By 8:30 almost all of the grey nomads had moved on and we
were still getting our stuff together eventually heading over the road to fuel
up and start heading east again. The majority of travellers in this neck of the
woods keep heading down the Stuart Highway to Three Ways and then turn east
ending up at Mt Isa...but thanks to Mike and Mal Leyland we were taking the
Savannah Way which heads over from Daley Waters to Borroloola and then Australia’s
Highway #1, The Carpentaria Highway which funnily enough follows the Gulf of
Carpentaria across through to Normanton on the eastern side of the gulf.
 |
| The cold had finally caught up with us! |
De started driving but after a little while wasn’t feeling
the best so I took over while she had a doze in the back. There is a whole lot
of nothing in this part of the world. We passed vehicles going in the opposite
direction every thirty or fourty minutes and as it is a single lane road both
have to pull off onto the shoulders to get past.
We pulled into a rest area for
lunch and De was still not 100% so the
boys and I had a kick of the footy while she had a sleep. The only difference
was that this time we were kicking the footy on a national highway....and every
time I skewed one of my majestic punts, which was most of them, we had to tippy
toe through the Spinifex wondering what poisonous animal was lurking beneath
ready to pounce! It did help to heighten the concentration by my complete lack
of skills still didn’t improve!
With the boss lady feeling better we rolled on to the
Heartbreak Hotel at Cape Crawford, basically and intersection between two
‘highways’. I was looking forward to a rustic old pub with a publican who could
share more stories than the world book encyclopaedia. We pulled into the road
house and went inside and was told it was ‘next door’. Back out the door and
ten steps down the veranda we opened a
door and went into a small dark room with a bar and pool table that had a
couple of Elvis pictures and that was about it. A surly thirty something woman
grabbed a stubby from the fridge and reluctantly gave the two boys a glass of
water from the tap. We sat there in silence slurping down our drinks soaking up
the complete lack of atmosphere. Ten minutes later a surly thirty something bloke
popped his head in behind the bar and told us that the kids weren’t allowed in
the bar so we would have to drink them on the veranda....we headed out, I
skulled the remains and we couldn’t get out of there quick enough.
As we were leaving four triple road trains full of cattle
pulled in and we had a yarn with one of the drivers. One of the local cattle
stations had just purchased 8000 head of cattle and they were in the process of
carting half of them....the numbers that they deal with in this part of the
world are staggering!
We rolled on to Borroloola where we fuelled up, grabbed a
few supplies and headed out to King Ash Bay, a fishing camp situated on the
McArthur River and its multitude of estuaries. We turned off the bitumen that
leads to a town called Bing Bong (No I’m not joking) onto a dirt road and for
the next 5kms we were shaken by some pretty serious corrugations in the bull
dust. The good folk up here have taken it upon themselves to widen the road to
get away from the bumps and on a number of occasions we went to the left of the
road signs!
When I read about a fishing camp I imagined a small area by
the river with a couple of shacks and may 20 or 30 van scattered through the
bushland....sounds ideal doesn’t it....well it was nothing like that. This
place was like a small suburb in the middle of nowhere with 200 – 300 caravans
all lined up beside each other with another 100 or so shacks that varied from
ramshackle huts to two story McMansions...ahhh the serenity!
By the time we arrived we had been pretty much driving for
the whole day so we were glad to stretch the legs with the boys tearing around
on their bikes finding jumps and places to skid. The cold had finally caught up
with us as we pulled the ‘blankets’ out after not having needed them for quite
a month or two and while it wasn’t quite snuggling weather yet it was getting
pretty close!
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