The intrepid phrogs jumped up with the birds at the Barkly Roadhouse ( good price for the campsite - everything else was through the roof!). There was a gorgeous flight of Galahs (grey and pink parrots with a surging flock fight pattern) dancing in the air just outside our camp as we rose and started the long drive to Mt Isa. One thing that can be said for the Northern Territory is that they maintain good roads. The instant we passed back into Queensland, the road degenerated into a single lane of pavement - what’s known here as a "beef road". The name comes from the technique of upgrading a dirt road to a "bitumen" road by laying a narrow strip of pavement on the dirt road bed. This is done to speed the transport of road trains hauling beef across the country, hence the name. These are fine until you encounter a road train coming the other way which gives you the option of pulling off onto an often muddy and/or soft, rutted shoulder so that the truck can stay on the pavement, or getting only partially off and making the road train do the same, in which case his outside tires will kick up gravel and crack your windshield! Tough choice when there’s a sign post in the shoulder right where you cross paths!! Two cracks in the Troopy’s windscreen are mute testimony that this has happened to us more than once. Anyway, this was the character of the road for much of the long drive into Mt Isa (known locally as "The Isa" in keeping with an Australian outback penchant for this sort of renaming).
On our way through to Darwin, we noted several promotions in The Isa for touristy attractions like the mine tour and the Riversleigh fossil museum. Now, The Isa is basically a mining town, a big one (largest city in the world - no fool’n - look it up in the Guinness Book of Word Records), that just happens to sit on the main east/west highway between the coast and the Top End. Virtually every tourist going to the Top End (Darwin, et al) by road passes through here. Just because there aren’t really any tourist attractions in a mining camp is no reason to not capitalize on such an opportunity! In fact, despite a commendable job of marketing, there really isn’t much to see and do in Mt Isa. The Riversleigh museum is a very amateurish display that would hold the attention of the average 10 year old for about 20 minutes, and then only if he/she was already interested in prehistoric animals. The potentially interesting deep mine tour is for just 9 people at time, twice a day and is so over booked that you need to schedule several days in advance - good for the local economy and other marginal attractions that might not otherwise get seen, but expensive for the tourist. The above ground ore processing facility (seen one and you’ve seen them all), city lights at night (yeah, right), and various pay-to-see mining junk collections at various distances from town pretty well rounds out the attractions. We’d have to give top marks to the city’s marketing consultant for making a sow’s ear really look like a silk purse - it even took us two days to figure it out! The highlight of our stay was this little guy with a big voice that inhabited our amenities building and came out to visit us one evening.
That’s my boot top that he’s perched on. With the enormous smoke stacks of the mine, which dominate The Isa’s skyline, receding in our rear view mirrors we proceeded on to a tour that we’d been debating for some time - Lawn Hill National Park. At issue was the considerable distance out of our way that we would have to travel in order to see it. It would mean a detour of nearly 1000 Km of which 200 Km was dirt road and at least 40 Km of that would be unsuitable for the trailer. On the other hand ,with only one exception, everyone that we met who had been there indicated that it was a "must see" place. So, since we were here to see all of the "must see" places, we stored the trailer with our friends at the caravan park in Cloncurry (saw our first wild camels just off the road on the way there!!), and headed back up north along the Burke Developmental Road (another beef road), through the Burke and Wills Roadhouse, then east to Gregory Downs and finally in along the 90 km dirt road to Lawn Hill - a very long day of driving over beef roads and dirt roads of varying quality. Along the way, we stopped at the road house in Quamby where I had the biggest beer of the trip so far!
After a bit of looking around the mostly deserted campground (we’re now traveling well outside the peak tourist season), we picked out a nice secluded spot at the far end of the park and set up camp. We were surrounded by bush country, wallabies that hung out on the edges of the camp, and lots of birds. The camp ground is right on the water hole that forms the major attraction of the park, and, at this time of year, was quite hot and muggy. However, the water hole itself was convenient for a swim whenever we felt like it and there were always the showers to cool off . On the next morning we rented a canoe (got a good, watertight one this time!), and paddled along the two water holes that were accessible.
Because the area to be covered was considerably smaller, it was a much more relaxing paddle than at Katherine Gorge and just as pretty. We found a nice spot to pull out of the water, have our lunch and spend a while swimming in the cool water. The portage between the middle and upper gorges was equipped with a wooden chute and walkway to pull the canoe through, so even that was easy! No powered tour boats this time!
After returning the canoe, we walked along the mesa that overlooks the lower gorge (not accessible by canoe) and observed the wide variety of bird life that inhabits it.
The National Park campground where we stayed has a manned ranger station, lots of campsites (some with plenty of shade), hot and cold water showers, and even a working phone! Up the road 6 km or so is Adel’s Grove which has even more campsites with similar amenities (though they were not taking campers at the time we were there) and a kiosk where they sell ice and basic groceries. All in all, we felt that, despite the distance traveled, the detour was worth the effort to see the place and spend the day floating around in the water hole.
That night the heat and humidity were oppressive and by 4 am it had clouded over and begun to rain lightly. We decided to forgo our plans to take a dip before leaving later that morning. Instead, we hastily packed our camp and hit the road in the dark before it really started to rain. Daylight found us pounding back onto the pavement at Gregory Downs and charging on down the beef roads toward Cloncurry and points west. One of the good things about our early start was that we saw a record number of bustards (a large Australian version of a road runner that we’d seldom seen before) along the road, to say nothing of the dozens of roos and wallabies that tried to get me to run over them - all unsuccessful, I might add.