13 August 2015

The return home:

We spent our time wandering along the Murray River and into SA, the Flinders Ranges and the Clare Valley.  The car, filled with cartoons of wine and the credit card feeling a little overworked; we agreed it was time to go home.

This has been another adventure that has been based on very broad ideas like lets go somewhere along the Murray River and beyond that it’s just evolved as we have travelled.  We are not good at detailed planning, it happens as we travel and as opportunities arise.  The best example of this organic style of travel is after a excellent dinner at Rawnsley Park in the Flinders Ranges and a bottle of Seven Hills Shiraz we decided that Clare Valley was a place we needed to go since that was where the wine came from.  We now have a dozen bottles of their wine on board.

The final observations for this trip:

• We cleaned up the mandarins expecting to go through another fruit inspection station but that didn’t happen and so we planned to get more fruit down the road and guess what, we had left the citrus country and therefore no fruit stands on the side of the road.  We are now in the country where fruit comes from supermarkets.  The lesson for all; never assume mandarins will always be there and grab opportunities when they arise.
• We travelled across the famous Hay Plains on our return.  We have heard much about the Hay Plains but had never experienced them.  We have been told they are flat and boring.  How wrong can they be, there were several highlights for us on this section of the road.  There was a hill, two curves in the road and a tree.  The hill and the tree were in the same place so that was very exciting and when I say hill what I mean is a slight rise.  I could see a truck that had past us for about another hour, at that time it was just a tiny black square on the horizon, just a pixel on a very flat landscape.  This section of road was over 110kms (70 miles) so it was pretty exciting.
• We did see a cow.  She was about 2 kms or  maybe a mile from other cows which suggests she slept in that morning or was the type of cow that just didn’t need the company of others.
• The Hay Plains are so flat you could use a sextant and a good time piece to calculate your position.  The horizon is visible in all directions.  If you were away from the road it would be very easy to get lost since there are no landmarks not even farm buildings!
• You get a sense of how hot it gets out here in the summer with property names like Hells Gate.  It is believed Hells Gate property is the reference in Banjo Patterson’s poem Hay, Hell and Booligal, an Australia classic.
• I mentioned this country is flat and dry.  Flat is good for agriculture but how is it we grow so much rice in such dry country.  All through this area are vast rice farms.  What isn’t under rice is dedicated to cotton, again a heavy user of water.  We could not see these fields since they were well away from the road, closer to the river and irrigated water.
• You know its cotton country by all the cotton on the side of the road.  At first I thought it was litter but there was just too much even for the grubby individuals in this country who think chucking stuff out the window is ok.  For miles and miles cotton decorated the side of the road – may be they could harvest the cotton fluff on the side of the road and avoid having to grow it.
• The country towns out here have that look about them that says their best days were in the past.  Boarded up and empty shops are everywhere.  Farms have gotten bigger and people are able to drive great distances to buy their supplies. However what remains in these town is that country pace to life where everyone has time to chat, no one is in a hurry.  You can park your truck, leave the motor running and walk into the bakery to buy several pies and sausage rolls (obviously for your mates); where people drop into the store grabs six loaves of bread and call out to shop assistant to put it on the account as they leave the shop.  That would never happen in the bigger towns and cities.
• We visited Lake Mungo, which although described as a lake and it was for about 40,000 years has in fact been dry for 18,000 years.  Is calling it a lake overstating the congeniality of the area just to attract more tourism, I wonder?  Let me say don’t take your ski boat to Lake Mungo there are no launching ramps.  Regardless, it is in this area that they found the remains of a woman and man.  She died 41,000 years ago and he somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago (his dates are still being debated).  There have also been footprints found that are 20,000 years old.  This is a very long time ago when you compare it to the 227  years since Capt Phil turned up in Sydney cove with a bunch of convicts.
• Imagine for a moment Mungo Woman and Mungo Man finishing a meal of mussels, fish and some left over giant kangaroo, maybe the last of giant macropods.  As the sun sets over the lake, Mungo Man suggests a good coffee would finish off their dinner.  She replies, “Mate, it’ll be 40,000 years before they’ll get a decent barista out here”.  And she would be right, because now in the middle of nowhere you can get an excellent coffee at the four star Lake Mungo Lodge.
• Final comment about footprints.  Whilst the evidence of modern man is seen in all the campgrounds you can still see evidence of Cobb and Co coaches (stagecoaches) near the lake.  These tracks are over a 150 years old.  Cobb and Co coach routes covered all of outback Queensland, NSW and Victoria.  In its heyday they would on an average day have 6,000 horses in harness or about 1500 coaches on the road.  Imagine the blacksmiths, harness makers, stables, and stock feed suppliers required to maintain such an organisation. No wonder there were so many small towns.  And all of this was achieved without an Excel spreadsheet or TripAdvisor.com.au!