A Town Exactly Like Alice

For a town that boasts that the local Todd River rarely flows and is just a band of sand meandering through the middle of the city, there sure is a lot of drainage infrastructure hanging off it – culverts, drains, signage, flood markers...but in our time there – nuthin’ but the sand and the steady stream of locals using it as a shortcut into town. Still, there were lots to see in Alice Springs. It’s a very interesting place overall and we would rank the old Overland Telegraph Station as one of the highlights; Alice Springs’ original raison d’etre and restored exceedingly well, right down to the old Stevenson screen and anemometer mast where the weather readings were taken and transmitted to “Weather Central” – via Morse of course. We were very lucky in the fact that a bunch of old Morse Codians had gathered there that week to demonstrate one of the world’s fastest dying arts to tourists who get jittery when they have no signal on their mobile phones. It’s very impressive to watch these old guys operate and the gents are wonderfully skilled but who’s going to take up where these guys are leaving off? They just shake their heads when asked, but with an “I’m not dead yet” look in their eyes.

Taking the readings at the Overland Telegraph Office...dot dot dash dash....

                                  Maurs kissing a Blue Tongue Lizard (he won't phone ya...)

 

My sister-in-law Margaret is terrified of snakes and lizards so naturally she had an urge to visit the Reptile Park (seriously). She really wanted to look at the reptiles, I guess at close range but sealed up, and they had some fine specimens there from small desert Geckoes to Terry the Crocodile (around 3 metres long and growing). The owner also gave a talk about handling reptiles in the wild (in summary, “Don’t!”) and then provided a few tame specimens for visitors to handle, to get a feel for them. He even offered a blue tongue lizard that would give you a kiss on the nose (however there is no guarantee that he will call you back for a second date). Maurs and I had a go at snake handling – it was a cool experience. Margaret deferred this opportunity to get close, but she is one step closer to it – at least she didn’t bolt out the room with loose reptiles around. She did go close though when the handler opened up the glass cage of a deadly mulga snake to remove some snake poo. He turned his back on the snake to explain to us the fascinating aspects of their excreta when the snake suddenly came alive and started moving about. Marg was like she was at a Punch and Judy Show, yelling out “The snake! The snake! It’s moving!” while Mr Punch (the handler) ignored her completely. This theatre played out until Mr Punch finally closed the glass window with the snake rearing up the side of his cage defiantly (the ham).

Gus and the python (she gave me a serious squeeze around the neck when the handler wasn't watching)

"Mr Punch! Mr Punch! The snaaaake!!"

We took some time to explore the West Macdonnell Ranges. This was about a 300 km round trip and included wonderful little places like Simpson’s Gap, Standley Chasm and Glen Helen Canyon but the pick for us was Ormiston Gorge. All had enough water in them to be interesting but Ormiston was very picturesque and serene. We just sat down and watched it, well, do nothing really. There was a camping ground there too that looked good with sufficient shade to beat the other options available. Temperatures are typically 32C right now so it’s warm enough and the skies are blue. Very comfortable really.

                                         Glen Helen Gorge - Maurs at mid-field, exploring

                      Ormiston Gorge - there's something about seeing water in a dry land

Back when we were in Uluru, at breakfast of home-made crunchy Granola, one piece of Granola proved too crunchy for one of Maur’s molars. Consequently she spat out a piece of tooth (in a most dainty way of course). She made a dental appointment when we got to Alice to get it fixed. After she came out of the surgery I thought that I heard the receptionist stumble over his words to the effect “And that will be Seven...Eighty Two Dollars Mrs Foley”. I thought what the heck $72 or $82. Silly moi, it was $782! They can get Oxygen out to the reception area real fast these days. It’s one of the main hazards in dentistry. And actually the pain hasn’t settled down yet (for her jaw or my wallet!)

Another highlight of Alice was an evening at Alice’s (Vietnamese) Restaurant. It’s some miles out of town, on their market garden property, it's small and you need to book ahead but the dishes were sensational – full of their home-grown herbs and vegetables. Tom and Marg, who hadn’t had a lot to do with Vietnamese cuisine up til then were very impressed with it all. It’s fun to find a little gem like that in the middle of nowhere.

