Quilpie to Windorah

Our stay at The Lake extended to 3 nights after we had a call from friends who left Victoria a couple of weeks after us. They were in Yowah & planning to go west to Thargomindah, but upon discovering we were at Quilpie drove the 200+ kms north to catch up with us. So glad they did, seeing Alan & Robyn again with the chance to share a camp fire was really enjoyable, something we hadn’t done together for a couple of years. We left Quilpie the same day, with us headed direct to Windorah & them to Windorah via Erromanga, so a reasonable chance we would bump into them again in Windorah.

Remaining on the Diamantina Developmental Road all the way to Windorah kept us on sealed road, albeit constantly varying between a narrow two lane road & even narrower single lane. Outback protocol on such roads in the event of oncoming traffic (not very common) is to slow to a crawl & pull almost off the road, leaving the driver side wheels just on the bitumen. This helps to prevent rocks that are thrown up from breaking windscreens. Road trains – the huge multi trailer combinations are a different story. When we see one of those approaching, slowing down & pulling as far off the bitumen as possible & stopping is the best option. Mostly approaching drivers have been exceptionally courteous, the majority of them being travellers towing caravans.

It’s hard to convey the sense of travelling to folk who have never visited Australia , or even to Australians who have never left the city or the east coast. Driving a few hundred kilometres between tiny towns & settlements for those used to services etc along the way is very different to driving those sort of distances with the only evidence of human presence being the narrow strip of road snaking ahead (& perhaps the occasional glimpse of a fence or maybe a power line). Observant readers may have noticed that mostly our camps are at places with water. It is often the presence of water which determines where settlements & towns have been located. Importantly there is rarely any surface water between these places. Many folk would describe the journeys between our stopping points as driving through ’nothing’. This is of course an understandable but grossly inaccurate description. The country changes all the time, the frequency of change can be most surprising. Colours, textures, vegetation, hard, soft, red, grey, yellow ground. Cracked soil, sand. Density of trees, of the scrub, of the wildlife. etc etc. And it can change at intervals of just a few minutes, sometimes with obvious reason, but often it’s a puzzle. We are driving over the bed of an ancient sea.

Occasionally we listen to music as we drive, but mostly we don’t. It’s too easy to remove ourselves from the country as we pass through it, sitting behind glass, distracted by sounds that are not of these places. Watching the country as if on a screen is not the aim, we can sit at home to watch documentaries. We are finding we are increasingly driving much more slowly than we could. Even on the sealed roads our average rarely exceeds 70kph (40mph). If the sealed road is black it dominates our outlook more than if the road surface is constructed using local materials which blend more with the surroundings. Unsealed roads with no fences are best for ‘immersion into country’. Travelling on foot, bicycle or horseback would be better still, but the car allows comfort, & an engine lessens the effort but ……… consciously keeping ’immersion’ in mind is something we find worthwhile, even though it is something we don’t always manage. We still pass things we wish we had stopped for – a photographic opportunity, or just to search for an answer to a question that something we are passing throws up. We accept missed opportunities as something left for another time, but hope with practice to train ourselves to pull up more frequently.

Twice now when driving over one of the frequent cattle grids across the road we have been surprised by a loud & sudden wailing siren. The first reaction is that sick feeling in the guts which accompanies the sound of a vehicle alarm informing us that we have a problem with the car. The immediate scan of gauges & lights revealed nothing untoward & it seems that the siren has been triggered by us passing over the cattle grid. Whether this is a joke to amuse a station owner, an additional means of dissuading stock from wandering across the grid, or something else we are as yet uncertain. If you know please let us know. In the meantime if it happens again we are going to stop to ‘play’ on the grid.

