Our last big stretch of dirt road lay in front of us. I am
not certain but at a guess we must have done 2 -3000kms of dirt since we left
Derby and with only 100kms standing in front of us.....until we get home.....we
were all really looking forward to it. After a bit of schooling we packed up,
let the tires down hopefully for the last time, and headed off. Ironically,
apart from a couple of small parts of the Carpentaria highway, the Cape Laveque
Rd and the road to Kingfisher Camp, this was the worst the worst of it. The
road had been graded early in the season but due to rain just before the long
weekend, its clay base was now cut up pretty badly. There were 4 crews trying
to restore it but we were a few weeks early!
Not far from Normanton is Burke and Wills Camp 119, their final camp before they did one last three day sortie to try and spot water. They didn't make it, getting held back by the tangle of mangroves and it was February, the wet season, so I can only beging to imagine what it was like for these poor buggers. Around the camp they blazed (or branded) 14 (I think) trees with the camp number and B or BW in some places. Some of the trees are still there but only one that we could find that is living. It was pretty cool to be in same spot as these adventurers but reading their stories reminded us how harrowing it must have been for them.
We arrived in Normanton hopeful of finding a decent
supermarket as old mother Hubbard’s cupboard was looking a touch empty.
Unfortunately the combined food in the foodwerx and 4 square shop might have
come close to a Brisbane corner shop and the prices were all fairly exorbitant.
We bought a few necessities and after checking out the very informative
information centre we checked out the big tourist attraction "Krys" a life size replica of the largest crocodile ever caught in the world. We had been somewhat scared of a 4.5m croc (in out 3.6m tinny) so I can only imagine how we would have felt seeing this behemoth sunning its self on the river bank! We then headed to the free camp just on the other side of the river.
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| They have pretty big floods in this part of the world. |
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| A bit of Friday afternoon school work. |
It was Friday and the boys had been behaving really well
lately and doing a heap of school work so we decided to reward them by taking
them on a pub crawl around Normanton. WHAT I hear you ask...well that is about
all there is to do! They did quite enjoy themselves as they managed to get a
ginger beer and some chips at the Albion as well as ogling at the pictures of
crocs, barra and pigs that adorn the walls of the pub.
We then moved onto the
purple pub which wasn’t nearly as entertaining, but it was very very purple!
We headed back with the boys having a great time squashing
beer cans on the front tyre of their bike that gets geld in place by the front
fork. As the tyre goes around it rubs against the tyre making a terrible
racket! I think Normanton was pretty happy that we had decided to go across the
river to the free camp as you can’t complain if you haven’t paid for it!
After dinner the boys hit the hay as I attempted to catch up
by uploading a plethora of blogs. We haven’t had decent reception since King
Ash Bay, so even though I had a number of blogs written the complete lack of
reception stopped the process!
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