Left Heartbreak Hotel and headed to our first real big dirt road of the trip. The graders were working on the road which meant that in parts only half of it was available. It went from good to bad and back to good. We had lots of dry creek crossings and bull dust on quite a few occasions. When you hit a bull dust section the car slews around a little as it chooses the deepest track line and the caravan simply disappears . When you eventually emerge you find that the van has gone from grey to red. Keeping your clothes clean soon becomes a joke as everything we touch is covered in inches of talcum fine red dust.
We checked in at the homestead who run a tab using a copy of your drivers licence and adding everything you order to a sheet displaying a copy of your licence.There is absolutely no discussion about costs until you ask. Don’t worry I will put it on your tab. So I bought a fishing shirt and we attended happy hour and croc feeding a few times. I did consider buying a further 20L of ulp but at $3.50 I simply could not do it. As it turns out there was some doubt as to the community in the north having any ulp so we changed our minds on that route and I no longer needed it. I digress, we found a spot to set up camp. There was water available which is great. We chose a spot that was shaded but sunny in the early part of the day.It was also within walking distance of the homestead and the hot springs. 39deg and we are swimming in a hot spring. Go figure. The camping costs are based on a sliding scale. The longer you stay the cheaper it gets. We only had 4 nights so it wasn’t that bad. You can camp anywhere on the 1 million acre(4046 square km) property which includes a large beach front area on the gulf. People that were coming back from that area said that they were catching heaps of mud crabs, in fact so many that thy eventually got sick of eating them. Mud crab is big and delicious, especially done with a little chilly. some people go there and drag their boats across the rough tracks to go fishing in the gulf. Some spend a months up there.
After setting up we went for a short drive to a cold water billabong and had a lovely swim and used one of the kayaks for a little paddle up and down. The owners have left kayaks at various safe billabongs across the property for people to use. In the evening we made a fire and barbecued some precooked pork ribs. Oh we do live well on the road. The temperature dropped enough to allow us to sleep fairly well with all the fans running.
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