Day 381 | Musgrave roadhouse: finally joined the mainstream
85 km | zzOz total: 10,708 km
Lakefield National Park is the second largest in Queensland, maybe the size of a small to medium sized European country, but most of the action is down near the water.
There’s about 30 separate camping areas all either at waterholes or on the few flowing rivers, most down 10 or 15km down sandy tracks. They’ve changed the permit system for camping this year and in theory it’s terrific each campsites is numbered and you pre-book your chosen spot.
But it’s not exactly bike tourer friendly: you book and pay online, and, you guessed it, I haven’t had reception for the last 8 days.
Despite the current school holidays they don’t appear full, even the most popular close to the road, Kalpowar and Hann River crossings, your average bike tourer just needs to pick an ambiguously obscure plot.
Seems most of the 4WD adventurers prefer to speed straight up the main Peninsular Development Road, traversing the country as quickly as possible: only got 3, 4 or 6 weeks holiday.
I popped out onto the said road at Musgrave, a friendly roadhouse with plenty of well distributed power outlets on display, a terrific steak sanga with the lot, a cold beer if you choose, no mosquitos or midges, and camping with hot showers for $10 a person. What you also get is 30+ 4WDs, the majority with snorkels for river crossings and camping trailers, some daytime roadtrains, and nighttime, and plenty of company.
Some of the faces are familiar having taken to odd side trip as I trundled on, been somewhat less gormless conversation, one crew brought over some remarkably delicious fish cooked in a thin herbed batter, although I had the hilarious situation of 3 people sidling over sequentially and asking exactly the same question which the first and then second enquirer answered for me.
But tomorrow I’ll take a break, I might have gone far each day but it’s been a fair, actually ridiculous, effort on the Bloomfield Track push-a-thon and the Cape Melville sandpit since I left Cape Tribulation 9 days ago.