About

1 July 2023

We have left the yacht and said our goodbyes to the Captain and First Mate. The yacht is moored and we are landlubbers again. A flight to Barcelona and its time for new adventures.

I thought a quick summary of the seafarers we met during our time in the Baleares islands would bring this leg of your journey to a meaningful conclusion.

There were the Old Salts who contract their services to yacht owners to sail their yachts all over the world. The people we met had just crossed the Atlantic and were planning on a circumnavigation of the world.

The philosopher had discovered the root of all that ails the world and had a strong desire to tell everyone. He was stuck on transmit, not receive if you get my meaning.

The Lone Yachts man was a very competent sailor who hired crew as needed and sailed all over the Caribbean, Atlantic and the Mediterranean. He was a great conversationalist and had a story to tell. He had no desire to return too quickly to Canada.

There were yacht owners who were contemplating some long passages maybe without a good understanding of what 6 weeks at sea might feel like. Travelling in confined spaces with an unknown crew for extended periods must be fun, not.

A common theme was people who left colder climes to spend weeks, months and years on the sea. Their time and money was spent in chandleries, constantly repairing and cleaning their yachts and sailing on to the next exotic location.

Adonises are everywhere on the Med. I’ll say no more and leave that comment for the contemplation of my female readers.

The restaurant waiting staff are from all over the world, predominantly from Mallorca, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and a few from Italy. It all makes for great banter at the table.

Tourists on Mallorca are from Spain, the UK and lots from Germany.

For those wondering, a replacement dingy has been found. It’s just a case of ordering the boat and having it delivered to the yacht. I did enjoy a 30km e-bike ride with the captain to view the replacement boat. We rode through the streets and back roads of Palma. Not a ride for the feint hearted. E-scooters, e-bikes, pedestrians, cars, busses and trucks filled the roads.

Something that truely amazed. I thought all the big couture brands sold their wares in high end stores. Not so. In Palma Lacoste, Louie Vuitton, Gucci, Hermes and Yves Saint Laurent are all sold on the footpath. No need for fancy shops here, just acres of concrete on which to lay your goods. I’m sure the products were all the genuine article.

A couple of pics from our first day in Barcelona.

23 June 2023

We have adopted the Spanish ways, eating dinner at 11:00 pm and not shopping in the afternoon. Everything goes quiet in the afternoon with little activity until about 4:00pm.

Tying your yacht to a public mooring is no different to reversing a caravan onto a camp site. Everybody is watching while the tension on your boat rises. There is a collective sigh of relief when the boat is secure. It’s no different to caravanning, just wetter and if you drop something over the side it’s gone.

The following phrase has not been heard during our whole time in Spain: ‘Gosh, Brexit was such a good idea!’

The coastline is nothing like you will see in Australia. There are deep coves (calas in Spanish) that offer stunning mornings with deep crystal clear water and wonderful beaches. As you sail along these coves are not immediately obvious and it is not until you motor in do you appreciate these amazing moorings.

We have moored into one of these coves and swam to the beach for a seafood lunch at a quaint restaurant under the trees.

This is the place for big boy toys. There are yachts, motor boats, fliteboards, SUPS, seabobs (underwater scooters), para gliders and more. The Med is perfect for these distractions. The water is warm and crystal clear and the seas generally calm with no ocean swells.

23 June 2023

I enjoy food but please don’t ask me to critique the food I eat or provide a insightful comment on the complex flavours I might be experiencing. That said we have enjoyed some wonderful dining experiences in Mallorca and Ibiza.

We have dined on tapas, paellas, seafood and shellfish, and pasta. We have dined in beachside restaurants that look more like shacks and street side cafes in Palma.

The most challenging dining experience was arriving at a beach shack on a shingle beach in choppy water. A tender came to pick us up from our yacht but we had to get out of the boat and into knee deep, choppy water and then scramble up a shingle bank to arrive at the restaurant. It’s was not an elegant arrival. The departure was the reverse process however in the dark as the sun had set.

The ladies in their dining outfits did extremely well but there is no grace in getting into and out of a rocking dingy in the dark. All good fun.

The second experience was another beachside restaurant but this time on a sandy beach. The proprietor sent out a dingy to collect his patrons from their yachts. We landed on a lovely sandy beach and took a short walk to the restaurant. A far more dignified afternoon.