Miss Olive Pink’s Botanical Garden is like no other botanical garden that I have visited. Usually they are green and shady with exotic plants in abundance. Miss Pink’s dream was to highlight the flora of the local area so what you get as you walk around in the dry bush is the dry bush...with labels. No frills here, but they serve a good lunch. Five days in Alice – I hope we did it justice.

In the Red Centre

We drove from Coober Pedy to the highway turn-off point for Uluru – a place called Erldunda, about 400 km up the Stuart Highway. We were astounded to find grass on our campsites instead of the dirt and gravel of the past week – there is obviously a lot of artesian water around there for them to nurture patches of grass for tourists to park upon. We also found a profusion of flies (the sticky, persistent kind), to the extent that in order that there not be a death in the family while we set up the campsite, we resorted to wearing fly-nets to keep the annoying little pests at bay. It worked – no death occurred while erecting the campsite.

Flynets - the salvation of the Red Centre

                                         A Parrot Tree - honest, they grow on trees out here!!

 

The scenery just became more and more pleasant as we headed west towards Uluru. The desert oak trees seem to spring out of the red soil, interspersed with Spinifex grass; it just looked friendlier country from what we had been driving through before. The resort at Yulara where we camped for four nights was also a pleasant surprise. They have really got it together. The resort caters for all types, tastes and pockets, and when you consider just how harsh the environment really is out here, making any operation run so smoothly must take some mighty good organisation. There are buses and tours, bars and bistros, hotels rooms and campgrounds, well-stocked supermarket, good water, power - and it’s all done right!

                                          Desert Oaks with Kata Tjuta in the background

                                    A boot tree - lot of bored people on the Returd Highway

Mostly we got about independently and walked through Kata Tjuta (The Olgas in old money terms) but we paid for a tour that took us to Uluru for the sunrise, on to the Cultural Centre for breakfast, a talk and demonstration by an Anunga indigenous person, followed by a walk at the base of the rock where she told us (through an interpreter, for it seems she couldn’t speak English) tales of long ago and pointed out smaller rocks that had significance to her people, handing down oral history in the traditional way. She demonstrated how the Anunga people made Kiti which is an early form of Super-Glue made from some component of the Acacia bush that you separate out by beating the heck out of it with a big stick and then fuse the remains in the fire. The women in the tour group then practiced walking around with a lump of wood balanced on their heads and the guys got to throw a few spears, with and without the woomera, which increases the mechanical advantage of throwing, but does nothing for accuracy at all. Out against the Rock she told us a story. It must be a compact language because she said maybe three or four syllables, at which point the interpreter sprouted out paragraphs of legend. This was an ancient story about a Blue-tongued Lizard Man called Woody Woodpecker (or something like that) who had a run-in with a Bell Bird Man called Woody Harrelson (I could be slightly wrong on the pronunciation of that one also). Anyway they had a stoush over food and Woody Woodpecker fell out of a cave way up on the Rock with some uneaten emu legs and died. There was a moral there somewhere but I might have missed that also. That’s oral history for you.

                                                        Uluru by the morning light

                                                 Fractured ribs??? Not even a flesh wound!!

Next stop after Yalara was Kings Canyon – another 300 km along the track. We walked the walk around the rim and we found it probably the most interesting and varied of the walks so far (Kata Tjuta and Uluru). I must say a word about the heroic effort of Margaret who walked the 6 km over quite rocky conditions while nursing two fractured ribs that she sustained several months ago. It just displays the pluck inherent in Queensland women – they’re a tough lot in the Sunshine State. Judging by the number plates of campers I just wonder if there is anybody left in Queensland at the moment. They all seem to be on the road. Perhaps Campbell Newman’s policies are causing an exodus from the promised land. Still, I think there are more French and Germans out here than Australians at the moment. They hire these self-contained Britz motor-homes and roar around, taking in the sights and enjoying the 30C heat compared with the current temperatures in Europe.

                                              A snippet of Kings Canyon - a good walk

Right, it’s off to Alice!

