Day 10 Jervois Station to Alice Springs (although that wasn't the plan!)
I don't think I have mentioned that since leaving Tibooburra we have had the most amazingly beautiful clear, sunny days; and lovely moonlit evenings....until about two nights ago.....when the moon has been rising later at night and beginning to wane somewhat.
We woke this morning to cattle in our campground, nibbling on some tufts of grass....but that was ok, we didn't mind sharing our space with them! We were on the road before 8am and the first part of our trip took us through desert and scrub country. Then it became more treed and even though it has been a week since the rain, there were still patches of water on the roadside and lots of chewed up sections. We had to drive on the wrong side of the road for quite a few km because it was a better track! (That was ok though, because there wasn't any other traffic for a couple of hours!) We travelled through some very scenic areas today, including the Harts Range and the East McDonnell Range. Spectacular vistas....the photos don't do justice to the grandeur of the landscape. (Speaking of photos; I haven't yet worked out how to efficiently upload lots of photos at one time...hopefully I will!)
We turned off the Plenty Hwy onto the Binns track, which is a 4WD Track stretching from Mt Dare in South Australia through Central Australia (NT) to Western Australia. We just did a short(ish)section of this track. It was hot in the middle of the day. We had our lunch, by the roadside, (as we usually do), and we even had to seek a shady tree today.
There was much excitement for us city folk as we came across the tail end of a cattle muster, (we had to stop, as the cattle were all over the road), with guys on quad bikes doing the mustering, as well as someone from the air in a helicopter ! One of the quad bike guys was going slowly along the road, looking carefully into the scrub.....for stray cattle we thought. Not so.......he had lost a pouch of tobacco!! Once all cattle were safely into the mustering yards, we were on our way. The road was badly corrugated and narrow in places so we were not able to average much more than about 50km/hr on this stretch. We reached Arltunga Historical Reserve at around 1.30 pm. We enjoyed looking at the historic buildings in this area.....some restored....to have a glimpse of what life might have been like out here in the late 19th and early part of the 20th Century. Gold was discovered here in 1887 and many prospectors rushed to the area, some even pushing wheelbarrows for 600 km from the nearest railhead at Oodnadatta. Sadly there was not a lot of gold and the area was abandoned. We had an enjoyable self-drive tour and also a walk around the 'town' as well as a steep climb to one of the abandoned mine shafts.
We were intending to camp at N'Dhala Gorge...we had not been there before but as well as the bush campground it has a gallery of Aboriginal rock carvings. The track to this gorge is strictly 4WD only ( the turn off to this track can be reached on bitumen from Alice Springs), and before we had gone even 1km along the track we had three water crossings to navigate. The last one looked a little tricky....and deep.... so I got out of the vehicle....Dave made it through ok and then I noticed a problem....a shock absorber on the trailer was hanging down....it had broken off at the weld point. So.....with much difficulty we turned around.... back through the water....and then stopped so,that Dave could take the shock absorber off. It had to be removed otherwise it would have dragged along the ground. We have no idea how or where it happened, but we think it was not long before we noticed it, since there was not much damage to the unit. Fortunately we were only 80km from Alice, all on bitumen, although driving this distance directly into the setting sun was not too pleasant. Hopefully the trailer can be repaired relatively quickly and easily. Watch this space!