The Roaming 5: Oct 24 - 26 (Day 267-269) Alice Springs (Burt Plain) to Boulia, Qld

Saturday 24 October - Burt Plain to Gemtree

We finally left our bush campsite and made our way towards QLD via the Plenty Highway. We came this was back in 2017 and visited Gemtree for some gem fossicking which we really enjoyed. The road to start with is two lanes of bitumen, but a little way along it suddenly changes to a single lane. If someone’s coming the other way you both have to drive off onto the gravel shoulder to let each other pass, so you have to have your wits about you!

Attempting (unsuccessfully) to
fossick for Zircon

On our way out here we came across a fellow stopped on the side of the road and asked if there was anything he needed an hand with. He said he needed a lift into Alice to get 2 new tyres as he's shredded two and also has some pets with him. He'd been there for about 24 hours and numerous people had stopped but none had enough room for him and his pets. He thanked us but said we've got kids and that he'd be ok and someone would eventually stop with enough room. I really hope so for his sake as it can get quite hot out here. We made sure he had enough water and food and headed off in the hope that some other kind soul would be generous enough to give him a lift into Alice for this things he needed.

A little further along the road we stopped at a place that was marked as a Zircon fossicking area but we weren't sure exactly what we were looking for so didn't stay long. While here Jude discovered a cute little lizard. He really loves to catch all sorts of little creatures and have a hold. They are quite fascinating and amazing how they are all so different and cute in there own way.

Jude with yet another lizard!

We arrived at Gemtree close to lunch time so headed into the office to book our site and then collected some lunch from the cafe just next door.

Lunch at Gemtree

Fossicking for garnet by the van

After parking and setting up, Mim and Bek did a bit of fossicking just around the campsite and found a few little gems. Garnet is a lovely red colour, and it's a shame it's not valuable as it's quite attractive, and they obviously use the waste gravel from their diggings to spread on the roadways in the park so there's plenty of scraps just lying around!

Garnet at Gemtree

We had a quiet afternoon getting business and school work done while Mim undertook to create 'washing city'! We'd built up a good amount of washing to do, and Gemtree is the last real spot of civilisation along the Plenty Highway (as far as it's civilised - it has generator power, toilets and washing machines but is still out in the sticks).

'Washing City' at Gemtree!

The weather has been a bit cooler today. Probably around 26 degrees but the sun was still warm but it was a lovely evening to sit outside and enjoy our dinner while watching the beautiful sunset.

Very pretty sky tonight

Sunday 25 October - Gemtree to side of road

The temperature these days have still been in the mid to high 30’s, however the evenings out here have been lovely and cool. Oddly though, the last two mornings Mim’s made the coffee, the milk has been curdled in the fridge even though the fridge has been nice and cool. It’s still tasted fine, but the sight of white lumpy bits floating around in a cup of very dark brown coffee is hardly appetising! So we’ve had to throw out two half-empty 3L bottles of milk.

After breakfast I got some work done, because we knew from the Telstra coverage map that there was no phone signal for most of the rest of the road to Boulia, which we didn’t expect to reach until Monday night. It was a bit of a shame we couldn’t do any gem fossicking here at Gemtree this time as we really enjoyed looking for garnet last time and hadn’t done any zircon fossicking yet, but we did want to keep moving. The others packed up the van while I finished leaving instructions with a few of our suppliers as to what to do in my absence, and we left about 11am, turning east to head towards Queensland.

Not too far along the road we came across our next reptile sunning itself on the road - this time a Bearded Dragon!

Bearded Dragon!

After we'd all had a hold, and once again gone through the usual discussions about why we couldn't keep it, and why we couldn't seriously buy a terrarium for the caravan, we laid out some warm stones for him well away from the road and laid him back in his surroundings, where he seemed to stay thankfully!

Looking across the dry plains towards Harts Range

Something that’s been interesting out here has been how green it’s all become since the rains. Of course we’ve never been this far to know what it used to look like, but the low green carpet over everything has the distinct look of recent growth thanks to the rains the centre has had over the past few weeks. Along the side of the road there are channels cut to divert any floodwater away from the road, and these all had water in them, along with the odd cow standing nearby for a drink! It is amazing to think that this barren wasteland is full of seeds just waiting to spring to life once water comes along.

The incredible effects of water in the desert!

We read through Isaiah 35 while we were driving which describes the restoration of the earth when Christ returns to establish God’s kingdom –

“The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose… in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water. In the habitation of dragons, where each lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. And a highway shall be there…”. Isaiah 35

Of course not all of this relates perfectly to what we saw, but we absolutely saw the desert blossoming with grass, pools of water, the habitation of dragons (as in, bearded dragons / lizards) along the Plenty Highway! It’s a real blessing to have scenes like this to better visualise just how realistic these verses are, that given water things do spring to life quickly even when they look dead.

As I mentioned yesterday, the Plenty Highway at this point is a single lane of bitumen. After a little while it grew back to two lanes (one each way) which was nice. However our enjoyment of the smooth road, the green carpets and the jagged skyline of Harts Range ahead and either side of us, was eventually broken by the dreaded ‘Gravel Road. Drive to conditions’ sign! We had hoped perhaps the sealed road ran all the way through to Queensland, but it wasn’t to be!