Easter and then the road north

We spent four days in the Burra area and we found it quite an interesting experience. Burra is fascinating – the site of a very rich copper mine that ran out of copper and closed in 1877 – it attracted Cornish miners and Welsh smelters. They built solid stone houses of quality and style and they have been preserved very well. Those that had no house carved out dugouts in the creek bank and a few of these are also on display. The locals have developed a self-guided tour of the sights and the museums, which we embarked upon. The first museum was at the old mine itself and the guide, a middle-aged guy in a striped shirt and earring in one ear gave us the spiel. It was a long tour – we stopped for lunch in the middle of it and then resumed at another museum in the town itself. The guide, a middle-aged guy in a striped shirt and earring in one ear gave us the spiel? Was there a little too much in-breeding happening in Burra? No, same guy apparently, but it was a little bit of a shock when he stamped our tickets.

                                      Old mine wreck at Burra (but beautifully built)

                                        It were only dugout in creek bank but it were 'ome to'us

Burra is close to the Clare Valley wine area so naturally we just had to take a peek. It was a rainy old day so we stopped in at Clare for a coffee, picking a cafe at random. We walked in and stood at the counter for quite a while. There was a big fat guy at the coffee machine making movements that resembled a barrista under sedation. He turned his head towards us, smiled nicely and said “Won’t be long”. Minutes passed – nothing. I thought “It will be long”, but then an efficient looking lady strode up to us and took our orders. As I walked away I happened to notice that the lady placed our order at the end of a metre long queue, next to the barrista. “It will be long”, I thought. We took advantage of this by venturing out into the town and buying provisions, including a range of sausages from yet another championship sausage-maker – every bluddy town has one! (These sausages were very good though, might I say). We came back to the cafe – no coffee – so Tom and Marg went and bought their provisions while we waited in vain hope that the barrista had finished his shift and someone competent had stepped in. That didn’t eventuate but we did eventually get our coffee (what? You want me to tell you it was good coffee? It wasn’t).

                                                   Two bruvvers framed by a tree

By the way, and it may surprise our South Australian friends, one of the provisions that we bought was a little knob of cold meat sausage called Fritz, which is peculiarly SA. Now this may surprise our non-South Australian friends, but I quite liked it! I’m a Fritz fan and may become a Fritz fiend if I’m not careful.

Our next destination was Woomera – about 400 km north. The country changes starkly once you leave Port Augusta and as you go further north you can imagine why no one had the slightest remorse about bombing, strafing, rocketing and nuking the joint. It is just so flat and desolate. There were some decent displays of old rockets we used to know (who can forget the Blue Streak Project that practically crippled Great Britain financially for no result) and great Aussie developments with great Aussie names like Ikara, Malkara and Jindivik (although that does sound a little Norwegian when one thinks about it).  My brother Thomas had his own missile attack of sorts when he came down with a sudden stomach upset that laid him low for a day. This delayed our travels while he recovered but we then pressed on to the opal town of Coober Pedy – 370 km further north again.

                                        For Zoolander fans - Blue Steel at the Blue Steel display

Now I would doubt if Coober Pedy has ever made the semi-finals in the Tidy Towns Competition. It’s kind of a mass of holes and mounds and every bit of machinery that has ever broken down is still in someone’s front yard.  Obviously it works for some though and there are about 2000 people living under and above ground, searching for the elusive opal. People must become addicted to finding this rock as they stay forever and the payoffs seem low when you ask. Everybody’s broke but everybody’s buying expensive mining machinery to add to the stuff that’s in their front yards.

                                   Living underground in Coober Pedy - 24C all year round

The land is so flat around here that we’re going to have to move on to see the really big rock – Uluru.

                                            The Big Nuthin'...Down on Desolation Row

Back out on the road again

In accordance with popular belief that old Returds don’t die, they just keep cruising the highway, so it is with us. After a hiatus of nearly six months, and what a six months that was, Maurs and I are back on the road armed with a loose plan and a tight budget (that seems to be the lot of the Grey Nomad). We have been travelling for just over a week now – wrenching ourselves away from our daughters, their partners and worse still, our new grandson Harvey, whom I might say is a bit cute and totally addictive. More on that later.

