Day 60 | on the set for the film "Holy Smoke": and a dusty couch to lie on

28 km | Heading west total: 2,205 km

Is that two months on the road already.

Despite feeling fluey this morning, (I won’t describe the precise flemmy symptoms), I had anticipated getting a bit further than this today. But when you ain’t feeling the best and a big L shaped couch presents itself, well, I’m pretty flexible with the schedule.

The day had started slowly enough and I found myself following 2 new bike tyre tracks. Oh well. Someone has just gone for a ride from Hawker for something to do, but the tracks persisted. They looked pretty much like made this morning. There’s two camping grounds in Hawker and I chose the nicer and cheaper of the two which was a little outside town while the other one is right next to the Mawson Trail. That makes it pretty easy to miss other riders. Small footprints showed they were having almost as much trouble with the trail today as I was although they didn’t seem to be carrying all that much.

There was a 10 km or so section that was pretty hard to ride, the longest bad stretch I’d encountered so far. Actually a guy James back in Quorn had warned me about it but couldn’t be definitive about where it was.

Then I stumbled on a bizarre group of structures. I guess this was the base camp for the film Holy Smoke that has Kate Winslet in it back, I’m guessing, about 1999. There’s a toilet/ shower block (hmm, no water running today) and also a big kitchen/ dining area under a huge roof. There’s tables and chairs, big stainless steel benches with running water and sinks, gas burners etc. Pots and pans, knives and forks and chopsticks. Almost as uncanny as the Mary Celeste, it looks as if the film makers ran out leaving everything behind. They also built a great bbq pit with a long stone bench seat. And they sited the camp with a magnificent view of the River red gums in the creek where a thousand galahs are currently making a major racket.

I could have continued on for another couple of hours and camped in a river bed, but tonight I don’t even need to put the tent up. Instead I’m putting my feet up on this big couch.