I have been intrigues by a couple of Australian curiosities in Palma. I found a bar offering TV coverage of the State of Origin and a number of other football competitions. More intriguing however was a souvenir shop offering boomerangs painted in Aboriginal artwork with the word Mallorca emblazoned across the piece. Bizarre!

We have sailed beyond Palma and are now moored in at Puerto Petro on the island of Mallorca.

20 June 2023

Our trip started with a somewhat minor frustration when my glasses broke about 1 hour out of Sydney. I do have a backup pair which are quite old but do the job. There was more to come.

Two days ago our tender broke free from its attachment to the yacht and drifted on to the shoreline which was a line of cliffs. We watched as the dingy was bounced against the rocks and for a while it seems to remain in tact. After some time it was apparent the dingy was breaking up and was probably unrecoverable.

A local delivery chap, Juan-Carlos turned up in his boat to see what could be done. Juan-Carlos had the physique and complexion of a bronzed Adonis. He was in the business of delivering food and wine to yachts. Juan-Carlos collected our captain and headed to the shoreline. He got into the water and climbed into the wreck of our tender. Nothing could be saved and the tender was too full of water. The motor and other parts had started to separate from the boat.

The Adonis returned to his boat and bought our captain back to Wyanga. He returned to his local harbour and promised he would be back when the sea has calmed to retrieve the pieces of the tender for an insurance claim. We lifted the anchor and headed for Palma, an eleven hour trip, sans tender.

As always 20-20 hindsight kicks in and there is lots of speculation on what could have been done differently. The big take away was no one was injured and no one made rash decisions that put people at risk. A good result.

Back to the days before the loss of the dingy…

We have been sailing and motoring around the islands of Ibiza and Frontera. The cliffs are spectacular. We have been in the company of other Oyster yachts and while we are 60ft long we are regularly dwarfed by 100ft vessels. We have met yachties who have just crossed the Atlantic and those who have plans for an 18 month circumnavigation of the world. Clearly we are not in Kansas any more.

18 June 2023

After a three and half year hiatus it was time to get back into some adventurous travel. A random invitation back in April to go sailing and we had the opportunity we couldn’t ignore. A brand new yacht and the chance to sail in the Mediterranean with some very good friends, who could say no.

We left Sydney on 12 June for a 30 hour transit to Dubai and on to Barcelona. An overnight stay in Barcelona and a short flight to Palma on the island of Mallorca to where we met our friends and their new yacht.

Thirty hours of flying and we realised we were out of practice with international travel. However we were open to new insights which included:

• You know you are out of practice when you find yourself staring at the Arrivals board when you looking for your departing flight number.

• You know you are getting older when you notice all the faces in the inflight magazine are so much younger than you.

• Do not expect to have an easy time travelling if you don’t have a smart phone. Everything is electronic and without a smart phone you might just as well go home.

• The high point of international flights is you still get to check in with a real person.
• It’s now a smart option to put a tracking device in your bags so you can keep an eye on where they are and to be sure they are at your destination airport.

• Your carry on bags are getting heavier because now all your devices with lithium ion batteries have to be carried with you. It’s amazing how many Li-ion devices we all own.

• Grey hair sometimes means you get to avoid long queues. We were in a line of maybe 200 people all waiting to get though immigration. Suddenly the retractable belt was opened and we were ushered to the EU passport control and within a minute we were heading for the baggage carousel. We could feel the stares of all those still patiently waiting to be processed. Happy days!

We arrived in Palma and after a bit of searching we found the boat that would be our home for the next 2 weeks. It was now time to explore Palma unpack our bags and chill out, at least until we are under sail.

More to come as we explore the Balearic Islands.

1 August 2022

This trip has been a little different from our previous travels. This time we are staying in one place for at least a week. Whilst we may think this is slow we have met many fellow campers who are happy to stay at the same place for 6 weeks and longer. Many have been coming to the same camp ground for twenty years. This level of commitment is quite foreign to us, there are just too many places to see.

We have now been on the coast for the past three weeks and are more convinced winter is something to avoid. The birds had it worked out a long time ago. I have now completed the Parkrun alphabet challenge with runs at Urunga, Yamba and last weekend, Varsity Lakes. Now for a new challenge like Parkruns in all States.