Harvey - 2 months old

We drove out from Melbourne roughly in the direction of Adelaide and stopped at Halls Gap in the Grampians purely on a whim. It is great rugged country with a lot of walking tracks through there as we found out – funnily enough the clincher in the decision-making process was that there was a zoo there and they had Meerkats! We did enjoy the zoo. We had committed to get to Adelaide by the Friday and so we took off on the Thursday into the teeth of a developing weather system – gusty headwinds and equal helpings of blowing dust and sheeting rain to give the vehicle a muddy tone – to see how far we could get. We decided the little town of Tailem Bend on the Murray River was going to be our funkhole for the night (about 100 km from Adelaide). The Caravan Park had seen better days, possibly in 1965. In keeping with the environmental movement there were stickers plastered all over the shower recesses urging people to “Save Water”. Sadly upon entering the shower cubicles all the shower heads were leaking vigorously – without the taps on at all! Tailem Bend was the proverbial Curate’s Egg – good in parts – and the meal served at the local pub was terrific (and within a poor pensioner’s budget too!)

                                                         Meerkating in the Grampians

                         New-born baby marmoset clinging to Dad's neck - pretty rare

Onwards to Adelaide the next day. The weather had eased down some and it was an easy drive to South Australia’s fair capital city. The van park there was superbly appointed and lawns manicured (plumbing worked too!). Our mission was to catch up with friends; the Wehrs, the Harris’s, the Watsons, and Jamila – really good to see them all. South Australia might be the driest State in the driest continent (yes I know about Antarctica – but it’s a popular saying, alright?) but try telling a guy that as he packs up in patchy rain and drives 160 km to the next destination in steady rain. We booked into a place called Burra, only because it was one of the few places with a vacancy as the Easter holiday looms up and everyone leaves home for the four day break. We are rendezvousing with my brother Thomas and sis-in-law Margaret there – they are coming from Brisbane via Broken Hill. We had so much fun together last year through central Queensland that we thought we’d try it again. Unfortunately my sister Mal and bro-in-law Roy (the self contained entertainment system) couldn’t make this one but plans may be afoot for next year.

                                                     Ah the life of a Grey Nomad!!!

So that’s where we’re at, cats. After this we’re heading north in a valiant attempt to stave off yet another winter. We’ll keep you informed. Meanwhile, if you’re interested in our last six months “off-road” so to speak...read on.

We ended our last road-trip in Melbourne last September by spending some time with family and friends before flying back to Perth where Maurs had to do the rounds of the doctors regarding the aftermath of her breast cancer diagnosis. She got the all clear health-wise plus a spot of reconstructive surgery and hopefully, eternal vigilance aside, that will be that. We also caught up with friends (those that hadn’t got sick of us never being around) before heading back to Melbourne via Singapore. We heard the Singaporeans did Christmas rather well and we were not disappointed by the street decorations, the general vibe, or anything else in Singapore for that matter – it is a great city. We met our friends Elly and Mike there and we sampled as many different cuisines as we could in the time available. The time available turned out to be a little more than planned. For the first time in my flying career we completely missed our flight to Melbourne – misread the flight schedule – realised our mistake at about final check-in time – dashed out to the airport – threw ourselves upon the mercy of Jetstar who were very obliging and simply booked us onto the next night’s flight – rushed downstairs at Changi Airport to find some accommodation for the night – got a room at the same hotel we had just left, same floor and about four doors down from Mike and Elly’s room – caught a taxi back to the hotel and resumed partying. Unfortunately it meant that we had yet again missed being with Renee for her birthday, so there were consequences when we did get into Melbourne.

                                                            Elephant suits become him

We spent Christmas in Melbourne, followed by the main event, the birth of Harvey on 14 January. He arrived nearly a week late and it was a difficult birth but he is a little gift to Renee and Justin (and to us as well). We spent a lot of our time assisting the new parents around the house, helping them to adjust to their little arrival. The guest room was renamed the Servants Quarters and I reckon Justin would have been howling the most of all of us when the time came for us to leave, with the possible exception of Dexter the dog who was clearly on easy street with his G/Ma and G/Pa tending to his every need. But Returds need to be on the road – that’s the way of things.

                                                          "Please come back...pleeeeasse!"

It’s getting very near the end

We had to stop over at Charleville as it was the only place along the way where I could book a service for the vehicle – and I had to book that weeks in advance as well. As it happened, it proved to be an entertaining layover. The Van Park that we chose had signs up everywhere about a “Stowaway Cat”, apparently an over-friendly feline who had the habit of being inadvertently packed up in vans only to be unpacked hundreds of kilometres down the road, behoving the disgruntled drivers to return said feline back to the Van Park. Sure enough the cat found us and made itself right at home. Very friendly cat and I guess secure within itself and around strangers. However, on the day of our departure I kept one very suspicious eye on that cat as it hovered around our camper. Three days in Charleville was enough – we were not coming back!

