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Longreach to Carnarvon Gorge (July)
On towards the gem fields. Passed through Barcaldine, still a lot of motor homes around after their national rally, the town is quite pretty, extremely wide main street to allow for the camel trains etc. to turn round, the centres of these streets these days are being utilised for parking and displays. A lot of bougainvillea around which gives a lovely splash of colour. Stopped at a rest area just out of town for a pit stop and a cuppa. Some people had obviously stayed there the night or longer, which wouldn’t have been bad, the toilets were clean, plenty of trees and close to the river.
Stopped at a little place called Alpha for lunch after passing through Jericho, there was a funny feeling about Alpha, don’t know if it was the people or what but we didn’t feel we wanted to stop for any length of time. There were some great murals on the walls but that’s about the only good thing I can say about it.
Passed a sign saying we were going through the Great Dividing Range and could hear a funny sound. Stopped had a look around couldn’t see anything so started off again and there was that noise. Stopped and this time discovered the problem. The one tyre that was not brand new (it had been the spare on the van) had thrown its tread. So as usual when a tyre has to be changed there was no shade and in the middle of the day. Several people offered to help as they went past but Clive had it all under control. There were a herd of cows in the paddock next to the road, when we stopped they were at the far side of the paddock, but when they saw us they started to amble across, by the time Clive was nearly finished we had the whole herd with its heads over the fence watching him, quite a funny sight. Whilst it was annoying having to change the tyre we did feel it had done good service. It was the original spare, therefore, nearly ten years old and had been sitting on the back of the van for that long. We put it on the van in Alice Springs and it had done a lot of kilometres over some rotten roads before it gave up the ghost so not bad at all.
Turned off the main road and headed towards Rubyvale as the chap in Longreach had suggested. Stopped at Sapphire first and had a drink then travelled the few kms. On to Rubyvale. We had a look around and weren’t too impressed by the appearance of the park, it looked crowded, small and a bit run down so we decided to drive back to Sapphire to stay the night. We were not disappointed the Blue Gem caravan park was great fun. You could buy a bag of stuff and sift it etc. to see if you could find some gems (people were finding them) but we didn’t, or you could go and fossick yourself on the creek banks. Quite a few people stay there for months at a time just fossicking around and I’m sure Clive would have loved to stay longer, I told him that we could come back after Carnarvon Gorge, but we had to get there tomorrow to keep our booking. We had a great couple of hours round the campfire at Sapphire chatting to both the ‘regulars’ and the ‘travellers’, we were very glad we had partially taken the guy in Longreach’s advice and not gone straight through to Emerald which was just another largish town. In the morning as we were leaving there was a family of Brolgas just wandering up the main street, and hundreds of brightly coloured parrots flying around, very Australian, very nice.
We stopped in Emerald to get a new tyre for the van and had a drive round. It was a large town, had Coles, Woolworths and Target as well as lots of small shops. The guy where we got the tyre said we had to be careful on the road into Carnarvon gorge as they get loads of tyres brought in that people have done in on that road. It’s approximately 230 km from Emerald to Carnarvon so if the ranger has had to bring your tyre in (which apparently often happens) it would be an expensive tyre. We haven’t seen any rain since we left Alice but the nights and early mornings have been rather chilly, but the weather during the day has been very pleasant, sometimes even a little too warm come mid afternoon.
After passing through Rolleston we came across a cattle drive. A real drover on horseback looking after them with whips cracking away, but they were still all over the place and driving was very slow, great to see. Arrived at Takaraka, the camping area for Carnarvon gorge. There used to be a camping area at the main gorge site, but that has been closed and they have upgraded and extended this area. It is still in the throes of development and there is a bit of mud around but on the whole it is lovely. Lots of trees, lots of birds, especially Apostle birds (so called because there are nearly always 12 of them together). The campsites are huge and the ablution block is the best I have come across so far in our travels. There are three areas, area 1 near the office and ‘shop’ also has a few cabins, area 2 where we are, and area 3 which caters for the large tour groups. Each area has a camp kitchen and again fantastic. A large undercover area with tables and chairs, fridge, sinks, cook tops, microwave ovens, kettles, toasters etc. and an urn kept constantly boiling if you don’t want to boil your own kettle. Also there is a large fire pit with log ‘seats’ around where people gather at sunset for the customary drinks and yarns. The fire is kept going most of the day and a lot of people were placing their camp ovens in it to cook their dinner, I didn’t but maybe I should have. The first night we were here we went to a talk in area 1 by the local rangers on the gorge, its history and the walks there were etc. Unfortunately, whilst the talk was great it was freezing cold and the fire had not been built very well so was not giving out much heat, I got frozen to the bone and was quite happy to go back to our own van and put the heater on to warm up.
Day 2 at Carnarvon gorge dawned cold but lovely, clear blue skies and a nice day for walking. We drove up to the main visitor centre and got our track maps and sat down to decide what to do. Me being the unfit chicken I am, decided on the nature trail and rock holes walk, Clive would’ve liked to go to the Moss Gardens which look fantastic but I was a little worried about the 4k. walk there and 4k. back, we must have walked the 4k. on our little walks and I was fine, but they were on fairly flat ground and the moss gardens was going uphill – maybe I would have made it, we’ll never know. The walks we did were very lovely, but we didn’t see any platypus which was the story of our whole time at Carnarvon, even with Clive doing his Karate Kid impersonation standing perfectly still on a log for at least an hour towards sunset they didn’t come to visit. Some people who got up much earlier than us saw some in the early morning but no-one saw them in the evening. In the afternoon we took another walk to a place called Balloon Cave to see some rock art, unfortunately this was a great disappointment to us as the rock art was only a few hand stencils, the walk was very nice though. This evening we sat round the fire pit at our own camp ground and whoever had made the fire had done a great job, it was really warm, shame to leave and go to get tea.
Day 3 was again a chilly start and a lovely day. Did the Mickey Creek walk which was very pretty, Clive did a detour into one of the side gorges, but it was a bit too rocky for me and he said it just got rockier and narrower so he gave up as well. We booked in at the Lodge for dinner tonight then back to camp to get tidied up ready for the off tomorrow morning. Dinner was very nice after we established we wanted the ‘all day menu’ which was advertised not the a-la-carte menu, plenty to eat and very reasonably priced.

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