Day 102 | out in the middle of nowhere Mereenie Loop Rd: just the 3 of us (oh, we have a few friends drop in later)

54 km | Heading west total: 4,119 km

I’ve got two dingo stories now.

The first was at Kings Canyon Resort where I had mostly packed up and was waiting for Ahn and Chee to come back from an early morning walk around Kings Canyon. Well, it was almost lunchtime … it’s a 3 hour walk.

I was catching up on this blog transcription from my dead tree file, sitting at a chair and table with a nearby power point when I saw a dingo sniffing quite brazenly at my bits and pieces at the tent some distance away. Feeling protective I was up and running across the campground. The dingo was running as well, rather quicker, but he’d picked up my bag with lunches for the next few days in his mouth before he departed. Bits of lunch were scattering for 100 m but when I chucked a rock that hurtled close by the fanged canine finally relinquished the bag.

Lucky. At the prices that the Resort charged (ie, $1.50 for a small apple, almost $5 for a packet of biscuits, $5.50 for a loaf of frozen white spongy bread) it was just as well I didn’t lose the lot.

The second dingo experience was out on the Mereenie Loop Road. We were setting up camp when one slender dingo crept tentatively in for a snoop. I tried to chase it off but it slinked off and just sat a short distance in the bushes and howled a bit.

Later on I went to bed early leaving the Ahn and Chee to sleep around our conflagration. Halfway through the night they started to stir me by howling themselves. It was quite a cacophony, in fact it sounded as if a whole pack was hanging around in close proximity. In the morning I realised Ahn and Chee had indeed retired to their tent much earlier.

And they wondered about my stirring them with some adjacent night time howling.