2006/06 Australia trip - Little Desert |
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Tuesday June 6th
As always, we were packing until the early hours, resuming before dawn, but it was worth while as we were ready to leave as John and Edna left for his appointment. We set off from Melbourne, heading for Adelaide, Alice Springs, Darwin, Broome, and Perth, and then looping back to Melbourne. Although ten weeks sounds a long time for a vacation, we would have to average over a thousand miles per week, so we needed to skip much of the interesting stuff we’d seen before and get up to Darwin and the new areas as soon as we could. We didn’t expect to be stopping off at Uluru (Ayers Rock) or the McDonnell mountains on our way north through Alice Springs. We were only planning to revisit a couple of places that we’d had to leave too soon on previous trips.
We had cold mist all the way through Melbourne, which looked rather dismal on its industrial western end. We’d bought a day’s pass on the City Link, the toll road that links Melbourne’s motorways, as we didn’t fancy negotiating the side streets.
There are three major routes to Adelaide. One is the Great Ocean Road, which has “great” coastal scenery but we’d end up taking three days to get there. There’s also the northern route through the Murray River area, but this would take us through the fruit fly exclusion zone, and require us to dump all our fresh fruit and some veggies. We’d driven those two before, so we took the direct route via the “motorway”. In reality, most of the road is not motorway, as the “M” designation in Australia seems to mean “Wish it was motorway”, but it’s almost all straight and fast. It took us through pretty farming country, and the occasional range of hills, to Ballarat, famous for its gold mining history.
We stopped for lunch at Ararat state park, with a view over the valley to the Grampian Mountain range and Mount Ararat. (No sign of Noah or his ark.) The Grampians and the valleys also looked green, but not as green as Melbourne. We were moving into a drier area.
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Grampians view (0.26) |
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We camped at Little Desert national park, near to the border with South Australia. We were the only people in the campground,
and maybe the only ones in the park. The park is not really a desert, as there are plenty of trees and bush, but it’sdry enough to have discouraged farmers in the past. I took a short walk in the evening and saw more different kinds of wildlife than I’d seen in three weeks in New Zealand. There were magpies and currawongs, honeyeaters, parakeets, firetails, wrens, huge mobs of galahs (pink and grey cockatoos), a couple of kangaroos, and even a herd of emus. Yes, I know that it should be a “flock” of emus, but the word doesn’t do justice to the impact of a half-dozen emus thundering through the bush. There were also some flashy parrots I didn’t recognize: neon socks on wings.
The walk took me past the ruins of a eucalyptus distillery. I don’t think they made booze out of it: more likely they were refining the sap for medicine. The sign said the workers lived under poor conditions, and mentioned the suffering caused by a whole month of frosts…hmm. It was already cold as the sun set, and the clear sky promised a cold night.
Wednesday June 7th
The night turned out to be extremely cold. We woke up to find thick ice on the windows and the floor, and no water in the tap as our pipes were frozen. The puddles outside were frozen too. The rising sun had no effect; its warmth was lost in the mist until late morning.
It was a noisy morning too, with those mobs of galahs flying around screeching until they’d warmed up enough to go off for breakfast in some farmer’s field.