The Desert in Bloom

After all that worry about what the roads would be like if they are open, I completely missed the point about what that would mean for the desert. Flowers! Today we were treated to massed displays, mostly only about 4 or 5 different varieties, but the coverings were immense.

We needn’t have worried about the clouds bringing rain last night. The clouds eventually all disappeared leaving a clear night. The clouds were however cleared away by a strong southerly change, probably 40km/h and the rest. This made for a rather noisy night in a tent. We didn’t even hear a truck pull into our rest area. By morning the winds were blowing stronger than ever, so after a futile effort to make some breakfast and chasing stuff blown away we were on our way.

Initially there was little to indicate recent rains, other than a general greenish tinge. Then came a creek crossing and a waterhole looking full and happy. After that we came into vast spreads of flowers. Each area was in general dominated by one particular flower, but occasionally you would get some mixing. We had a pea-type flower in purple, orange, yellow and occasionally white. We had another type in reds which seemed to prefer slopes. We also had bunches of daisy-types, and another which was christened the fried egg plant, for obvious reasons.

This morning we started on roads we had not previously travelled. A couple of hours in we came upon the intersection with the Mt Hopeless road which is the road we travelled last time we were in the area. At that time it was a dry, desolate and barren place, totally in keeping with the name. Today the contrast was profound. Yellow flowers lined the roadside and there was heaps of green further off.

 

Next stop was a bore. Many bores on the great artesian basin have now been capped, stopping the wastage which happened for many decades after they were initially dug. A few are still free-flowing and these create localised wetlands. This was one such bore. Emerging at a slightly too warm temperature, you could regulate how hot you made it by moving up or down the channel which led to the main dam. Even though the day was still a chilly 17 degrees with a breeze blowing, after baking for a few minutes we were refreshed and ready to face the day again.

I had a demon to face today. When we were last here in 1999 we travelled in the commodore, which did a fine job, but got us severely bogged on a sand hill, not surprisingly. I set out today to find that road into the waterhole near Strzelecki Crossing. It wasn’t too hard to find once we had our bearings and the road was in much the same condition as we found it years ago. Nice, hard-packed clay on the way up and half way across the top, completely disappearing into sand on the way down. We elected not to tempt fate by driving down, satisfying ourselves with a turnaround on top, and a walk to the campground a few hundred metres away. While the road was much the same, the dune which had some sparse vegetation then was a blaze of colour today.

The Strzelecki Track passes through pastoral country in the south, which is mostly rolling plains gently undulating. As you go further north the sand dunes start coming in, mostly whitish in the south moving to reddish further north. Around Moomba, 100km from Innamincka, the landscape starts being criscrossed with oil exploration roads with very unfriendly signs, before arriving at Moomba itself. Describing itself as a hydrocarbon processing facility, it has no permanent onsite workforce. Most staff fly in from Adelaide for their two week shift. The public can only peer in from a distant lookout.

Innamincka has changed little since our last visit. The most marked change was that there were almost no cars in the carpark at the hotel, whereas last time there would have been 200 people there (but that was July, the peak of the tourist season). I have also had my fuel price attitude softened somewhat. After paying nearly $2 a litre on the Gibb River Road, the $1.70 something didn’t scare me at all. I might even get some.

Tonight thankfully the breeze has dropped to a more sensible level. I had almost resigned myself to a pub dinner if the wind kept up. A quick look at the menu though soon cured that. We would not have made it out of there under $200. Isabel has finally managed to make sense of the star charts we have carried all around. It has not been easy to find the right combination of moon, weather and grumpiness to do that, which has been a bit of a disappointment of the trip.

Tomorrow, on the trail of Burke and Wills.