Hello again!
How things change! We are now
learning to mostly ignore the No Camping/RV signs in certain places– all too
often in many towns we are told by fellow travellers, the locals and Council
workers that ‘Yes, you can stay here, just ignore the signs’. Or they will tell
you about such and such a place. Apparently these signs are mostly erected to
deter long term campers, or those who wish to set up ‘home’ on a permanent
basis. Unfortunately some people seem to think everywhere belongs to them and they can live there indefinitely!
When we stayed at Liverpool Creek
for 2 nights before heading to Paronella Park, council workers were coming and
going, filling up their water trucks from the creek for the local road
works. One friendly bloke told us that the No Camping signs had actually been
put up due to local Aboriginals trying to make a permanent home there. (Without
being nasty or discriminating, we call them ‘originals’: after all, they were the original people in this country
weren’t they!)
So within reason, when we are
told about these places, we keep them in mind and might stay there, usually
only for a night or two, sometimes longer, such as Winfield Park in Malanda,
depending on what we have been told. The old
saying “It’s not what you know, but who you know” certainly is very true eh?
So Friday 8th
November, after such a fabulous time at Paronella Park, we headed back 2 km to
stay at a place called Sharp Park, which is the local Model Aeroplane Club
grounds. Once again, this has No Camping signs, but we were told that the club
encourages ‘genuine’ travellers to stay, as it discourages vandals. There were
hot showers, water and electricity (which we didn’t learn of until later by
some Council workers who dropped by to eat their lunch, and Mark had already
set up the generator so we could use the washing machine!). There was what
looked like a donation box on the toilet block wall, so I dropped in some gold
coins. Have to laugh at this one…I was
told much later by a fellow traveller we caught up with again, that evidently it
wasn’t a donation box…it was a used syringe box!! He did a have a laugh at my
kindness! Oh my Gawd…when that is emptied I wonder just how many gold coins
will be mixed in with the syringes, as I can’t be the only person who has ‘donated’!!
I always thought used syringe boxes were yellow with writing– this was a metal
box and green!
The WikiCamps app I mentioned in
an earlier blog has been such a terrific tool to find places to stay also. We
now use this much more than our Camps Book – with the information from users
being dated, it means we can get a much better idea of the place along with
photos. I have been adding to it as we’ve gone along. The best thing is that I
can write a comment and take a photo without having to be connected to the
internet – it simply saves it and the next time we are connected it
automatically updates my information! How’s that for ease of use! Such a great
invention!
Anyway, we stayed at Sharp Park
for a night, then headed up to Archer Creek 16 kms past Ravenshoe. The reason
we went back up the Palmerston Highway was that our son Scott is driving up to
Airlie Beach with 7 of his mates at the end of December for 5 nights. (Yes, I
know, it is indeed a bloody long way
to drive from Victoria for 5 nights! Not to mention the fact that I kinda have a
small freak-out every time I think of 8 young men in their early 20’s driving
in two cars all that way!!!! OMG
kangaroos, semi-trailers, driver distraction..My imagination is in total
overdrive! Anyway, we are going to meet them there and spend time with them. We
didn’t want to go back down the coast, so chose to go inland to Charters Towers
coming out at Townsville.
Once you get to Ravenshoe and
beyond, the landscape changes dramatically. It is very dry and dusty, with
rocky ground, and not much shade. As our neighbour Russell back home says of
places like this “It’s the middle of Bum F@#! Egypt!!” Well it may as well be, coz it is horrible,
we don’t know how the poor cows survive, and we saw plenty of them; they look
half starved, ribcages showing and all desperately looking for grass to eat!
The poor things must bake in the heat, many are huddled around whatever tree
they can find for shade; it’s so sad to see. This is all old mining country;
tin, copper, gems and gold. Must have been a dreadfully hard slog mining in
those days, absolutely backbreaking!
Happy Harold…When we
first got to Archer Creek, we went down past the gate to see if we could get
the van in down by the river. We met this local Aboriginal sitting there who
introduced himself as Harold. He had his car with him, and he was listening to
his battery radio and drinking out of a pewter mug. Seemed a nice enough guy,
told us that the markets would be on in the morning and to park our van up the
opposite end. A few hours later we could hear him yelling loudly and carrying
on. Mark took a walk down and here’s Harold trying to push his car from behind.
Somehow, he had reversed it back up over a large hillock and the front wheels
were hanging in midair, and the underneath had become stuck good and fast! He
had very obviously been drinking a great deal, again introduced himself to Mark
and asked for some help and did he have a smoke he could have. Mark said they
had already met, I’m Mark remember? Harold just laughed and said he didn’t know
what was wrong with his car. Mark said he didn’t have a winch and couldn’t help
him. A few other people had pulled up for the night by then, and Harold went
and asked all of them for help. Clearly nobody wanted to get involved, not to
mention the fact he was drunk as a skunk, and that helping him get his car back
on the road would be a recipe for disaster. So for the next few hours Harold
kept coming up to us, shaking Mark's hand and again introducing himself and saying he needed help and did Mark have a smoke!! He
wasn’t abusive or nasty, I kinda felt sorry for him in a way, even though he
clearly liked his brew and drinking was a regular pastime for him. Once it got
dark we could see his tail and brake lights coming on, he was still trying to get himself out of his
predicament! In the morning I saw him down there and about an hour later he was gone. We
walked down and found two large branches that he’d used as leverage to get the
car free! Poor Harold, hope he is not as silly next time! The people you meet eh? Makes life on the road interesting and certainly never boring!
