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Published: April 23rd 2010
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Melbourne to Broken Hill
Well we got underway on Monday 19th of April, more or less on schedule. The trip through the city was uneventful and we headed up the Calder Hwy to Bendigo - well not quite after some debate with Flossy (our GPS lady) we navigated around the city and out the back towards Sea Lake.
It was shortly after leaving Bendigo that we started to encounter the locust plague. Boy was I glad that we had seen the article on the TV on Saturday night and I had spent half of Sunday manufacturing a screen for the radiator out of gutter guard! It worked a treat and is still working. The only problem is - what do you do with 27,000 squashed locusts after you have caught them! Some of the vehicles coming towards us were just total yellow from the mesh they make when they hit the car. We made our first stop at a free camp just North of Sea Lake after filling up
with diesel at a 40’ container self serve facility on the highway just before Sea Lake. Whatever happened to the little guy who came out and removed the bugs from your car whilst he filled the tank? That was total of 400kms for the day.
Our next destination was Turlee Station, a farm stay just south of Mingo National Park. After getting a bit lost getting out of Mildura, we eventually found the right road, which turned to unsealed after about 40kms. It was the right road because the station owner’s wife (the car had a Turlee promo sign on the back window) went past us in a cloud of dust. Not sure where she put the wings after the trip, but she was flying. They say there is a critical speed on dirt road at which you just skip over the top of the corrugations. Judging from her speed it is about 110 - 120kph! I tried, but in deference to the caravan judged that anything more than about 70kph would see us arriving with just the drawbar attached to the towball. We pulled in just after lunch to a sign saying contact them on ch 8 UHF
(see it is not just to listen to truckies swearing), which we did and were told the directions to the camp ground. Someone will be around later in the day or tomorrow…
The back of the van was covered in red dust about 2cm thick. The front of the van was covered in squashed locusts. Just lovely!
Tomorrow dawned (Wed 21st) and luckily we were up reasonably early as Nathen (station owner, husband of Sophie - high speed driver) turned up for a chat and some money. We had already decided to go out to Mungo National Park, and so we set off for the 50 or so kms to the park. We had already had a taste of the dirt roads when they get wet, as we experienced a short shower on the road into Turlee and the red mud flung up under the car and onto the front of the van by the bucket load. It was therefore not a happy sight to see a road crew using a water cart on about 1 km of the very reddest part of the road to Mungo. Even just a small amount of water on these roads can
turn them into a skid pan, and much to M’s horror I did have the car sideways once on the way out - but that was only a taste of what was to come on the way back!
We did the Mungo ‘circuit’ and took lots of photo’s. The lunette or Walls of China are truly amazing and the amount of pre-history data held here is incredible. Not sure if I can get the photo’s onto this blog, but I will give it a try. The circuit is 70 kms and takes in a lot of the early white/European history/settlement. It is almost beyond conception that the early settlers ran 50,000 head of sheep in the lake area and built correspondingly large shearing sheds and all the associated infrastructure. At the ‘back’ of the lunette there is a disused well that was once a watering point for the Cobb and Co. coaches and bullock trains passing through the area.
Whilst circumnavigating the Walls of China we could see rain in the distance falling all around us. That was not a real worry at the time, until we got back to the ‘road works’ where a combination of the
water tanker’s work and a short sharp heavy shower turned the 2 kms under repair into the biggest skid pan I have ever seen. Even the grader and work crew had to call it quits and as we followed said grader through the section, we were sideways more than straight; so much so that my l.h. mirror ended up completely covered in red mud (on the reflective side). My idea of nirvana, Margaret’s idea of hell!
After some negotiation, we decided that there was not much point in staying at Turlee and that we should head on to Broken Hill a day earlier.
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non-member comment
Looks like great fun!Wish I was there.