                         Charleville's stowaway cat, "Puddy" livin' it up in the camper

Mind you Charleville did hold some interest – they have a Cosmos Centre for stargazers, a Bilby Conservation Centre looking after an endangered species of cute little chocolate-covered marsupials, and a special treat for us in reuniting with my brother-in-law Grothy and my nephew Steve as they made their way out to the Birdsville Races. The races are an annual event but for Grothy it’s more a pilgrimage. Our rendezvous point was the Cattle Camp Hotel at 10am – coincidentally opening time for the pub – and sure enough, not withstanding a flat tyre to hold them up momentarily, the bus rocked up, spilling the prospective punters into the pub and up for the first drink of the day. We politely declined their kind offer to join them in an early tipple – and our gift of two fresh cream-buns for Grothy did look a trifle insipid, lined up against a wall of beers – however we had a great time catching up and eventually they all got back on the bus hoping to make Windorah in time for the Yabby Races, a warm up for the Birdsville Cup.

                                                            Find us in the mural...

After Charleville, we knew we had to head south but we were attracted to divert just a little bit to a town called Eulo (population 50) where there is a date farm making a date wine, plus it is within striking distance of the Yowah opal fields – home of the famous (that’s how it’s advertised) Yowah “nut”, a type of rock that, when sawn in half sometimes yields opals and/or other interesting effects that has earned them the title of picture rocks. On this leg of the highway we learned two things: one sip of date wine explains fully why grapes are the preferred medium for the wine-making process; and, finding a good opal in a public fossicking area like we did in Quilpie was a complete fluke, making prospecting in general an activity for the tourist that should be more for fun than for profit (dammit!).

                                                             Now that's a Bilby!

After Eulo we did head south, crossing the border into New South Wales on our way to Bourke. Henry Lawson wrote, “If you know Bourke, you know Australia” and I tend to think he was right. An old riverboat port on the Darling River miles from the sea – there’s just something about it, and just being at the “Back’a Bourke” makes it feel special.

                       Yowah "Picture Rock" - mighta picked up a couple of samples...

By the time we got to Cobar the wind was really picking up as a trough raced through inland NSW. For us it was a tailwind that actually assisted our fuel consumption (that bane of the Grey Nomad’s existence) but made it equally unpleasant when you had to stop driving and get out in it. So we kept on moving until we arrived in Hay and spent the night there. From there Victoria beckoned so we crossed the mighty Murray River at Echuca and stopped for the night at Castlemaine. It’s weird when you realise that you are spending your last night of an adventure that you started 7 months ago, and the next day you will be back in a city – in a suburb – in a house – doing everyday things again.

                                     Back to Melbourne and civilisation??? Local graffiti

We’ve gone from off-road to off the road, as we will be flying back to Perth at the end of the month and then flying back to Melbourne in December. There’s a grandchild due in January but maybe – if we can escape – we’ll resume on the returd highway again next year sometime. Maybe you’d like to join us...

A Flurry in Cloncurry

Caravan Parks are usually pretty quiet and staid affairs once the sun goes down but we were awoken from our slumbers around 4am by a rather loud (dare I say maniacal) dialogue from a woman in a tent just 20 metres from us. She was in her early 40s I guess from what we saw earlier in the day and the gist of the conversation was her questioning the conjugal rights of her partner, complaining that she badly needed a rest and wasn’t three times a week enough (to paraphrase and omit expletives)? After a short silence there was a chorus from the surrounding male grey nomads (with a hint of envy even) agreeing that she did have a fair point there, and there followed a chorus from the female grey nomads “Amen to that, dear!” The guy kept a low response at all times so we couldn’t hear him but whatever he said arced her up even more, and so it went on for about 20 minutes until either or both fell back to sleep, and the caravan park residents followed suit.

On the way to the ‘Curry we were obliged by a road train driver throwing up a rock our way, giving a rather displeasing large chip mark on our windscreen. As we drove through Cloncurry we happened upon a windscreen repair business and asked if he could fix it tomorrow – he said no he’d be away tomorrow but “drive it through, I’ll fix it now!” As I got out of the vehicle I happened to notice a tangle of bare wires hanging out of the trailer where it should have been connected to the car. Somehow (and we suspect it happened outside of Lawn Hill) we had obliterated the connecting plug which was nowhere to be seen.  The windscreen guy said to try the bloke across the road, which I did and he obligingly wandered across and reconnected the electricals while the windscreen was being patched. Country towns are cool! Nothing seems to be any bother to these people.

