What are our travel plans at the moment?

Hi all,

PHEW!

That's the sound I made when I finally got the blog up to date! It has been a bit of a grind, especially the videos, so I hope they've been interesting enough.

Anyway now that's out the way I wanted to give you a quick update on our travel plans. You're probably aware Queensland's borders are still closed at the moment. This actually suits us fairly well, because it means there aren't any southerners filling up campgrounds and escaping the cold winter. Sorry fellow SA'ers, we do feel sympathetic for those who would want to be up here, but at least for us it's working OK.

The Big Picture

On a broad scale, we are still hoping to complete the full lap this year, but a month or so ago we roughly sketched out a couple of contingency plans if we were unable to get into either WA or NT. Loosely, these would be to either:

1. If the NT border stayed closed: come back down Qld inland, spend more time exploring that, and then come back into SA around Birsdville (the north western corner of SA where it joins QLD), or
2. If the NT border opened but WA's stayed shut: explore the rest of NT and return home down the Stuart Highway.

Whatever happened there, Cape York Peninsula was certainly on our list however that is currently still closed as there are apparently a lot of Aboriginal communities up there. So we don't want to rush up there too quickly and find the border's still closed, so we are trying to keep moving but not TOO fast, so there is hopefully enough time for that to open. Frustratingly, the roadblock is at Mount Carbine, just inland from Port Douglas, which excludes not only the top of the Cape, but the entire Cape York Peninsula!


So back to our contingencies... we always felt Northern Territory's borders would open before WA's borders, and indeed that proved to be true, with Michael Gunner the NT Chief Minister announcing a few days ago that Northern Territory's borders will open on July 17. This suits us fine, as it gives us about a month to finish off Queensland and then cross the border into NT.

Now WA is the tricky one, because Mark McGowan hasn't been giving much away as to what his plans might look like. And as with Cape York, we don't want to run into NT too quickly, find we've covered that and still have the WA border closed. However today we got our first clue - given Victoria's let the cat (or should that be the corona?) out of the bag, he's just announced that he's keeping the border closed, but that he HAD been planning on re-opening on August 8. August 8 would have been perfect for us, thanks very much Victoria, however this is still somewhat good news, because while he hasn't been willing to announce a new date, it does give us some insight into roughly what time frames he works on. Up to now we had no idea if he was thinking end of the year, middle of next year or what. We will have to obviously wait and see what the plans are, but since that is about six weeks away, if we assume Victoria gets Coronavirus under control within a month, it's possible the WA border may open around early to mid September. I think we can be pretty confident it's not going to open any earlier than August 8 anyway!

So that helps us to roughly formulate this plan:

1. We will continue to move north, aiming to get to Port Douglas early to mid July. If the road to the Cape is open by then, we'll travel up there. If not we'll head west and aim for Lawn Hill, near the Gulf of Carpentaria, which we've heard is really nice.
2. Cross into NT late July / early August. Hopefully visit Kakadu. Arnhem Land would be nice too but I doubt that will open.
3. Assess the situation with the WA border during this time, with a view to hopefully being able to cross early to mid September.

Obviously we'll revise this as more information comes to hand.

Immediate Plans

We're currently in Townsville as you'd know and intend to stay here probably until mid-week God willing. We are quite comfortable where we are so will probably use the time to look around a little more. We hope to head up the coast later in the week past Mission Beach and into Cairns. By the way, did you know Cairns is about half the size of Townsville? I learned that yesterday... Cairns is always mentioned a lot so I assumed it was a huge centre, and apparently it's sizeable, but only about half the size of Townsville. Anyway, random trivia fact there :)


God bless!

-- Greg