The Great Inland Way

Driving, driving, driving. Tonight we are in Charters Towers in a caravan park so as to do the washing and refill the water after driving all day along the Great Inland Way which links Cairns to Sydney via Charters Towers, Clermont, Emerald, Roma in Queensland and through Lightning Ridge, Dubbo, Orange, Bathurst and Lithgow in NSW.  We will probably head east at Roma so as to visit Lindsey in the Sunshine Coast near Caloundra.

It rained most of the night and this morning there was a dear little green tree frog sheltering under the roof outside.  We had to move him or he would have been squashed when we dropped the pop-top.

He didn't want to get off and go back on the plants near the creek. He seemed to want to settle down on my arm for a snooze. I had to practically lie down under a bush until he got the idea.

Would have liked to detour to the Undarra Volcanic National Park but our time on the road is running out.  That one will have to wait for another trip. We launched onto the Gregory Development Road, also known as (ahem) "The Sir John McEwan Beef Road" and had a good close look at some of Queensland's finest cattle country.  Plus a good close look at some of Queensland's finest cattle. On the road.

Queensland's "Development" roads are, as they say, under development. Some bits are normal, double lane with dotted lines down the middle, but most of it is more like this:

Observe the tyre marks on either side of the single lane of bitumen. They are there because of the frequent appearance, at great speed, of these - road trains.

Supposedly, they announce their forthcoming appearance up your date, by UHF radio. But we had ours on the correct channel and mostly there was no warning. These behemoths can't slow down easily, so anything smaller just has to get the hell out of the way. There are even signs telling you this.

But we survived.  Or I wouldn't be sitting in Charters Towers writing this blog, would I? We even enjoyed it. There was the "40 Mile Scrub National Park" where we did a little guided walk through a patch of "semi-evergreen vine thicket dry rainforest", an ancient remnant form of inland rainforest featuring my favourite trees, Melia, also bottle trees, Burdekin plums and "python trees". Kind of bizarre but fascinating to us botanically inclined persons.

This is the "python tree' - they do kind of look like pythons...

and this is a bottle tree - ditto, they kind of look like bottles

I couldn't get a decent shot of The Great Basalt Walls which are stunning red geological formations. But here is the evidence of volcanic activity in the area in the past. That patch of rainforest was growing in some seriously red basalt soil. This photo is for all you gardeners.

Finally, I want to share with you one very large sign we saw that had us saying, "What the?" The sign announced that we were approaching a "Tick Clearing and Spelling Centre". Those of our readers who are teachers, or parents of young learners may well struggle to understand why spelling is being taught in centres in remote outback Queensland, and why the tick marks have to be cleared away.  But eventually it dawned that there must be a cattle connection, and that the ticks being cleared were on the skins of the cattle being transported in those road trains, the same cattle which might require a spell out of the trucks from time to time.

Travel. It broadens the mind.