Homeward bound - this time!

What could be more wonderful than sitting out under a strawberry moon so close to full no one would notice, kicked back around a camp fire, drinking red and telling stories?  

Not to be entirely denied a last stretch of travel on outback roads, we took the road from Cobar to Ivanhoe – all dirt and not in very good condition due to rain - which let us live our dust/mud dreams a little longer!  We stopped half way along the road just on dusk at an organic sheep station – Belaradon Station.  We camped by the shearing shed and the owner was over in half hour with a 6 pack to share our fire along with a backpacker from France who is staying with the family learning some of the ropes. She had some great stories having been travelling and working around Oz for 2 years – what a magic existence. Made me wish I were young-er again. Next morning we rugged up and headed for their warm kitchen ½ K way for cappuccinos before packing up and continuing our southward journey  to Ivanhoe.   

Ivanhoe which, unlike its romantic historic Saxon links, albeit fictional, with the crusades and the  Knights Templar, is a pit stop for many travellers, but one we seem to pass through often as it is the hub of five ways heading east, west, north and south and in between.  We decided to head SW to Balranald on the road we had try to drive back in January but which was closed because of rain.  It was open this time and OK but for a few dodgy short stretches.  By now as we got closer to Victoria we were really looking hard for excuses to drag our heels and prolong the end of our travels so halfway to Balranald we pulled up and made camp by the side of the Hatfield pub now abandoned and derelict.  It was another magic night around the camp fire alone in the vast plains with their flat horizons, except for a dozy stumpy tail lizard and rather large spider sheltering under a sheet of roof iron near our camp. Rain drove us inside halfway through dinner and the rest of the night was beautifully quiet albeit punctuated every little while by rain and wind gusts and the bleating of a lone goat somewhere around midnight. We have seen more mobs of goats (and families of wild pigs) along the road in that area than ever before – they say the gathering of goats heralds rain.

By the time we rolled into a powered camp site, we were a bit feral after a few nights under the stars, minimal showers and many days of red dust in our ears. We spent half a day washing our intrepid van which has proven to be a force to be reckoned with when it comes to off road adventures, but which then stood slightly embarrassed and naked gleaming white and shiny but for a few, quite a few, hidden caches of red, reminders of our months eating dust along some of the best dirt roads in eastern Oz. 

Where to next!?

Over the Divide and out onto the plains

The Dividing Range was a significant geographical separation from the coast for us and quite magnificent – towering wet and dry forests, geological formations that would keep an amateur geologist humming for weeks. We passed through places which boasted tin, diamonds and sapphires, but the metal detector, little rock hammer and panning dish stayed buried in the back of the Beast under the recovery equipment.  The region remains a promise – we will return!

The trip west from the coast was like stretching and taking a deep breath. Out on the plains we struck Moree with it a huge developing solar farm and cotton growing but it was just a place on the road west. Changing vistas kept our eyes scanning the horizon as we loped along the road.  Just as a little aside – Walgett, which we passed through on the way to Bourke, is the largest producer and exporter of chick peas in Australia and the southern hemisphere. So eat up your humus it’s good for our GDP!!

We were heading to Bourke and a 4^th attempt at driving the largest section ~350Ks of the Darling River Run which actually ends at Menindee and starts at Brewarrina where the Darling and Barwon rivers flow through what is thought to be the oldest man-made structure on earth – the Brewarrina fish traps which are believed to be 40,000 years old. We were in the land of spinifex, sand hills, big skies, land of flooding plains and wildflowers – and loving it.  We spent a day exploring the Gundabooka NP with its ancient rock art and, for us, new and different flora. Then drove back to camp through the pearly golden slant of the setting sun watched over by a yellow moon peering through slats of clouds like a nosy neighbour peeping through the venetian blinds.

Sadly the river run was closed between Louth and Tipla because of the water still lying around after a 30 mm downpour a few days before we arrived.  In spite of patiently waiting a few days, the road remained closed to us yet again.  We will return – not just to do the run but also because we love Bourke and surrounds. It is close to corner country, opals, numerous national parks including Lake Mungo, and, right in the middle, citrus farms!  It is quite amazing.