We stayed at Archer Creek for 2
nights and decided to take a road off the main one and stayed at Mount Surprise
for the night, another dead town where you can walk the main street in 3
minutes flat! We stayed in a van park for $20 a night, a little run down, but
it had a pool we cooled off in. The place was teeming with incredibly ginormous
loudly buzzing Hornets; blasted things looked like B52’s about to land! Don’t
know what they feed on up here! Actually, just think about their name for a
sec…isn’t there a plane called a hornet?!? I hate them – I was stung by a bunch
of them when I was 8 years old and we were living at my Nana’s house in
Birkdale – youch, they hurt!! Well heaps of these were buzzing around inside
the toilet block too – bit hesitant to pull me knickers down for a wee! The owner
had a menagerie of animals – she had this big leather hat on with some kind of
strange feathers sticking out of it, and told me she would have to go and put
the emu away before we drove in! Poor Mille didn’t know what to make of that thing when I walked her past its fence -
chicken on steroids maybe? There were even geese on the property on and big
signs saying ‘Warning, Geese on Guard Duty’! Don’t know why she needed bloody geese
guarding her all the way out there in the middle of Bum F@#! Egypt, not like
she was gonna be burgled for crying out loud!!
There was another camping place
next door and the owner does snake shows – Mark was interested in it, but thank
the bloody stars it wasn’t open, coz no way
was I getting anywhere near a snake! He would have been taking a squiz at that
all by himself! Here’s a strange story Mark read about: There was some info
about a couple, in the late 1800's, who actually travelled with their sheep…on foot from the goldfields of Ballarat in Victoria. They took 4 years to get to Mount Surprise!
That’s’ just crazy! Poor Mark just could not
get his head around why anyone would
want to do that, let alone the fact it is such horrible dry countryside to even
contemplate living in, and they actually walked
all that way! I think it must have made an impact on him, as he was still talking about it 3 days later...yes, well ,it has been hot and they do say you can become fixated and delusional in the heat. Must make sure he drinks more water..
Apparently it is called Mount Surprise because this couple came around a corner and found about 100 Aboriginals camped along the river and they surprised each other! Well, gee, not like you'd expect to see other humans all out that way out in the middle of Bum F@#!
Apparently it is called Mount Surprise because this couple came around a corner and found about 100 Aboriginals camped along the river and they surprised each other! Well, gee, not like you'd expect to see other humans all out that way out in the middle of Bum F@#!
So, the next morning we left early
at 7:45am to get ahead of the heat before it got too hot. Lots more scrubby dry
landscape for miles and miles, hundreds more poor sad looking cows -was funny
though because we even saw a big group of camels!!! The road we travelled is
the Gregory Development Rd and it is a road train route. There are 25 numbered
Call Check Points along the way for vehicles to use them to inform others coming
from the opposite direction – So we got to use the CB radio the kids bought us.
So here I am saying “Caravan Southbound Call Point 25”…new experience at
that! Felt like a checkout chick asking
for service on Register 3!! The road became very narrow and tight in some
places, with only room for one vehicle and twice we had to pull to the side in
order to allow a huge road train to pass. There was an incredible lot of road
kill, either on the actual road or on the side where they have landed after
being hit, mainly cows and kangaroos, and the stench was just appalling, making
me dry retch. I jokingly said to Mark that we should keep a can of Impulse
Deodorant in the car for times like that! Honestly, the stench just permeates
the car! Gross!
We stopped at a servo in the
little town of Greenvale, (not much there either!) had a cuppa and some fruit
cake, with cute Opossum birds looking at us from the trees. They are such cute
cheeky things and I managed to get a pic of 4 of them sitting on a branch
together. Next stop was a parking bay to stretch our legs and the sun was very
hot by then. We travelled about 350 kms, coming into Charters Towers itself,
then followed the road towards Townsville for 3 kms to the camping ground,
Bivouac Junction, a very basic campground for $20 per night with power. This is
all part of the Burdekin River area, a river which is one of the most important
in Australia, and spans 710 kms.
Bivouac Junction wasn’t very
pleasant, horribly dry and dirty, no grass at all because the kangaroos come
and eat it as soon as it pokes its head out of the ground, heaps of chickens
running around, and a lot chicken poop underfoot. Millie had to be tied up,
which I hate doing to her, otherwise she would have chased the chickens! She
did manage a couple of times to try just that, with the poor chickens running
and squawking and Millie beside herself in eagerness to catch one! Mark and I
laughed, we reckon even if she did catch one she wouldn’t know what the hell to
do with it, they were bigger than her!
The owner Joe, is a lovely man
who has been there for 5 years. He is a local councillor and doesn’t have much
time to be there. He asked if we were interested in staying a while for free and
giving him a hand. All we had to do was direct any arrivals to a spot and clean
any cabins that had been used, giving us $15 for each cabin. We decided it wasn’t
a very desirable place to spend time in, and also too far from town. Charters
Towers is only 23 kms away and it isn’t exactly a nice town at all. Very old,
rundown and unkempt. The whole area we’ve come through
in the last 3 days is just awfully unpleasant and we both felt depressed and
couldn’t wait to get out of there and into some green countryside. We are really missing the beautiful Tablelands, it was so green and pretty up there with no humidity.
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Not much room on these roads!
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Bivouac Junction Campground - it sits way at the top of the banks where the Burdekin River meets the Fanning River. This place was half under water after Cyclone Yasi in Feb 2011. |
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Macrossan Park - a free camping area - very hot, dry & absolutely no shade. Only basic toilets here and no drinking water. Also a sign says 'No camping within 30 metres of Council infrastructure'. That means the toilet block and picnic tables. The Burdekin Train Bridge is in the background.
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