Broome to Darwin Day 3 - El Questro


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Published: May 8th 2012
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Today we had another long drive ahead of us as we made our way to El Questro. However we made a quick stop to get rid of some energy before starting the long journey, stopping at Mount Nina. At 90m high it was a mountain by Australia's standards but only took an hour to get up and down. It was a steep climb with loose rocks all the way up and Spinnifex grass covering the mountain. The Spinnifex grass is very sharp and feels like needles digging in you if you catch your ankles on it. The last stretch of the climb involved some clambering over boulders to reach the summit and I think everyone got to experience just how painful the spinnifex could be.

It was the birthday of one of the Swiss girls on our tour today so whilst at the summit we sang happy birthday in each persons language...so there were 6 happy birthday songs!

We stopped at Halls Creek to get fuel and take a quick look around the small town which was the site of the first Gold Rush in Australia and Nick explained how when the government introduced a tax on Gold in Western Australia they smuggled the gold over to Queensland and pretended that they had found it there. Halls Creek is also where the Flying Doctors started in Australia but is only a very small rural town.

We also passed through Turkey Creek along the way and we stopped for lunch in a road station here. It wasn't long after leaving Turkey Creek that the bus started to play up and we had to get out on the side of the road while the guides played around to try and get the bus going again. The bus would only drive in limp mode so it was a limit of 50km an hour for the rest of the afternoon and a couple of road side rest stops whilst we waited for the bus to recover for another stretch of slow driving. But we used the stops productively and went looking for fire wood on the road side each tone the bus needed to take a rest.

We eventually pulled into our camp site at El Questro after dark. El Questro was a working cattle station until 30 years ago when it was turned into a hotel and campsite. The hotel part is very exclusive with people like Hugh Jackman being helicoptered straight into the hotel and some of the local attractions being closed down to the general public at certain times of the day so that the hotel guests can have exclusive usage.

We had chilli for dinner tonight and since it was a birthday Rich also cooked a cake in the embers of the fire. After dinner Nick played a few songs on his guitar, one of which was composed especially for Will as he had won a quiz earlier in the day and his prize was one of i. A song of his choice composed and sung by Nick ii. A beer iii. A hug. Will chose the song since he still had 2 crates of his own beer, and chose the theme of beer and breakdowns for Nick to compose the song. We were all impressed with how well the song turned out since Nick had only 30mins to prepare.


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