Day 137 | Lasseter Highway, Mulga Park Road turnoff: fences both sides doesn't make for easy camping
104 km | zzOz total: 7,015 km
I’d forgotten what it was like to be a typical bike tourer, ie, asphalt, my missing ingredient.
Despite the additional weight of my new supplies for the last leg into Alice, probably about 10 days, and for some reason, general pessimism about water supplies carrying over from WA, having forgotten I’m in the NT where there are roadside watertanks nicely spaced, what’s that 2 nights supply of water for, I was soon zinging along, the wind not a headwind and the road a bit up and down with the emphasis on down.
Now I see what everyone other bike tourer is raving about, imagine what it would be like if it wasn’t 300 km to the next supply post.
It’s serious sand dune country hence the undulating topography, they’ve dug out the dune part to fill in somewhat between them so the oscillations aren’t completely dramatic.
I’ve cleverly avoided the early morning cavalcade of caravans and campervans fleeing Uluru, mission accomplished, through some last minute procrastination chatting to some older tourists in pastel Polos and neatly combed hair, maybe a mid-west dentist here for less than the full 24 hours, over by the supermarket, the flying visit types, incredulous that bike tourists exist, and they get me to take their photos with an original pocket digital camera, 1MP maybe, gee I never even saw one so old, with a screen thumb nail or thereabouts size.
More camels near the highway, I count at least 17 but it was hard to be definitive with that shrubbery, may well have been the complete harem at 19. How the big male copes I’ve no idea, I had more than enough trouble with a solitary partner, mind you, I could sure pick em.
A couple of ks down the road I find another, lying just off the asphalt, I wouldn’t like to be the one to run into that beast in my hire Kia, I think there are less confrontational ways to reduce the numbers.
Later the conditions change, blue sky to thunder clouds, no lightning, wind more in the face. Incline.
Despite that I avoid the free dusty campsite at Curtin Springs where long ago I stopped for a salty cup of tea with Robyn, and keep going for a camping spot on my lonesome. Somehow I’m back in Cattle Stationland with a sprinkling of the horned beasts along, or on, the road and a barbed wire fence each side, ie, nowhere to camp. There’s only padlocked gates.
No worries, something will come up as it always does.
It gets later and the weather looks more gloomy.
And later.
But the road coming in from Mulga Park has a cattle grid and I find myself across the fence in a typically great, private, sheltered campsite and get the tent up before the weather starts coming in.