                                              Maurs runs with Banjo the Dinosaur

From Cloncurry we drove back down to Winton, checked out another Dinosaur Centre but one where you see actual dinosaur bones rather than replicas (a rarity anywhere in the world), and through Longreach but then got off the beaten track a little by checking out the smaller towns of Stonehenge (the van park was full there – had two vans in it) and Jundah, where we camped for the night. We took a “tourist drive” along the Thomson River in the late afternoon (plenty of water still in these rivers) to check out the bird and animal life. That evening while we were having our showers we could hear a band playing at the local pub – a quality band! So off we set for a couple of drinks and enjoyed a two-piece group with a big sound called Mick Lindsay (Mick had a guitarist called Grant with him). As a muso he was arrogant in a friendly way – “any requests?” he asked casually – he could pretty well play anything but he specialised in Southern US country rock, and they gave their all for less than 20 people in the audience (so the whole of Jundah was there). Very enjoyable and unexpected night. He was on his way to play at the Birdsville Races. You can look him up at www.micklindsay.com – worth a look and a listen if you have a spare moment. Maurs had the added thrill of being hit on by the village idiot – he was fat, drunk, and cavorted in front of everyone like a barefoot John Belushi – but, as Maurs rightly pointed out, he was a lot younger than her and it was a male, unlike other occasions when she has been hit upon in pubs.

                                                   Real dinosaurs - real bones!

From Jundah it was on to Windorah – a metropolis by Jundah standards, where we had a morning coffee and moved on quickly to Quilpie.

                   Things move kinda slow at Windorah - of course, it was Sunday morning.
It’s about 200 km of single lane bitumen with high shoulders onto gravel so if you happen to meet someone coming the other way you have to gingerly get one set of wheels off the road and hope the other guy doesn’t cough up yet more gravel onto your windscreen. The road carnage along this stretch was appalling with loads of dead roos, emus, cattle, feral pigs, feral cats, and slow birds. Maurs had to stop outright for a wedge-tailed eagle who just eyed us off until he lumbered a few metres off to the side of the road to let us past. This was luckier than one hapless traveller whom we met in Quilpie – a wedge-tail had flown into his windscreen making a rather large mess of it and ruining his chances of making the Birdsville race meeting (I’m not sure that he was so willing to stop for it though).

                                                Don't mess with the wedge-tail....

Outside of Quilpie is a public fossicking area where people can have a dig and give rocks a whack with a hammer. Are you catching on to a theme here? Of course we went out for a fossick. The target this time? Opals. In an inspired piece of team cluelessness, Maurs asked me to bring a cloth over on which to rest our findings. I placed this cloth on the ground and picked up a random rock to keep the cloth from blowing away. She picked up the rock and saw a tiny glint of opal on one side of it. She whacked it to make it into a smaller rock to keep but when she did, it broke open to reveal more opal inside – to the extent that she got the opal guy in town to cut out a not-too-shabby piece of pure opal for jewellery plus he polished up the remainder of the rock for a nice conversation piece (yes we do intend to bore you about this when we see you again!) I fear our fossicking days are not ended yet either.

                                     Our opal find, all polished up! Not a bad morning's work.

I should mention bore water for those unfamiliar with it. Water in this part of the world is artesian and has varying concentrations of Hydrogen Sulphide. It’s good water – so soft you can hardly wash the soap off yourself, but it does carry the distinctive odour of rotten eggs that tempers any notions of long showers – particularly after one has had an egg for breakfast (particularly galling!) As everyone out here says, you get used to the smell – but crikey, I reckon it takes a while!

Mostly Lawn Hill

We travelled down from Karumba to the Burke and Wills Roadhouse and stayed the night before heading on to Lawn Hill. The roadhouse is a pretty lonely spot on the highway – there’s nothing for a hundred kilometres in any direction. I’m pretty sure Burke and Wills never stayed there on their journey, which is a pity as they would have got a hot shower and a cold beer before continuing on to their own personal oblivion. When we were there, there was a scattering of other caravaners including Merv and Brenda who inhabited a great big old motor home with, not surprisingly, “Merv and Brenda” emblazoned on the front. They may have been there a while as periodically big Merv would try to turn over the big diesel motor - to no avail. Still, hot showers, cold beer...no worries eh Merv.

