Camping #1

Date of Adventure Most of the time since 26 August 20244 but really 12-18 November 2024

I’ll write more blogs about my camping experiences since traveling Australia. Some comments are more relevant than this blog but they’ll just have to wait until some later date. It’s taken a while for me to really learn how and where to camp in Australia. I should have learned it when I was here in February but I guess it didn’t sink in. At that time I was concerned about learning the systems in the Troopy and so I spent way too many nights in Caravan Parks. They usually had wifi so I could look things up online. In retrospect, the wifi wasn’t that critical because I was in fairly populated areas and my cell phone had plenty of signal most of the time. There’s a whole set of comments to make about WiFi in campgrounds, Telstra reception, and use of Starlink.

Usually I’d prefer to boondock or camp in pretty isolated places but Australia doesn’t have anything like the National Forests and BLM land that I’m used to in the States. The way to find campsites and places to stay is to use an app called WikiCamps. It’s a paid app but I think it only cost me a few bucks (9.99 AUD, one time cost). I’m not 100 % sure of the ownership or how the whole thing works but it is kind of crowdsourced. It’s a sort of gis app that has huge amounts of information. I’ve got to use filters or there’s so much shit on the screen that I can’t find anything. The bottom line is that it has lots of places to camp. I think that I’ve tried almost all of the varieties. This is going to be about the last few and I’ll follow up at some later time.

There are quite a few National Park campsites. These tend to be a bit more like National Forest campsites in the US than like our National Parks. Most have some kind of toilet and a few have showers. While in the town of Winton, to see some of the dinosaur sights, I stayed at the hotel in town. I’ll write more in a later blog about hotels, farm stays, etc. This one is just about a few or the recent campsites. So, National Parks require permits and they have to be obtained online. There’s no kiosk at the campground. In Queensland the permits cost 7.50 AUD, not too bad. After Winton I went to a National Park for the night. There was only one other guy camped there and probably places for 15 to 20 so we were well separated. The toilet, a pretty good chemical toilet, was guarded by a couple of kangaroos when I drove in. I suspect they were trying to get out of the heat.

And this was a relatively undeveloped campground with pullouts and a few crude fire rings. Some others have had really well defined and numbered camp locations.

After the one night in that campground I went to a dinosaur museum and then drove to the “town” of Opalton. This is a community of opal miners. The opal fields have been active since the 1880’s. In 1896 the largest opal ever found was discovered in the area. It was a meter long opalized tree trunk. The opals in this area are called boulder opals. They are opal veins in ironstone or sandstone. Anyway, there is a Boulder Opal Association (of miners) that maintains a bush camp in Opalton. Bush camps are generally fairly primitive with sort of random places for people to camp. It’s way off season so when I got to the camp there were no other campers, just the caretaker. He told me to camp wherever I wanted and later told me lots of stories about the area and opal mining in the area. This camp has several huts that can be rented, a very small bathroom area with toilets and showers, and several shade roof areas. They have an honor system with a box to pay, 2.50 AUD per person per night. They collect rain water in large tanks. It can be used for drinking and cooking. There is also a dam and reservoir nearby that the miners use for water for their mining operations. Here are some typical kinds of photos of what bush camps are like.

And this is a pretty crude overview from my drone.

After camping for a couple of weeks with no laundry, I decided that a caravan park with a laundry would be fine. In any case I’m in a place that is waaaay out of season so there won’t be too many people there. So I made reservations for a couple of nights in the caravan park in Richmond, Lakeview Caravan Park. It is 25 AUD per night, no electrical hookup, and laundry was $4 per load. Not too bad. As predicted, there was hardly anyone in the park and the woman running it let me pick a site wherever I wanted. I got a campsite pretty close to the “amenities” so I could do my laundry and take some time in a long shower. There were showers in Opalton so it wasn’t as big of a deal to get a shower as it has been at other times.

So, you can see that the park is pretty deserted. There were about 4 or 5 other campers when I arrived and they left the next day and maybe 4 more came in and left. This is the best of caravan park camping. First, it is a pretty nice park with trees and some space. And it was empty.

I’ll write a few more camping blogs in the next few weeks. There are lots of options and each has advantages and disadvantages. But when I’m in populated areas and during holiday times, I’ll avoid caravan parks in favor of other options. Some strange places have good showers and even have laundry facilities.