I should say something about the weather. Now being deep winter you might think that you’re cold and you’re probably right. We get cold too. Early morning the temperature dips down to around 5-10C but it’s Tee Shirt time by 9.30am and we’ve been picking up 28C most afternoons. No clouds, just blue sky and wafting little breezes. Dat’s de weather report (not quite in official Bureau language)! The northern Australian winter climate is just superb.
Equally, Cobbold Gorge where we have just spent five days is superb. A resort built on a cattle station out in the middle of nowhere and done really well. We’ve toured the Gorge, walked the walks, swum the pool, canoed the dam, read the books and had sunset drinks at the bar. Very relaxing lifestyle.
Maurs is becoming very keen on fossicking and we went to a place called Agate Creek looking for...agates. It was the first time on the trip that I actually had to use 4WD as we bounced around searching for a prized agate. I don’t really know what a prized agate looks like so I looked for “rocks with character” – some of them may be agates, I don’t know. As the bloke who showed us around O’Brien’s Creek gem field told me, there are malachites, azurites, pyrites and leverites. The important one to recognise is the Leverite. “Leverite where you found it, it’s a rock!”
Maurs - happy in a dry creek bed
Now heavily weighed down with Maureen’s gem findings we limped in to Croydon and spent a day and a night there. Croydon is an old gold town, now almost defunct. However the locals have a great sense of history and have retained a lot of the old mining precinct as a really interesting display, including a lot about the Chinese community who stuck it out in quite harsh conditions, both physically and socially. And there are still traces of them within today’s community.
We went on through Normanton to Karumba on the Gulf of Carpentaria. Normanton didn’t ring any of our chimes at all. We circled the joint three times but couldn’t even convince ourselves to buy a coffee there. In fairness it was a Sunday and so some places were not open, but what was open wasn’t flash. Karumba however had everything we needed and we stayed four nights, mostly relaxing, stalking the local wildlife and going for long walks. We did watch the sunset a few times at the local pub on the point, which is almost de rigor I believe.
The place is full of Mexicans who every year throw their Toorak tractors into top gear and haul their massive caravans up here for months at a time. It’s tough to get a space at a van park because of all these aged itinerants. They were all forlorn when we got there as the winds were wrong, the tides were wrong and it was too cold so the fish weren’t on the bite at all. All they could do was clean their equipment and wait for “happy hour” every night. There were whingers and there were white trash trailer park snobs, but we met some really nice people too. I think I’ve got enough material for a lengthy discourse on people who inhabit caravan parks, but that will have to wait for the end of the journey. There are some cool stories.
We’re done in Karumba. Having said the fishing was crook, there was no shortage of prawns, crabs, barramundi and other fish for sale and Maurs and I took advantage and supped on seafood for the entire time. Now, we’re turning south west and heading for Lawn Hill where we will continue to be out of mobile range and possibly out of Internet range too, but we hear it is a spectacular place to see.
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