The roads are a little busier than we had expected, & will become more so over the next few weeks leading up to & following the world famous annual Birdsville Races in a couple of weeks time. Currently we have been encountering at least a couple of dozen other vehicles on the road each day & most of the better known bush camping spots are increasingly being populated with racegoers who use the races as a reason to undertake a bit of adventure. We have been to Birdsville previously at one of it’s quietest periods & loved it & are now doing our best to avoid the race crowds, with a view to reaching Birdsville again when all the hubbub has dissipated.

50kms east of Windorah we passed one of the few tracks leading off into the scrub to a station. Next to a pile of old fenceposts cut from Gidgee was a sign offering firewood for a donation which would go to charity. No doubt a fundraiser for the race period. I managed a u turn & we picked up this dense, heavy & ultra dry wood, enough for a few nights fire. Probably the best quality firewood for the coals around a camp oven that can be had. No idea what the charity was, but we were happy to make a donation for thes campfire length gems.

We didn’t reach Windorah, instead pulling up 12kms short of town at the Coopers Creek. Plenty were already camped along it’s banks, but we found ourselves a lovely spot, which gave us access to the sun for our solar power needs, whilst also having a gorgeous little woodland spot with day long shade & a river view…… and with room for our friends whom we were now expecting the following day. Alan & Robyn again, plus Alan & Lorrelle who are on there way back south having been up around Darwin for a few months. All are mutual friends who have ‘tradionaly caught up once a year over several years at an annual gathering nearer to home, a favourite for all of us. Meeting up together ‘on the road’ would be special…… and indeed it was. Incredibly with the two couples arriving from different directions – they both arrived at exactly the same time.

Tonight will be our 4th night at Coopers Creek, A&R left today & A&L will continue east tomorrow, whilst we will go north with a view to spending the next couple of weeks zig zagging between several of the Channel Country’s national parks. This morning we finally made it to Windorah, driving into town for a much needed shower & to check out whether the town had changed much since were there in 2009, before returning to our camp. Somehow, although a sleepy little backwater the town has had a bit of a face lift. The pub has been done up a little, now with a pleasant shady outdoor sitting area, but most noticeably the servo has ‘upgraded’. Merv ran the servo for 33 years, he was a bit of an outback legend, it’s not often one comes across a blind man running a servo & mechanical repair centre. I still don’t know how he worked out how much fuel we had put into our tanks! Anyway it turns out tha Merv moved away from Windorah about 5 years ago to Toowoombah over in the east. Peter & Danielle have taken over the old ramshackle place & have given a good spruce up as well as expanding the service a bit. The old corrugated buildings are now painted white & house not only the mechanical repair shop & fuel bowsers, but also a fast food outlet, souvenir shop & of interest to us – the hot showers. What makes the place look so different is the Large concrete apron at the font of the servo rather than the previous red dirt. Dannielle explained that finding the concrete had been a surprise. It had been covered, over time, with the red dirt – up to 15 inches thick & hard packed with use. Removing it was like an archeological dig with all manner of long lost tools & implements of repair hidden in the layers of time.

A visit to the Info centre was of value, giving us details to help us decide where to next. We were told of what seems (to us) the crazy requirement that the Queensland parks dept now has for anyone wanting to camp in a National Park to book in advance, for specific dates. For travellers without a fixed intinerary in a huge area with no phone signals this is incredibly inconvenient. We also learned that some folk, wanting to do the right thing, & to book ahead for their planned visit to the Diamantina National Park had, this morning, spent over 3 hours utilising the Info centre’s free wifi & their phones just to set up the required account which would enable them to make a booking. It wasn’t clear if after doing this they had successfully actually managed to make a booking. We have decided to ‘wing it’ as we have no idea how long we will stop in places along the way, & thus when we will want to be in each National Park. Hopefully there might still be self payment boxes at the Parks, or Rangers who will collect fees from the ‘naughty’ people like us who have not booked in advance. We feel it unlikely that Rangers will evict us from the parks for not following protocols we think that they to will consider unreasonable. It feels like rules made by beauracratic desk jockeys a long way from the outback, lacking in any sort of understanding of how people travel in these parts.