Expensive, expansive

The most expensive leg of our journey began almost three weeks ago with an overnight stay in Malanda, in the Atherton tablelands, east of Cairns. It was amazing how quickly the landscape changed from lush tropical rainforests, green lawns and fields of sugarcane, to dry, sparsely treed savannah lands around Mareeba and the rolling, fertile farmland of Atherton and Yungaburra, much like Gippsland in Victoria.
We came to stay next to the Malanda Falls only after being told the caravan park at Tinaburra was full (despite looking half empty) and were glad to have stumbled across the curtain fig tree along the way. We went platypus spotting at dusk in Yungaburra and devoured some home baked bread and poffertjes from the Malanda markets the next morning after waking to our first frost in weeks.
Feeling a bit sad at the thought of leaving the beaches and warm overnight temperatures, we decided to head back towards the coast and see in daylight what we had missed on our night time drive to Cairns. The cyclone damage was clearly visible at Mission Beach, but the caravan parks were bursting at the seams with visitors and we wrote off our most expensive campsite (at $51 for the night) as a donation towards the rebuilding process!
Our next stop was Charters Towers, about one and a half hours inland from Townsville and I learnt very quickly that a place name on google maps doesn't equate to its actual existence. Charters Towers is a beautiful town with very similar history, architecture and terrain to Bendigo, Victoria. We felt we needed a second night to explore the area and embarked on a self-guided walk of the town, an early morning visit to Tower Hill and a very interesting tour of the School of Distance Education (school of the air) before beginning the long drive to Winton.
We stopped at Torrens Creek for lunch and Hughenden for some exceptionally expensive fuel (166.9c/l) and Corfield for afternoon tea. To give you an idea of just what is (or isn't) at Corfield, the only things that passed us in our twenty minute stay while the girls played on squeaky old swings, were an emu, a road train and a tumble weed.
On a combination of bull dust and stones and under the shade of coolibah trees, we finally pitched our tent at the Matilda Country Van Park with the moans of "are we there yet?" ringing in our ears.
You wouldn't think there would be much going on in a town like Winton, but it turned out to be quite an action-packed night, with some fantastic entertainment by a pair of travelling bush poets - in an old green shed decorated with rusty farming memorabilia and packed with plenty of weary travellers like ourselves. More entertaining than that, though, were Ben's attempts to fend off a pack of marauding kittens in the wee hours of the morning. As we tried to sleep, we were woken by the occasional TWANGGGG as the kittens amused themselves by jumping from overhanging branches onto our tent. I lay in bed in fits of muffled laughter as Ben stood in the middle of the tent and punched madly as each kitten landed. If he had managed to get the timing exactly right, it would have been quite a sight to see the kittens somersaulting skyward in the moonlight!
We woke to all the colours and sounds that early morning in the outback brings and, after comparing all our sightseeing options, we settled on a tour of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum and were thoroughly impressed. Nestled on top of the 'Jump Up' about 15km south of Winton, we learnt all sorts of facts from George, our young, Steve Irwin-like guide, who shared his knowledge of paleontology with us and managed to keep the girls attention for an entire one and a half hours, with his flamboyant hand gestures, enormous smile, booming voice and wide-brimmed Akubra.
The day became hot and dusty pretty quickly and the short afternoon drive to Longreach was no where near as enjoyable, especially with someone screaming the entire way in the back seat. We were thankful it wasn't a day where we were attempting five or six hundred kilometres.
We set up camp on a mixture of red earth and rock at the enormous Discovery caravan park and Ben spent some time rediscovering his passion for all things aviation at the QANTAS museum. The girls and I joined many others in admiring a pair of Brolgas wandering through the campsites and watched hundreds of cockatoos fly over as the sun set in a pink sky.
As we drove through kilometres of nothingness on our way to Charleville the next day, road kill became so common that, if I pointed out some wildlife to the girls, they began to ask if it was dead or alive. In one 119km stretch of road, we counted 142 kangaroos, 1 pig, 1 crow and 1 lizard (all dead). Most remarkable of all though, was an encounter with a very-much-alive wedge-tailed eagle. We were all astounded to find that they can stand up to 1.1m tall and have a wing span of 2.8m. Mirages, feral cats, goats and signs indicating the next fuel stop was more than 250km away also became more frequent and by the end of the day, all of us were sporting a single sunburnt arm.
After stopping for a snack under a giant meat ant at Augathella, we drove past a large bush fire, but arrived unscathed in Charleville and settled into possibly our worst campsite (on top of a septic tank and in a thoroughfare) with the smell of smoke hanging in the air. Considering its small size, Charleville had a real hustle and bustle about it and, by the look of the queue in the bakery the next morning, the locals love their coffee and cafes.
Arriving in Bourke meant we had left Queensland well and truly behind and the overwhelming sense was that Bourke had left its best days well and truly behind. Grand old buildings and paddle steamers indicated what might have been, but seeing all the buildings boarded up gave the town an eerie feeling. We stayed in a great caravan park a few kilometres out of town and had to eat inside the tent for the first time for fear of being carried away by giant mosquitoes. Despite the Darling River run being 81kms shorter, we were advised not to take it and so set off the next morning on our 617km journey to Broken Hill, via Cobar and Wilcannia.
We left without breakfast (a strategic move to try sneaking in an extra hour of driving without the girls noticing) and stopped at a roadside camping site about 70km out of Bourke. We had our porridge in the most striking scenery - nestled amongst scrub on rich red earth, but slightly annoyed at the sound of someones generator ruining the peace.
The most exciting thing we saw on the side of the road in that 617km journey was probably the decomposing cow, overinflated, with all four legs skyward and with a crow perched atop it's hoof. Funny how horrible things like that suddenly become fascinating when there's nothing else to look at.
And so we arrived in the mining town of Broken Hill and, having clocked up more than 10,000 kilometres on our journey so far, it would be fair to say that petrol (at an average around 145c/l) has been our biggest expense. We stayed two nights in the town and explored the nearby ghost town of Silverton with it's old stone ruins and rugged terrain, but were glad to be heading off when some campers (with plenty of tattoos and no teeth) started setting up next to us with their pack of hunting dogs and slabs of beer.
The countryside changed again as we approached Adelaide and we decided to stay a night in Burra to explore the history and architecture in the pretty little village. We woke the next morning to find the car and trailer covered in a thick layer of ice and the underwear (that I had hung up to dry in the tent) frozen solid. Without a doubt the coldest morning we had experienced, it was a stark reminder of just how far south we had driven in the past 10 days and that we weren't far from home at all.
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