2019/11 Australia trip - Cobar |
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Tuesday November 12th
We set off on another warm morning. These king parrots were in the shrubs around the motel.
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Coonabarabran parrots (1.06) |
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As expected, the park was closed but the road that goes through part of it was open so we looked at what we could at the roadside stops.
We saw kangaroos and emus, and got a view of some of the park’s spectacular volcanic 
relics. The side roads into the park were all locked, a shame as the park’s skyline is quite a sight: a line of twisted volcanic spires. But I doubt that we could have repeated the 1000 step climb we did last time we were there in 2010.
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Just outside the park we came to a field with hundreds of emus, an emu 
farm with paddocks for different ages. In the far distance we could see Dad emus with their chicks in tow.
We had lunch in Warren in a café. We ended up with a greasy pile of bacon and eggs. The quantity was good if not the quality.
We were now on the Mitchell Highway, heading into what is usually termed ‘the Outback”. In reality, most of Australia is Outback, but the term was first applied when NSW was farmed and the area beyond was regarded as unfarmable. 
Some parts of the countryside around us had been farmed, but in the absence of rain it had turned into fields of dust and we were now passing through dust storms and willy-willies, spinning columns of dust, called dust-devils in North America. It was now 37C and above, high nineties F.
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Dust storms (4.04) |
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The other sign of being in the Outback was the flies. Each time we stopped and got out we’d pick up a dozen or two tiny flies and they’d get into our eyes and ears and lips, anything to find moisture. They’d come back into the car with us. We’d lure them to the car windows and slowly lower the window and they’d be sucked out. There were extra points for raising the window at the last second and squashing them. By the time we got rid of all the flies it was usually time for another stop.
There were swaths of these pretty violet flowers, scaevola I think, along the roadside.
Another familiar sight was this group of paddy melons. These look like juicy grapefruit but they are dry and mildly poisonous, so nothing eats them. For some reason they like to grow on edges, so we saw them all along the railway track that paralleled the road.
Edna managed to contact the family and get an update on their situation in Sydney. There were fires within a few miles of their house so they were keeping a watch out for drifting embers. Even the park we’d been in two days earlier Ku-ring-gai Chase was on fire. There was no evacuation yet in their area but they’d kept the kids home in case they had to leave in a hurry.
At Nyngan we switched to the Barrier Highway heading due west towards the Barrier Mountains, we made it as
far as Cobar, a mining town. We turned down a couple of motels as too expensive. The Town and Country looked OK but John and Edna’s room was missing its TV and fridge, presumably stolen. Another change of rooms.
We ate at the Cobar memorial service club, which advertised a schnitzel special with free wine. Even better as the server miscounted the vouchers. Not Chinese either!
The NSW Parks website showed that most of the far western parks were open, with just a few roads closed by rain; that was a surprise. The TV said that Sydney has survived the high winds better than expected; the winds had stayed high in the atmosphere, but now they were moving north into Queensland where fires had also been burning for months.