Sugarcane, beaches and special friends

After the remoteness and silence of the many thousands of Ks we’d travelled on the Cape and far N and W Qld, the population crush and traffic of the built up areas of the coastal regions from Cairns on down to the Qld-NSW border and beyond, was a very confronting contrast. And driving became a matter of who’s the bravest! Double lines? pff*^@#tt, it is less than nothing! We’re not talking death wish here but .…… road toll figures .. hmmm.  However, taking bit between teeth, we took the most scenic route options and trawled along the roads that hugged the coast as much as possible looking for good things to ogle. Fortunately we were swimming against the tide – isn’t that typical?  When most are travelling north to sun and warmth, here we were blithely travelling south, but it does have its advantages. There were many hidden, magical spots that didn’t give up their secrets easily so one had to take a punt and drive through innocuous looking streets until – voila! there you were popped out onto a magnificent beach, with views over Magnetic, Hamilton, the Whitsunday Islands and the like, wide stretches of beach fringed with storm swept palms, pumice and coral fragments, spreading beach almond trees with their carpets of nuts, and fallen giants – palm, eucalypts and others - silent, battered witnesses of cyclones and wild seas.  Quite lovely and if not for the threat of crocs, we would have been in the water. Sigh!

It was a blur of traffic, lush green field of sugarcane standing at attention, or perhaps at easy, in neat rows swaying to their own secret music, awesome mountains – some the result of subterranean land movement, others dramatic remnants of volcanoes. We chilled out with drinks at Bowen yacht club watching the local pilot boat come in to port at sundown, marvelled at Gladstone and its humungous shipping port, and Townsville and Mackay with their massively growing metropolises and thriving ports, found ourselves off the beaten track in Marlborough with a surprise overnight stay with a delicious meal of local fish, and then it was on to Rocky and Childers famous for its backpacker’s fire way back whenever.  Centres like Gladstone and Yeppoon are massive residential developments spreading like unstoppable lava flows in all directions – the scary price of prosperity and dare I say ‘progress’.  I am still a little overwhelmed by Qld ports which like Gladstone, ship out an astonishing variety of huge chunks of Oz – coal, alumina, magnesia, loads of –ites such as calcite, etc.  We will become a negative land mass if we’re not careful!

Then we visited friends! (our primary reason for travelling coastal in Qld).  It was wonderful. From Noosa to the Tweed we ate and drank like royalty and talked the legs off a whole dining room suite of chairs – it was good! We got lost in Tweed whose roads double back and back across the river till we flung up our hands and reverted to the trusty MAPS app on my trusting iPhone, found our family of osprey who seem to have been nesting on the same post for years -  we first saw the nest ~10 years ago -, lunched at a magic Bali-kind of place at Fingal’s Head, which set the scene for lunch at the Yum Yum Tree café in New Brighton where I indulged in a plate of  ‘Peace Love Vegetables’ and left there feeling zoned out and at one with the world wishing that I could sit cross legged to meditate - we were in Nimbin territory! and the atmosphere and conversation  was entirely one of zen and the food to die for.

Beaches all the way from the Tweed to Grafton – rolling surf, stunning sand, fishermen with huge surf rods, and halleluiah NO CROCS!  Early sunsets, rivers needing a packed lunch to cross – the Clarence, Brunswick, Richmond, Tweed and more.  But can you believe I was still scratching?!   The mozzie itch has ruled the nights and I looked like an aboriginal bark painting with splodges of calamine lotion in faded pink forming crazy patterns on arms and legs, itching like a dog with fleas - thank goodness for drugs! I tucked into the antihistamines as a last resort – and they work pretty well. Now I just look like a flea-bitten dog with red blotches, reminders of mosquito nights.

With one last friend to visit on the coast, we took a day trip from Grafton, home of the most beautiful Jacaranda trees, to Sawtell and talked (and ate!) for hours – again! Sawtell is a totally delightful place of picturesque beaches and inlets, but we couldn’t linger as night was falling so we pointed the Beast back to Grafton.

Having had our fill of beaches and main highway traffic, the next day we headed inland towards the big skies and the back of Bourke.