2019/11 Australia trip - Coonabarabran |
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Monday November 11th
We woke up to the smell of smoke and the light from a yellow sky. The TV news was warning of “catastrophic” fire conditions for Tuesday, a combination of temperatures up near 100F and very high winds. Sydney and the Hunter Valley were areas of extreme danger, OK for us as we were past both, but a worry for thefamily.
The people in the north were dealing with evacuations, homes gone, and even some deaths, so they didn’t need a bunch of tourists adding to their problems. We gave up on trying to reach Fraser Island. Instead we would head west across the Outback to Broken Hill, a mining town we’d never been to, though we had been close by in 2004. There are some interesting parks along the way, including the Warrumbungles, but very different from the rainforest we’d hoped to see. We’d be going into drier, near desert conditions, with less left to burn, we hoped.
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MacDonald Ck am (2.00) |
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This was our first really warm day, sunny, smoky, and about 30C, mid 80s F. We went back to the river, still looking for platypus.
One surprise was a large orange goldfish, probably an abandoned pet. Sandie and John spotted another platypus and Sandie got a short video and this distant picture. There was a good variety of birds too, a nice place to camp if were still camping. This large pied cormorant was perched above the river and this superb fairy wren was hopping around on the bridge.
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Coonabarabran (0.42) |
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We continued west to Gunnedah, where we picked up info on the area’s parks and then Coonabarabran where
we found a nice town park for afternoon coffee.
We stopped at the visitor’s centre for a list of motels and saw a notice that the nearby parks were closed because of the fire risk and then we realized that the closure applied to nearly all the parks in New South Wales. Even if we had continued driving north there wouldn’t have been any point, nothing to see.
We chose the Matthew Flinders Hotel, named for a famous explorer of Australia. Unfortunately Sandie and I found out that our room had not been made up; there were dirty towels and sheets on the floor. With Filipino-speaking staff it took a while to get allocated another room.
We went to eat in the bistro at the Imperial Hotel in town. We were happy to break the sequence of Chinese meals, and my bangers and mash went down well.
The TV continued to warn of catastrophic weather feeding the fires.