Date of Adventure 28-30 November 2024
I don’t know if you really want to read all of this bullshit but I’m going to get some of it down anyway. The last two days of driving, from about Cloncurry to Alice Springs, have been just normal Outback driving along sealed roads in Australia. While driving I’ve considered that for some reason I’m not pushing myself to the kinds of adventures that I’d really intended when I decided to make this trip to Oz. The first part of the trip was relatively boring, even to the point of being depressing. I spent a lot of time in the Sydney suburbs. Most of that was necessary because they were a little late in getting the Troopy finished. But then I drove up the coast, purchasing gear that I thought I needed. Today I’m pretty sure that I overreacted and overbought a bit. Some of the gear is likely to never get used. Recovery gear that I don’t use because I don’t get stuck is OK. Travelling solo can make me a little paranoid so having the stuff I need to get unstuck is probably fine. I’ve learned the hard way that driving the main roads and staying in caravan parks is just not the way to go.
There have been two times when I took the chicken route and really should have gone for the tough one. The first time was when I was in the Palmer Goldfields, headed for their camping area and chickened out on the rough track to get there. I’ve clearly got the vehicle that would have done it. The main thing was that I just wasn’t up for testing myself. Now I know that I should have gone for it and increased my confidence by doing so. There were a couple of extenuating circumstances: First, it was pretty hot and the heat was getting to me. Now, after weeks of really hot weather I don’t think that the heat would have bothered me so much. And the second is that lots of the area was really dry and some had been burned in a bush fire. So I wasn’t all that taken by the scenery or conditions. Still, it would have been a good thing to have gone ahead and done it.
My second chicken route is the one that made me think a lot about this and write some of this crap down. From Cloncurry I was going to take the Donohue and Plenty Highways to Alice Springs. That’s a route that’s about half sealed road and half gravel. There are about 3 stations or roadhouses along the way. But it’s essentially desolate Outback. During the season, a couple of them have fuel available. Here’s the route with the main fuel stops (and camping sites) marked. There’s another but it’s about 70 km from the main highway so not that useful.
At the last minute I started checking a little deeper and it turns out that all of them would have been closed. It’s so far off season that they just shut down. And then, thinking about it, I decided to take the more conventional and slightly longer route on the Barkly and Stuart Highways. These are the main, sealed roads used by most people and road trains delivering stuff across Central Australia. And here’s that “normal” route.
You can see on the maps that the Plenty highway is only about 860 km while the Barkly/Stuart route is 1230. That’s a little deceptive because I was going to take a day or so to get from Mary Kathleen, where I’d been camped, to Boulia. There are a couple of bush pubs along that stretch and I was hoping to catch them open for a beer on the way.
I don’t think that the scenery on the main, paved roads is much different than what I would have seen on the Plenty Highway but the driving speed is much higher and it just gets a little boring as the day wears on. The temperatures have been pretty high. Running in the mid 90’s and above most days. I did get a pretty good rainstorm just out of Mount Isa that cooled things down for a while.
There were a couple of things that made the trip a bit better. I spent a couple of nights at the Barkly Homestead Roadhouse. I was hoping it’d be an old time roadhouse but it’s actually a modern, well kept caravan park with lots of camping space and motel type rooms. They have a nice modern bar and restaurant. There was hardly any one camped there so that was good. And one night, for dinner, I got a really good salmon/black rice salad bowl. The other interesting thing was camping and walking around Karlu Karlu or the “Devils Marbles”. Those are some cool rock formations. The campground was fine just because it’s off season and there was only one other group camping. If it had been high season and full it would have been just like a parking lot. One car next to the other. Somehow, I didn’t anticipate things being that tight in a State Park campground. So far that hasn’t usually been the case.
Here’s the way the road looked on the drive. Shortly over the Queensland NT border it was unbelievably stark. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen an area that is so flat and just dry grass. It’s the end of the dry season so not surprising that the grass is dry.
Then later there was a bit more vegetation. And it’s kind of like this coming into Alice Springs. That really blew my preconceptions. I thought it would be more desert like. Well, this is really desert, just not sand desert and not like most of the deserts I’m used to in the US.
Well, now I’m in Alice Springs in an AirBnB. The first time I’ve been in a house for a couple of months. But it’s mostly time to clean out the Troopy and get things ready for the next couple of months of camping.
My plans for the next couple of weeks are relatively tame. I want to visit Uluru and do a little hiking in Kings Canyon. Then I’ll probably head directly south, looking for cooler weather. But somehow I’ve got to get past the intimidation of some of the rougher overland tracks. Mabe I’ll try for a day or so of sand dunes along Goog’s Track. It’s too hot and desolate to try to drive the whole track but a day of testing my abilities on the dunes might help a little.