Hello again
Well after 8 days of freedom camping it was nice to be parking up at the Discovery motor camp in Cloncurry to catch up on over due washing and reorganise the van again. This tidy and we'll run camp was the best valve so far and for $35 for a powered site you get free washing facilities including drier and washing powder which would normally cost you $24 for 3 loads dried. The cafe puts on good all you can eat meals each night as 1/2 the camp is self contained units ( donga's ) for the workers who live there. The weather is still very hot so the aircon gets a good workout to drop the temp down to about 22 for sleeping. We had a shower during the night but it had cleared by morning so we hit the road north under overcast skies for another big day as we had decided the to travel the 450k/m straight up to Kurumba on the coast. The drive turned out to be very interesting as we hit a swarm of locusts which lasted on and off for about 10k/m's. They are huge and very thick in places and made a loud noise as they hit the van especially on the windscreen so I had to slow down when the swarms were the heaviest. We have never seen these before and were fascinated with them. Quite a few kangaroos were on or beside the road and it was good to know our shoo-roo whistles were working as they hopped away from our van and seemed to ignore other vehicles. Unfortunately there was a lot of road kill laying on the road and most were attracting eagles so you had to really slow down and let them get clear or risk hitting them. We properly saw well over 100 of them !
There were lots of close calls with parrots and the road kill varied from snakes, pigs, Eagles and lizards but that's just the way it is out here. A quick stop at Normanton was required to refuel the van from a diesel pump outside a dairy that look like it was out of the 70's before traveling on the 70 odd k/m's in hot sunny conditions to our destination of Karumba.
Bye for now.