Conversations

One of the great pleasures of travel is meeting new people; people you would otherwise never have a conversation with or have the opportunity to hear their story. Last year it was the truck drivers who told us all about hauling fuel out to Birdsville, the young guys driving road trains full of cattle headed to the feed lots and of course the women running the bakery with their 80 year old dad out the back in the kitchen.

So it was at a French restaurant a short walk from our camp. Our neighbouring table asked us about the crab spaghetti which they in turn ordered. After we had all finished our meals we kicked off a conversation about where we had grown up, high school friends and class reunions, travel and online dating. Our friends for the evening were about our age and had met through online dating. They were quick to point out, in hushed voices, that the people on the table on the other side of us were on a date, people also of our age. Our new friends had overheard some of the conversation of the couple on a date and were convinced by the nuances of the conversation of what was happening. We had a collective chuckle at the expense of the dating pair. The night came to an end, we said our goodbyes and walked off into the night. I am sure we will never see them again, just like Paul who pulled over to help me last year with my flat tyre, never to be seen again.

I came across a group of six people deeply in a very animated conversation on a surf beach. They were waving their arms about and were quite deliberate with their hand movements. I thought they were trying to make themselves understood in the wind and sound of the crashing waves. As I got closer I realised not a word was being said. They were signing to each other and with raised voices considering the energy behind the arm and hand gestures. Just another conversation on the beach.

New Vistas

Have you ever returned to place you haven’t visited for 50 years. You know the place has changed, you’ve seen the pictures. Then you arrive and see for yourself. You suddenly feel so out of place in a setting more like a beachfront in Sydney or Miami. So it was when we drove through towns of the Gold Coast and Surfers Paradise in particular. Its now all motorways, McDonald’s, apartment buildings, and traffic. I think I need to get back to the outback towns with a population of just 100!

News from Home

Winter is in full swing at home and so we must look to new destinations north. Whilst there are many fellow travellers on the road there must still be that rare quiet beach camp that is free from the southern hordes. After a week in a city setting we have had our fill of people and traffic and are ready for the bush.

19 July 2022

After a hiatus of nearly twelve months now seemed to be a good time to get back to recording my thoughts and our travel experiences.

We are back on the road for at least a month and who knows maybe longer. We are not good at making definitive plans. That said on this trip we are actually booked into camp grounds over the next three weeks.

My motivation for this trip is to complete the Parkrun alphabet challenge. This involves running at 26 events that start with each letter of the alphabet. At the time of leaving home I had four letters to complete the alphabet. After this I might try for runs in every State. Parkrun is a 5 km run conducted on Saturday mornings all over Australia and around the world.

A few months ago we went crazy and bought an RV. It was there in the sales yard ready to be bought with no 18 month waiting period. It was too good to be true and it had everything we wanted especially a tow bar to carry our bikes. So we are now the proud owners of an RV and a caravan. The RV is for short trips and bike adventures and the caravan for longer tours over weeks or months, at least that’s the plan. Maybe we are just trying to recreate our younger days of travelling the US in our Chevy van.

We left home in early July and headed north where it must be warmer. Wrong, the morning I ran Parkrun it was -3c at 8:00am. The next day the car was covered in frost as we packed up and drove to the coast and warmer days, it was -5c!

All locals are well aware, however for my overseas readers I need to explain about travel from inland Australia to the east coast. From Cairns to Melbourne if you travel from inland areas to the coast you almost always have to drive over the Great Dividing range and that means a long downhill drive. As it was for us on this trip we had a day of driving down through the mountains with several hairpin bends. A lot of fun towing a 2.5 tonne caravan. We avoided roads that have were severely damaged by the recent rains and floods.

Along our travels we stopped at the site of the Myall Creek massacre. It’s sobering to quietly walk the site where 28 aboriginal women and children were murdered back in 1838. No doubt there are massacre sites across Australia just not as well commemorated as Myall Creek.

As expected the coast is substantially warmer and we are now enjoying weather that does not include frosts. I have completed two Parkruns and have only the letters Y and V to go.

There will be more and within the next week or so, not in 12 months time…..

16 August 2021

All things must come to an end and so it is with epic adventures. We have completed 12830 kms over 105 days or a little over three months on the road. With the COVID situation worsening we decided with some trepidation to return home.

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We were close to the NSW border and thought we might take a few days to get home. Alas the COVID situation became more difficult and we were left with two long days of driving to get home a week earlier than planned. We are now left with the unpacking, cleaning and reflecting on the trip and where to next.

