February 23 - Rocks and Rosé

Where are we? Yowah. We only learnt about this place while we were on the road. Itis a wee dot in the middle of a cattle station! Wildlife and cattle wander the streets and at the end of the village streets you simply drive into the bush. Or, as we did this arvo, into a public fossicking area. For a mad hour or so, we smashed up rocks with small rock hammers in a futile attempt to find opal. Stupid really not just because it was veeery hot, but opal is buried much deeper than we were tackling. However ..... we did find some quite fascinating sedimentary patterns in rocks when we split them open and that got me thinking. How long did it take for these patterns to be laid down? I reckon we’re talking hundreds of thousands of years and there we were blithely smashing at it - so sorry earth! I  can tell you that our rig is weighed down with rocks we have collected along the way. 

The Rosé? My new favourite cider. It’s delicious icy cold and in continuing high temps, it’s wonderful!

The colours and patterns are fascinating

The public fossicking area at Yowah. We didn’t stay out there long because it was simply too hot.

The plains spread as far as the eye can see from the bluff at Yowah. Rather impressive.

I think that small shed to the right is the departure lounge! 

It was extremely hot and dry but that is fairly normal for this area.  Fortinately they are situated on the edge of the Great Artesian Basin and the towns and stations rely on bore water - unless the rivers run and none are at the moment. Their main bore was sunk over 100 years ago and continues to spurt out over 1 million litres of hot water every day. 

These are ‘bathing boxes’ but with water at 50-odd C I wouldn’t want to slide in! Note there are no roofs

Wetlands created from the bore overflow

The overflow from the bore flows through town feeding plants and animals for a couple of kilometres. Here the overflow collects in two quite large pools of ;cool water;. I stood and watched fish breaking the surface and bubbles from various water life popping on the surface. There were lots of birds around - ducks, kingfishers, reed warblers and other species. A very tranquil place! Lindsay spent quite a few very hot hours exploring several kilometres of the overflow and found plenty of great birds.