2010/10 Australia trip - Stewart River |
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Back on the road, we found that it was now mainly sand and rock, with occasional patches of blacktop around steep hills and causeways. It is the kind of road where you can bounce along uncomfortably and safely at 20 mph or risk running at 50 mph and flying over the bumps. A lot of the locals still overtake at 60+. All of this is in clouds of dust, so passing and overtaking is a challenge. If you need to overtake a road train it’s impossible until you reach a stretch of blacktop.
Even at the higher speeds the bumps transmit a vibromassage to the shoulders and kidneys. The rare blacktop sections are a brief bliss.
Mostly the traveling is through dry savannah with lots of dips for creek crossings nearly all of which were dry for us, but every so often one would have a couple of feet of water, so we had to slow down for all of them. This was not the most exciting scenery, but we saw a few birds, a jabiru, some brolgas, and amazingly a cassowary. I’d stopped to take some pictures of the termite mounds and must have spooked the bird because it ran across the road in front of Sandie. There are very few cassowaries left and they are mostly deep in the rain forest.
We stopped at the Hann River roadhouse for Sandie to get some barramundi and chips but they had no fish at all, and the electric power was out anyway! Further on, the Mulgrave roadhouse looked to be a much more attractive spot and it had power but we ate just a couple of sandwiches, a nice change from eating out on the road in the heat.
We took the old road to Coen, now bypassed by the main highway, and found a gorgeous 
campsite on the Stewart River; we just drove down the river on the gravel bars far enough to get away from the traffic (three trucks in all). The water was quite shallow and Sandie soon forgot her worries about crocs and was rinsing clothes in the river.
Every shrub seemed to be crawling with green ants, but they didn’t bother us, and, unlike the 
aborigines, we didn’t snack on them either. The flying bugs were more of a problem, clustering around our headlights; they weren’t biting but they are hard to ignore when they are trapezing on your eyelashes. This mantis stopped by, definitely an insectivore, but she wasn’t eating enough of the other bugs.
Friday October 8th
The dawn chorus was deafening, but most of the birds were too high in the trees to identify; these galahs were an exception and they sat just above our campsite.
In the morning we drove across the river, expecting to continue on the old road to Coen, but found ourselves chasing a very confused bullock down the mountain towards Port Stewart on the east coast. He was ready to fight but eventually he found a spot where he could get off the road safely. We didn’t find the rest of the old road though, and didn’t want to go to the coast yet, so we turned around and drove back across the Stewart River again and rejoined the main road.