A quick summary in no particular order of the highs and lows of the past three months:

Best Quote:

From behind us at the Fred Brophy boxing tent we heard a lady in the audience cry out to her friend who was in the ring: ‘run away, run away‘. I don’t think this cry was ever heard at a Muhammad Ali fight although it might have been useful advice.

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Best Tour Guide

Stewie, the retired drover at Blackall was the most engaging guide of the trip. Stewie had no time for political correctness and could tell a yarn like the best of the old time story tellers. Alas I fear the days of the Stewie’s telling these stories of life in the outback are numbered.

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Best Butcher:

The Quilpie butcher is the best and the sign on his shop states he is the best butcher in Queensland. I think he is right.

Best Experience

The flight from Cairns to Cape York was a bucket list experience. A great way to see the wilderness of the cape from above and without the corrugations and the muddy roads.

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Challenging Experience

Replacing a flat tyre on the road out from Adeles Grove was a bit of a challenge until the ever helpful Phil turned up. Changing tyres isn’t a difficult chore if you have the right gear, its just inconvenient.

Probably waiting in Normanton for four days for a new tyre was the challenge.

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Not to be forgotten was our experience at the Augathella butchers. When we asked for lamb shanks and to be told a woman had just come in and bought them all. That wasn’t the shock. The butcher went on to say she bought them to feed her dogs! Yes, we were in shock.

Worst Coffee:

I won’t name the business and whilst Tambo might have the the best meat pies I have come across their coffee is not such a positive experience. I am sure this is only a temporary situation and they will get better.

Best Artesian Baths

The old bathtubs set up on an outback cattle station were probably the best. Hoping into a hot bath under the stars at 3.00am with a glass of wine was a most memorable experience.

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Best Pizzas:

The chefs at the Hotel Corones in Charleville presented the best pizza in our travels and they were not expensive at all. Recommended.

Worst Road

The journey of 470kms between Charters Towers and Emerald is a challenge. The road is sealed however the impact of road trains and flood has left this stretch of road full of undulations and gutters in the surface that mean there is no opportunity to relax. Its an exhausting day’s drive between these two towns.

Most Expensive Fuel:

At $1.96 a litre the fuel in Innaminka was the most expensive. However when you are that remote and the nearest competition is hundreds of kilometres away who is going to argue. In fact out there a full tank is the very definition of happiness.

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Most Useless Thing Packed:

We carried wet suits, snorkels and masks and then primarily travelled through the western plains of Queensland.

Best Meal:

A seafood dinner on the Esplanade in Cairns was the high point for culinary delights. The Coral Trout was outstanding.

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Best Customer Experience

This is a tough call. We experienced some amazing instances of customer service that was so bad it made us laugh and we had to retell the experience over and over. In many instances other random travellers told the same stories about the same organisations.

As for the best there were so many. A couple of examples come to mind including the husband and wife team that run the Outback Oasis Holiday Park in Charters Towers. They owned the park and were outstanding operators. The manager at Lara Wetlands just out of Barcaldine was full of energy and knew how to run a remote camp.

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For entertainment value the Quilpie butcher and the ladies at the Quilpie bakery who had their 80 year old dad out back in the kitchen baking. He was in fact the baker.

Phil, the man who helped me change a tyre and then vanished into my memories.

The lady who collected the camping fee of $10 at Lake Dunn will be remembered for her ability to share personal details and family stories just a little too much, maybe way too much!

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As an aside I think I might have been taken to the cleaners for a bit of welding I needed in Winton. I rationalise the experience as my effort to inject some cash into a remote country town.

Most Surprising Experience

Finding the Cob and Co stagecoach that ran from Queanbeyan to Cooma fully restored and on display in Herberton was a surprise. Seems to me it should be on display in Queanbeyan but I don’t think we would ever get it off the folks at the Herberton museum.

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So now we are thinking of where to next and when that might happen. Maybe a quick adventure within NSW before the warmer temperatures of summer. After that who knows, a remote adventure into central Australia…..

11 August 2021

It’s been a while since I last posted a log. It seems we have been on the move quite a bit and time for writing has suffered.

We have left the tropics and are now well south of the Tropic of Capricorn. We are only two days from crossing the NSW border and are only too well aware that once we cross that border the gates will slam shut behind us, at least for a while.

