Week Two – Daly Waters

We are really at Darwin after a successful drive from Daly Waters. By successful, I mean, we arrived safely. It is a long way, but the road is pretty good, and being Sunday, not as many road trains. We did have to negotiate a rather long, and wide vehicle, but we held our nerve and got around.

The night before. It really is hard to believe that we have been two weeks on the road, and today we rolled in to Daly Waters, a dusty frontier village bustling with visitors, odd characters, interesting animals, and of course, the Daly Waters Pub, known throughout the Territory for its Barramundi and Steak dinners.

We have just returned from a marvellous dinner and a lively Country concert where a bass, guitar and mandolin with accompanying singers belted out rock and country music from Australia. They were pretty good in their own way, and we enjoyed singing and tapping along.

The food was worthy of the legend: the meat succulent and tender, the Barra sweet and tasty, the soft aromatic undertones of the handily adjacent toilets and septic system adding a unique and memorable olfactory experience. 

The pub was just about the only spot where we can get phone and internet. John and Anne went down to the pub for a cooling ale after our drive up the Stuart Highway. I sent John a message asking “how many bars” and was pretty glad when he responded: 4 bars. Of course I meant phone connection, but he was meaning serving bars which were well supported by thirsty travellers. But as luck would have it, Telstra served up 4 bars as well, meaning we could get in touch with the world. Getting in touch was both good and bad. It was good to talk to the kids and receive some emails, but not so good to discover that my credit card had been skimmed somewhere and someone had been helping themselves to our modest funds. I suspect the culprit was the Barkly Roadhouse where we got fuel. The EFTPOS was unavailable so we had to use cash, and I acquired cash from a machine that dispensed cash when you insert a bank card. It must have had a skimming device to which I was not alert. Anyway, the bank is on to it and the card cancelled.

One of the interesting characters of Daly Waters is the Highway Patrol, consisting of a fairly portly gentleman clad in shorts and a blue singlet, riding a mobility scooter decorated with buffalo horns and a horse in tow. For the whole afternoon he sped up and down the street, apparently without purpose, though he did come over to chat with me and Pauline for a short while.

But I am getting ahead of myself, and I can reflect on the week just gone where, on leaving Longreach, we trundled up the highway to Winton, famous for fossils, dinosaurs and opals. For a tiny town, there are three large hotels, and two of them provide overnight camping just a short step off the highway. We dined at the North Gregory Hotel where coincidentally there was some poetry reading from the same man who read Banjo Patterson’s poems from four years ago. Although not connected to the hotel, his name is Gregory North. He read Banjo’s poems very well, and I was transported back to the days of childhood. My father was very keen to memorise Banjo’s poems, and before one could gulp down a last mouthful of mashed potato and peas, the old man (aka, Dad), would ask, with flourish, and meaninglessly as the answer was always “Yes”,  have you heard the Man from Snowy River, or The Man from iron Bark, or The Bush Christening.  I am not sure if I just happened to be slow or did not want to leave an empty plate, or possibly the iron grip on my wrist, but I always was caught having to listen to the old boy recite the poems, which you will know, are usually quite long. To this day, the lines of many of those poems are etched on my brain.

From Winton, our destination was Cloncurry then on to Mt Isa where we caught up with Rob and Pauline  and with a whole day to recover, fix things, do the laundry, and replenish the pantry. We had the fanciful notion that Mt isa might have a cafe or two where we could get a decent cuppa, but the choice was Donut King and Donut Realm, which I guess suggests that the locals are more interested in doughnuts than coffee.

On our second afternoon at Mt Isa, we took a drive out to Lake Moondarra on the Leichhardt River that supplies Mt Isa with drinking water. It was a very pleasant spot for our evening BBQ and to watch the sun settle over the hills and lake with a lone fisherman sllouhetted against the dimming sky.

After Mt Isa is a procession of roadhouses which provide fuel and a flat piece of earth  to rest our vehicles for a night. The traffic is almost entirely caravans, motorhomes and campers, with the numbers made up by huge road trains that roar along the highway. The landscape is relentless – flat and mostly sparse of vegetation, and yet there is a rich diversity  in the scrub and trees.

But here we are at Daly Waters, with the temperature reaching into the 30s, giving us smug satisfaction that friends, neighbours and family are shivering in the cold. Tomorrow is Sunday and  Jen and I have a long drive to Darwin, some 600 kilometres journey. We will leave our motorhome at Katherine and drive the car to Darwin where we stay overnight so we can transact some important business on Monday. Our plan is to return to Katherine on  Monday and on Tuesday go directly to Lake Argyle.

We feel that so far we have just been heading for a destination – two weeks on the road and we are still nearly a week away! And yet the journey has had its memories and experiences. We have had outdoor movie nights (watching Judge John Deed episodes), the conversations and banter on the UHF radio, listening to podcasts, and for Jen, participating in a JP seminar while travelling between Brenner Springs and Daly Waters (at least for the 30 minutes we could connect!)

Soon we shall have some really interesting things to write about and photograph. Be patient – we will get there soon!