By this time it was about 1:30pm so we dropped the tyres back down, put one jerry can of fuel into the car and stopped for lunch. Fuel out here is pretty sparse but we had all the jerry cans full of fuel from Alice Springs (50L worth at $1.26/L), and we left Gemtree without topping up the tank (at $2/L! which is why we didn’t). We still had ¾ of a tank, however once we got onto the dirt road and we saw the fuel consumption climb from about 16L/100km up to 20L/100km I started to wonder if I’d made the right decision! The road was fairly rough although not as bad as Bamaga Road (Cape York Peninsula) or Larapinta Drive out to Kings Canyon (NT). It's interesting seeing how the road colour changes so quickly. You'll be going on red dirt for a while and then suddenly it turns into light yellow limestone in the space of about 10m.

A giant termite mound,
Plenty Highway

Driving on these sorts of roads, as I found on the Cape, isn’t pleasant. There’s the constant loud thudding / drumming from the road, there’s the rattles from various bits of trim inside the car jumping around (not loose, just rattling, for example the buttons on the radio), the periodic crossing of a cattle grid which could be anything from a smooth entry and exit right through to a hard whack or getting close to getting airborne, depending on how well matched the grid is to the road level. Then there’s the concentration of trying to pick the least bad track across the ever-changing surface conditions, which even then sometimes leads to unexpected bumps. After a couple of hours of this I had quite a headache, so we stopped at Jervois Station for a break as much as anything else, although the shop was closed and all they could do was give us some fuel with cash payment, so we bought 10L of fuel (at $2/L).

The Plenty Highway once it turns into dirt

An example of the typical changing colours of roads

Jervois Station is a 2 million acre cattle station running Black Angus cattle. The lady who served us was in her early 40’s. They’d lived there since May 2019, having left the corporate life in Darwin and taken over from her husband’s parents who’d run it for 40 years prior to that. They really enjoyed the lifestyle. Their 4 year old son has a governess who helps him with School of the Air run from Alice Springs 4 mornings a week, and every Friday he visits a nearby Aboriginal community to get some socialising time. Along the way we’d seen a herd of about 15 wild donkeys, and they had one of these donkeys at Jervois Station (the animals, not the child!) as company for their Shetland pony, both of which Bek tried to befriend!

We laboured on for another hour or so until we got to a camp spot marked on Wikicamps. It wasn’t really much better than many of the other spots we could have stopped at but it was OK. Very rocky, red dirt and a number of prickly bushes which had spines like three-corner jacks! We’re quite close to a radio tower, not for phone signal but what looks like a microwave link between Alice Springs and western Queensland, as we’ve passed a tower like this every 50km or so with dishes facing in opposite directions, presumably to receive signal from one way and then beam it onwards to the next tower. I had a rest for… not sure how long actually, maybe an hour or so to get rid of my headache.

The boys made a fire while Mim did a Penne Bosciala for dinner which was delicious! After dinner Mim and I had a nice chat around the fire while the kids did the dishes as usual. This has been one of their standard jobs during the trip and they’ve gotten quite accustomed to doing it and it gives them something to do regularly to help out. After this we did our evening readings and headed to bed. There’s definitely no phone signal out here, which is nice in a sense because you have an enforced evening off! In any case I was still quite tired and a bit headachy so we were all asleep before 9!

Monday 26 October - side of road to Boulia

There was a nice breeze the whole night although this caused some of the zips around our bed to rattle annoyingly every couple of minutes until it disturbed me enough to get up and work out which one it was. Mim made the coffee, thankfully this time the milk behaved!

The Plenty Highway... or Mars??!

The landscape outside the van this morning looked like something from Mars! Red dirt, and just rocks of all shapes and sizes. The various bushes are the only giveaway but if you look past these you’d assume you’re on a different planet!

This place, and others like it, had the most horrible
three-corner jacks - such long spikes!

We packed up, emptied another 20L jerry can of diesel into the car, and headed eastwards along the Plenty Highway. The first point of interest was a Road Closed sign! We were horrified to think we’d driven all this way only to discover the road was closed! But it turned out it was just the Covid roadblock for traffic into the NT at a truck rest stop. As they were only checking cars coming into the NT they weren’t interested in us, well one of the cops came over and said hi and were very polite and all that, but had no business to do with us. They had a Telstra satellite hotspot they let us use while we were there and then we were on our way.

Our next stop was only 4km up the road at Tobermoray Station, which itself is only about 5km west of the NT/Qld border. We got fuel ($2/L!) and had some lunch there, as it was about 1pm by this stage. Stations like this are so large and do so much that they are almost like a small town. There’s the shop alongside what appears to be the main staff accommodation quarters, then some sheds where someone was grinding some metal while someone else was welding, then more sheds, more worker accommodation and so on. They also had an outdoor entertainment area with a BBQ inside the hood of an old truck, a spit roast’s rotisserie powered by a truck battery, a pizza oven (still warm from last night’s Grand Final entertainment) and a large seating area underneath the horizontally-oriented rotor of an old windmill!

Not the cheapest fuel stop!

Their incredible outdoor entertainment area!

This truck has a surprise under its bonnet...

... voila! A BBQ plate!

The Queensland border was only a few kilometres along the road, at which point the Plenty (of dust) Highway turns into the Donohue Highway, which was in much better condition than the Plenty! The dirt roads, as much as they were, had been all graded and were in very good condition, and there were sections of bitumen – luxury!!

Some distance along we spotted this wedge-tailed eagle eating some roadkill.

The country out here continues to be extremely flat -
it feels like you can see for 10-20km!

The rest of the drive continued without incident, and we stopped at a lovely quiet free camp spot near a creek about 7km north west of Boulia for the night.