My Most Recent Observations:

The Changing Scenery

We have left the green of the wet tropics and the mountains of the coastal ranges. We are back out west on the flat open country of outback Queensland. The horizon is obvious and the distance between towns immense.

Out here the massive road trains hauling cattle to market or feedlots and trucks hauling mining equipment are more prevalent. The UHF radio is so useful when you need to call up a truck driver who might be approaching or sitting on your tail.

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The Borderlands

We have reached the Borderlands. I am not talking about the border between States rather a wildlife border. We are now in a transition zone where the roadkill is consumed by both crows and kites.

North of here you will only see flocks of kites and south only crows and not a kite to be seen. I didn’t see the line on the road or the fence but clearly the crows and kites know where their territory lies. The wedge tail eagles are also absent this far south.

You are also more likely to see emus in open country now that we have left the tropics. Cattle of course along with goats and horses are out here but no avocado, sugar cane, bananas or mangoes.

Mining Towns

I have mentioned before the impact of fly in fly out mine workers and the lack of people in the small towns. Another impact of modern mining technology is open cut mines rather than underground mines.

The old mines had a limited impact on the landscape, with only the shaft opening visible and the relatively small heaps of waste rock. In contrast the new open cut mines leave massive scars with deep pits and huge spoil heaps.

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These days if it costs $1000 to mine one ounce of gold the mine is considered profitable. That could involve the removal of 30 tonnes of ore for 1 oz of gold. Those numbers help explain the huge waste piles so evident in this country.

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The Good Old Days

It’s pretty sobering to visit the cemetery in an old mining town. There a headstone recorded the death of a 15 month old baby due to arsenic poisoning. Maybe the good old days weren’t so good.

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Stock Exchange

These days we think of stock exchanges only in the big cities, New York, Melbourne, Sydney, London etc. However in the day country towns like Charters Towers established their own stock exchange.

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It seems there was a lot of skullduggery going on with lots of scams over potential mining claims. The stock exchange was established to bring some order to what was becoming a little too Wild West. And we thought scams were a modern aberration.

Gem Stones

While the big mining ventures are so visible there are still opportunities for the amateur prospector. In the areas surrounding the ramshackle towns of Sapphire, Rubyvale or Anakie you can still try your luck at finding that sapphire. Alternatively for $15 you can spend an hour or two picking through a bucket of sand looking for your gem.

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Tour Guides

We have come across a few tour guides these past three months. Some very good, some not so. Some who can tell a story from their own life experience and others that talk straight from pre-prepared notes.

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Stewart Benson is the guide at the Ram Park museum at Blackall. Stewart is an old drover with the skills of the true story teller. He lived his life as a drover and a horse man and has little time for political correctness. His stories are the stuff of legend and the Australian outback. He talks about his exploits as a kid and the Chinese veggie growers who might have enjoyed the smoke of the poppy, to the woman who served goat meat sandwiches and pigeon pie to train travellers and the doctors who travelled with the sick on the single carriage railway ambulance. He told stories of outback women who were tough enough to kill a goat in the morning, prepare lunch, get to the hospital to give birth and then be home to prepare dinner for the men.

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Stewart encourages people to come to his tour by riding his horse through all the camp sites regaling travellers with his encouragement to come to his tour which is free. Anyone travelling through Blackall must visit Ram Park but do it soon, Stewart is no spring chicken.

Blackall also has the last wool scour left in Australia. The Blackall wool scour is a steam driven wool washing plant that serviced the region from 1908 to 1975.

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And so we travel on south and back into NSW, maybe……

1 August 2021

The time has come for us to consider the third phase of this trip, namely the return home. I’m not talking about a rush to return to southern climes, rather a planned, slow retreat. The expectation being that the longer we take to return the better chance of Spring weather to have either arrived or to be very close.

We are still in the tropics and are enjoying tropical days around the pool, reading or partaking of a chilled beer. In recent weeks we have enjoyed snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef and exploring the tablelands west of Cairns.

My latest observations:

The Local versus the Visitor

In the country towns and even the larger centres its quite obvious who are the travellers and who are the locals. I am not talking about the tacky shirts tourist are renowned for wearing the world over, rather the winter attire of the locals.

On a morning of say 22c the visitors are wearing shorts, maybe a tee shirt and sandals. In contrast the locals will be wearing puffer jackets, beanies, long trousers, shoes and socks. They will look like they are ready for freezing weather or maybe a frost. This is always a source of great amusement for the visitors.