Lawn Hill is another special place. You have to eat about 90 kilometres of dust to finally get there and you have to share the track with huge three-bogie mining road-trains that cause localised blinding sandstorms as they drive past, but it is definitely worth the effort. We booked in for four nights. The owners do what they call a” Harry’s Hill Tour” at sunset. Basically they cart whoever wants to go on their little bus up this small hill to watch the sunset, hear a few Lawn Hill stories and have some wine and snacks. Wine and Snacks? There’s a species of Grey Nomad where that means “get as much as you can while it’s on offer” and we witnessed one fat boy with wine glass in one hand and a mitt full of cheese, pickled onions, olives, and cabana sausage in the other, slurping his way through the afternoon. No wine returned from Harry’s Hill that day I can tell you...it was a massacre. The sunset was nice though.

                                                        Camping in Adel's Grove

We booked our campsite at Lawn Hill via email and we received a confirmatory reply which included, “We assume that you do not have a generator or a dog and have allocated you a space in the Grove.” We wrote back, “You are correct. Our dog ran away with our generator and we haven’t seen either for months.” It seems like that if you have a dog or a generator you are relegated to a noisier and presumably smellier part of the camp. Imagine our surprise when we noticed the couple camped next to us in the Grove had...cats! People travelling the countryside with two fluffy pussycats defy our perception of well...fun. There’s a certain sense of dedication that goes into handling cats. They were probably aged in their late sixties. They had a special pen for the cats to lounge about in outside and they walked them on leashes. I asked was it difficult travelling with cats and they both said without hesitation, “It’s easier than travelling with children.” Well you can’t argue with that!

                                                   Crimson Finch strikes a pose

And I’d like to make a statement about Speedos while they are on my mind! I saw three gents of reasonably advanced years strutting back from the swimming hole in their Speedos. Now I reckon that you don’t look particularly great in Speedos in your prime and those things don’t improve with age. Not only that – guys tend to hold on to their Speedos for years and years and lycra does have a habit of decomposing with time – just add water and there is incredible sagging that only underlines the incredible sagging of the male form. To murder an old C&W song (and there’s been plenty of that happening out at Lawn Hills, believe me), “Mothers don’t let your babies grow up to wear Speedos”.

                                                   Indarri Falls at Lawn Hill National Park

Everybody does the canoe trip up Lawn Hill Gorge. A lot treat it as a race and paddle like fury to the first barrier, portage over the falls and speed up and back the next bit as well – then go and book into the local masseuse at the camp because they had used muscles they hadn’t used since 1982. We were more intent on spotting the wildlife so we took it rather slow. We came across a big fallen log with several cormorants and we snapped quite a few photos from different angles. We then continued our plod up the creek to the falls and when coming back we saw a couple taking photos at the same log. “There’s a crocodile over there,” they said. “That’s incredible” we said, “We were there earlier and it wasn’t around!” So over we went and took a few shots of this croc on the bank. As we paddled off Maurs said, “You don’t think it was there when we took the first lot of shots do you?” “Of course not,” I said. Oh yes it was! When we downloaded the photos later, there it was – the damn croc sitting happily in the background of EVERY shot! We had blithely missed the gorilla in the room! We seriously considered handing in our Naturalist badges but as we only got them off the back of a Weeties packet we didn’t bother.

                                                Never mind the croc - look at the birds!!!

So, the walks in the National Park were excellent, canoeing was grand, wildlife abundant, swimming in the spring-fed Lawn Hill Creek was so refreshing and there was a bar and restaurant on hand for us to relax at night (although we did have to listen to some fractured country music played by an old cowboy on a guitar while our drinks were going down). A small price to pay.

                                                                 Lawn Hill Creek

We were floating around in the big deep swimming hole on our last afternoon in Lawn Hill (I was in board shorts, not Speedos) and I said to Maurs, “Could we spend the rest of our lives like this?” It was a rhetorical question and the next morning we were back in the dust and corrugated ruts, bouncing our way back to Cloncurry.