Dirk and Joke doing the Half-lap: Day 48: From Gilbert River to Leichhardt Lagoon (19/07/12)

We left the Gilbert River camp reluctantly this morning.

A last look at the Gilbert in the morning.

We said goodbye to all our new friends with a “Safe travelling” and perhaps a “See you later” if they were travelling in the same direction. One of our new friends was Graeme from Sydney, recently widowed and travelling alone. He was going to go to the Leichhardt Lagoon camp and so were we.

Our first stop was Croydon, which had been our original destination for yesterday. To get there, though, meant more of the single-lane bitumen strips. We knew that we would encounter them and that the protocol was for us to go completely on to the wide gravel verge when a road train would come along. But experiencing them yesterday and today was something else. The bitumen strip was between one-and-a-half to one-and-a-quarter lanes wide and the gravel verges much the same. What was different to our expectation was that the gravel verges dropped off quite sharply and narrowed every couple of hundred metres. This meant that we would have to slow right down to pass another vehicle. Passing a car or fellow caravanner meant taking the left wheels off the bitumen, and you could keep up a reasonable speed. Passing a road train meant virtually stopping while they thundered past. And the road trains here are long – longer than the 36 metre ones we have seen in W.A.: the official maximum length here is 53 metres (or about 4½ times the length of our rig)! Also, all the locals tore past us at top speed, meaning you had to watch for stones on the windscreen as well. We heard lots of stories of cracked windscreens on this stretch. Luckily, we did not add to the 2 we had with us from Launceston.

Another consequence of the single-lane bitumen roads is that our car and caravan now have a nice coating of bulldust on the left-hand side. This made me think of a possible business opportunity for someone in Holland. On his recent visit, Marco told us that in Holland you can buy spray-on mud for your 4x4 vehicle to show that you have been in wild, rough and tough places. On your return to Holland you can use the spray, without having to put even a scratch on the car. Well, all an entrepreneurial type needs to do is to export a couple of container loads of bulldust from anywhere round northern Australia, find a large bit of tarmac or concrete on the Dutch border, dump some bulldust on to it, add water and charge Dutch off-road types to get their vehicles all nice and dirty!

Croydon was another mining town, proud of its history and showing it well.

The road to Normanton goes through Croydon

When you camp free, you need to tank up on water. Thank you, Croydon's parks department!!

Steam engine used in gold mining

Gold miner. A bit stiff and staid, but that's because he's made of metal.

Before resuming our journey, we climbed into the hill behind town to look at the lake there. On our way back to the main road we came to a lookout which showed the entire town and the enormous flat plain behind it as far as they eye could see to the south and west. The hill we were on would be the last significant hill until we got to the Gulf of Carpentaria, 220 kms away.

There were trees here which looked as if they were in spring blossom.

Croydon lost at the edge of a vast plain stretching to the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Our stop for the night was 24 kms short of Normanton – next door, in this part of the world! Halfway there we crossed the railway line and stopped for lunch.

Our lunch stop was at a station called Black Bull Siding on the Normanton - Croydon railway line.

The railway runs alongside the road, half on one side, half on the other.

It was called Leichhardt Lagoon Camp and is part of a cattle station. It had hot and cold showers and clean dunnies (wc in Hollands J ), but no power.

Dunnies and showers. Very basic, but clean and efficient. A nice touch was the open construction: you had free air drying in the showers and no smells in the dunnies! There were warnings in the dunnies to close the lid after use. Open dunnies attract frogs, and frogs attract snakes...

There was a lagoon with water lilies and a large variety of birds, including the first brolgas we have seen. We could not swim in the lagoon, as it was connected to the Norman River and was occasionally visited by salt-water crocodiles. In fact, we had to sign a form saying we understood that swimming and camping here was dangerous, and that we would not hold the owners responsible!