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The local will be uttering phrases like its freezing this morning and the visitor will be casting a sideways look with a comment like what are you thinking it’s a beautiful morning.

Of course come the wet season the locals will still be able to function in 38c temps and 100% humidity while the visitors will have melted into an oil stain on the footpath.

Self Service versus Service Delivery

Over the past many years we have all gotten used to the idea of the customer doing more themselves and less by the service provider. The examples are numerous and include self service petrol stations, self service check outs, ATMs, printing out your photographs and so the list goes on.

I am however amused at a service that a century ago was provided by dedicated workers that we now do ourselves. I am talking about the emptying of toilet cassettes at the dump point at camp grounds. A hundred years ago the ‘night soil’ man visited your house and collected your waste a couple of times a week. Night soil collection then wasn’t a self service industry.

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It seems there are some daily activities that we think were relegated to the past and are no longer part of our daily routine. Not so, some have simply evolved and remain with us just in a new form.

Small Country Towns

A long chat with a local has left me an excellent appreciation of how to grow and harvest tobacco. This is a skill I never thought about and it is redundant since no tobacco is grown in this country anymore.

However tobacco is not the issue. What I learnt was that during harvesting every farm employed at least 16 farm hands; mechanisation reduced that to 4. Similarly we saw pictures of shearing sheds from days gone by when 40 men were employed during shearing. Sheep are no longer raised in these parts.

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These numbers of workers employed across the country explains why there were so many small towns each with its own schools and at least a couple of pubs.

Farms now operate with a lot less people and so those small towns are shrinking if not vanishing.

Curious Characters

We met a couple of cyclists in the rainforest where they were having a drink and some lunch. One of them had just ridden his BMX, yes a BMX up a very steep mountain road with lots of hairpin bends, twists and curves. The road is 19km long or 12 miles. He took just 2 hours for this epic effort on a bike with no gears. He was probably in his mid 20s.

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He and his mate were very happy having lots of laughs about the ride up into the mountains. They were however enjoying an infusion of a less than legal herb. Who was I to criticise after that very impressive ride. They had finished their bag of chips and we refreshed their water supply. I don’t think they stopped chucking the whole time we chatted.

Snorkelling

We knew that as we get older we will face some restrictions with respect to where we can go or what we do. We didn’t expect this to happen so quickly.

As we headed out to the reef and our first dive for the day we were questioned by one of the guides regarding our health and whether we had any ‘issues’. We are both very healthy but oh no, I had a red tape wrapped around my snorkel and Barb got two stripes. The tape was designed so they could keep an eye on us as we strayed away from the boat and all because we had certain health issues none of which limited our ability to snorkel.

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Damn the red stripe on my snorkel, I will resist. Maybe I will just accept the red tape and enjoy the Parrotfish, the Wrasse, Anemone fish (think Nemo), Angel fish, Triggerfish and of course the Sweetlips.

The message is get out there before they, whoever they might be tell you that you can’t do that or this tour isn’t suitable for you.

Guacamole

When you can buy a bag of seven avocados for $2 then living on guacamole is not an issue. Smashed avos with every meal is well within a healthy and budget conscious lifestyle. We will miss these little luxuries down south.

The Quintessential Australia

We have seen much of outback Queensland and met some interesting characters and heard many stories. The epitome of the culture of the outback however was summed up in a night at the Fred Brophy boxing tent.

Fred is a fourth generation showman. He is a boxing promoter that travels all over Australia visiting regional shows, rodeos, horse races and any where there is a large gathering of people willing to take on his troupe of boxers.

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Now don’t get me wrong this is not championship boxing. Fred invites men and women from the audience to come up and challenge his boxers. It’s more circus than serious boxing but what a great night. I have not seen so many mullets in one room for many years.

A couple of likely lads and two women got up and had a go. Most did very well, remaining standing for the three rounds except for the odd fall to the mat. There was lots of cheering for the underdog and lots of smiles. The only downside was when an amateur boxing champion entered the competition and knocked out Fred’s boy in about 3o seconds into the first round. That wasn’t quite in the spirit of the night.

Fred’s boxing tent is the last of its kind in Australia and possibly the last in the world. A rapidly fading side of what makes the Australian outback unique. A once in a lifetime experience.

And so our travels continue…..