Day 489 | Marree: no internet, so it's not civilisation

56 km | zzOz total: 15,791 km

You don’t need to be Freud to interpret that vivid dream: a massive earthquake in Dreamland, well, New Zealand, simply means big change is about to descend.

It is the end of an era, there will be further dirt roads and isolated waterhole campsites but that long period removed from civilisetion, not meeting many people, a long way between supplies, it’s Day 9 when I finally bike into Marree since I left Birdsville, is really over.

I’m back with people in close proximity, there’s a shop every second day from now on for the most part, the road is asphalt, the traffic thicker on the ground, dogs are barking and I can hear the throb of a generator somewhere.

I enjoyed yesterday’s few surprises: after 6 km on an incline biking up from the well wooded Clayton River, all things to comply with the river category except that of water, to top a rise and have the expanse of Lake Harry spread to before me, must be 10 km long and one or two wide, at first I thought it was a shadow from a cloud in the distance, must clean those glasses more thoroughly in future, but, of course, there are no clouds around these parts; then a large contingent of nosey horses, the largest of their type I’ve seen outside Clydesdales and judging from their hairy feet may have been saddled with a few of those genes, running towards me, snorting and sniffing noisily from 15m away, ie, almost too close for comfort, milling around, then wheeling and galloping at moderate pace, then another group would approach, about 35 in all had a close inspection of me and my caravan; the dingo fence, a double width grid to cross and two metre high mesh fence, over 5000 km long I once crossed, back in the early days, on my original travels north.

Later I see a 4WD track steeply reaching to the top of a hillock overlooking the lake and my Moderate Effort dictate causes me to head off course and, without the bike, enjoy the panorama while munching the last of my smoko supplies.

The Lake Harry homestead ruins provided some shade as I contemplated the futile attempts to create a date farm, that’s the fruit rather than activity, here a hundred years ago, 2600 date palms from Algeria were planted and water by an artesian bore, but a combination of crows, parrots and bruising as they were sent to Adelaide, the trip to Marree fittingly by camel and the ridiculous situation where there being no bees in this neck of the woods the palms required laborious hand fertilisation, basically the enterprise was a long term disaster, so much effort for not a lot, the palms eventually ripped up and replanted in Mildura, where, true to form, it proved there was insufficient heat to ripen the dates. Some of the palms are now of the decorative variety in the town centre and no one cares whether parrots eat the green fruit.

But civilisation will have to wait another couple of days: the supply truck is due in at the shop and there’s no fruit, veges or most of the other lunchtime bits I need.

The water from the town bore still gives my porridge that I’ve-just-had-slightly-salted-and-indeed-marginally-off-egg flavour I’ve come to know so well.

And worse, no internet, there’s only 70 people resident now.

It’s still wilderness in my books.