Day 95 | Mangaroon Station, Lyndon Minnie Creek Road: just a solitary other traveller encountered today out on the road
74 km | zzOz total: 4,466 km
I headed up a well groomed front driveway, the best surface of the day, 3km long I might add, things are big out here.
“Cuppa tea?”, asks Kath, I’m not going to say no to some country style hospitality even if I am primarily here to pick up 25 odd litres of water to see me through a couple of nights, or 150 km of travel.
Lyndon Station has 8000 cattle on over a million acres, I’ve only seen about a dozen, including 2 cute few day old calves.
I find that Towera Station has burnt down and is now part of Lyndon, that explains yesterday’s fruitless homestead search.
The eaves are low on the homestead but the 100 year old iron is still in great nick, not much rust out here, the walls are 2 feet thick mud brick, keeps the heat out and they tell me it does get hot in summer. Inside there’s a 14 foot stud, make that 16 after checking out the door height.
Dinner round here is for 20 out on the verandah so there’s a full time cook, a few spuds to cook in readiness for some hungry workers, all currently mustering.
There’s a little white dog running around and jumps up on my lap when I’m downing my tea. I wondered about the survival of the little pooch due to the large number of poisonous reptiles in the area.
The predominant snake around is the harmless, 900 mm, Stimson’s python.
Recently Kath found a couple of different snakes on the porch in the morning. One a large, ie, 2.5 m, 8 foot, Mulga, or King Brown, one of the most deadly snakes in Australia, in the top half of the Top 10 list of the ones to avoid in the world. It had been suffocated by one of the much smaller pythons, also dead, due to snakebite.
On the other hand her father had seen a 3 metre, 12 foot, carpet python out on the driveway last week.
Hummm.
Might keep that tent door fully zipped up at night after that story.