in the new tyre I had purchased in Karratha (of course) and turned out to be a tear about 2cm long in the middle of the tyre tread. The size of the hole made it a borderline case for repair but I ended up getting it patched (for $40) but I left the spare on the car and made the patched tyre my new spare. I was not confident the patch would hold but maybe it could get me out of trouble if I really needed it.
So now I had a left rear that was a different rim and width size to the other tyres. My front right tyre had a plug repair in it and one of my spares was a bit dodgy. For these reasons I thought I might reduce my gravel road travel and head directly through to Leigh creek rather than head to Roxby downs. I wanted to go by Roxby downs as I've never been there so it was a bit disappointing but not the end of the world. And I still had to make it down the rest of the Birdsville track yet.
Mungerannie has a largish artesian hot water pool in the campground which was most welcome. There quite a few people camped there that night and so a few were making use of the pool. I sat in the pool for about an hour and had a chat with a few people. I must have been talking too much again as I ended up being the only person left in the pool after a while. The fact that I was nude at the time may possibly have had something to do with it too (not really-I was pretty quiet actually).
The next day was noticeably cold and it was quite depressing to be back in nasty winter weather. I really felt like I was heading in the wrong direction when I once more headed south towards Marree and the end of the Birdsville track. Along the way I crossed the dry Coopers creek which features in Banjo Patterson's' "Clancy of the overflow". Until very recently, being the ignoramus that I am, I had never heard of "Clancy of the overflow" and Coopers creek. Again Wikipedia has helped me out and I quote below;
"…And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected
(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar);
'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
"Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are."
In my wild erratic fancy, visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the Western drovers go;…"
The part of the Cooper I saw wasn't all that impressive or romantic but whom am I to argue with Banjo Patterson? He may possibly be referring to another part of the Cooper however the Birdsville track was used to drove cattle to the markets in Adelaide in days gone past.
Further south of Coopers creek is the Dog Fence. This fence was built in 1885 as a Rabbit proof fence but was unsuccessful and was converted to a Dog proof fence in 1914 to keep the Dingo's from coming further south. The fence is 5 320 km long is the longest fence in the world.
It wasn't too long before Marree came into sight and the Birdsville track was then completed. Marree sits at the junction of the Oodnadatta and Birdsville tracks and was once the railhead and change of gauge station for the Ghan railway. The Hotel is a relatively large building and is evidence of the town's former glory. Some of the old railroad memorabilia is on display in the centre of the town.
You couldn't say Marree was a very big place but as I was sitting in the door of my camper having a coffee, I got chatting to a bloke whom had just pulled up and it turned out he was the father of a bloke I went to the AMC with. Isn't it a small world?
Well, that's about it for this part of the journey. All going to plan I will have another 10 days before I get on the ferry back to Tassie. No doubt I will find more to write about over that period so I'll "see" you then.
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