This Adventurous Age

Adventures travelling and working around Australia.

Category Archives: 2005 Travels


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2005 Travels May 9

MONDAY 9 MAY     PUNGALINA

Watered the camp lawns and vegie garden at house. That occupied much of the morning.

The two female dingoes were coming onto heat, so O had locked them into a caged enclosure that was built near the vegie garden. He did not want any more dings! I had wondered about the purpose of this somewhat strange looking structure – too small for hens.  Scunge and Beau were decidedly unimpressed with this curtailment of their freedom.

I had noticed the old wild male dingo that O called the “old boy” hanging about more than usual outside the perimeter fence of the house yard. Even though the entrance to this was wide open all the time, O said he never came into it. The others would go out to him and they would go off together hunting or doing whatever dings do. They had also been known to take food – chunks of meat – out to him. O thought he was probably Scunge’s mate and the father of Lachie and Beau.

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Scunge always had a slightly worried look

I was firming up the order for our next truck order, which had to go to the various suppliers this week. Woolworths Country Orders was the most rigid about deadlines – and also the earliest one. The other, more locally based businesses in Mt Isa were a bit more flexible.

O felled four cypress pines to be milled for timber for construction about the place. John was salivating at the prospect of maybe being able to have a go on the Morrison Mill.

Another dinner for three, featuring mushrooms. I was getting very sick of mushrooms!


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2005 Travels May 8

SUNDAY 8 MAY     PUNGALINA

Today, O planned to start on the cleaning up of his track to the coast – in reality, the 75-80kms to the lower, tidal section of the Calvert, rather than to the actual shore of the Gulf.  However, he thought – from what he’d seen by flying over the area – he might, this year,  be able to forge a route from the lower river, over the tricky salt flat bogs, to the actual coast, but had not yet tried to get there by vehicle. Traversing such coastal salt flats needed to be undertaken with great caution. Such terrain could swallow vehicles totally.

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Salt flats west of the Calvert River mouth (Google Earth)

O thought the ground would be dry enough, now, to begin to clear the ravages of the wet season, and cyclone, on his track north.

Over the previous dry seasons, O had surveyed the eventual route of his coast track in his light Jabiru plane. He had used GPS fixings to plot a possible route, then went out on quad bike and foot to determine the actual best route on the ground. He had then slashed and evened this to be suitable for the 4 wheel drive Troopy to be able to drive over.

This track gave visitor access to the fishing of the tidal reach of the river, as well as seeing some great scenery.

O was taking one of the tractors, with a blade on, so he could push aside trees that had fallen over the track. Cyclone Harvey, in early February, came right over Pungalina. The winds got to over 100kmh and 6 cm of rain fell in a short time. This might not sound like all that much, but runoff was enough to raise the level of the river by metres.

Trees around these parts get weakened by termites too, so it often does not take much to make them fall. Thus there was a lot of debris to be cleared off the track.

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Unusually marked tree along the route to the coast

We were asked to take the Troopy, follow the tractor tracks and pick up O at about 4pm, from whatever point he’d reached, and bring him back to the house. He estimated that, even leaving at dawn,  he would not even get half of the distance and wanted to leave the tractor there so he could continue the work from that point.

We had a little sleep in, and left our camp about 10am, to go collect the Troopy from the house, then set off. Initially, the way took us on a familiar route, north past the Fig Tree and Bluff Water Hole turn offs. From there it was new ground for us.

After that, we were trying to follow thin tractor tracks through high, drying grass. We needed to travel slowly, because the ground was rough and we often couldn’t see rocks and ruts in the ground until we were onto them.

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Following the path of the tractor

As we progressed further, tracking O became harder and harder.

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We came to one place where the tractor traces entered a small creek, but we could see no exit signs straight across the other side. We hunted, on foot, for a while, and eventually found that he’d gone down the creek bed itself for some distance, before driving out on the other side.

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Tracks go in, but then where?

We eventually caught up with O, a bit beyond a beautiful lagoon, at 4pm. Great timing, right as instructed. We did not tell him that this was rather accidental, as we’d thought we’d have caught him a lot earlier. We had considerably underestimated how slow the going would be.

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Mystery Shovel Water Hole

The beautiful lagoon had been named Mystery Shovel Water Hole, by O. When he was initially surveying the track route, he’d found an old shovel there. No idea of how or why it had gotten there, except that it definitely was not recent. It was a really lovely spot, on a tributary creek of the Calvert.

O drove the Troopy – and us – back to the house, at a faster pace than we had made! But it was still dark by the time we got there. We collected Truck and went back to camp, for a fast meal and early night. The physical effort of bracing over the rough track and the concentration of trying to follow the way, had been really tiring. But it had been a really interesting day. Exploring Pungalina was quite fascinating.

 


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2005 Travels May 7

SATURDAY 7 MAY     PUNGALINA

There were still storm clouds around, some days, but these rarely translated into any rain. Today was a grey sky day.

Tomorrow was meant to be our day off, but O wanted us to assist him, so we kind of took it today.

After the usual morning watering of the gardens up at the house, we set off for some exploring.

O had told us that there were some interesting falls and rapids at Hot Dog Creek, which we’d crossed on the drive in. A lot of the tracks to interesting places were still not dry enough to travel on, so our choices were a bit limited. But we could access the good part of Hot Dog Creek by going back down the driveway and then walking across country for a couple of kms.

We had asked O about the origin of the name. A sad story. Early in his time at Pungalina, his oldest dog – Scunge’s mother – came off the back of a vehicle someone was driving out there, then ran after it. She died of the resulting heat exhaustion by the creek crossing, so O named it after this event.

We had no trouble finding the small pull in area, north of the creek, that O had mentioned. From there, we just struck south-west, there being no track to follow. The creek was running almost parallel to the driveway road in that area, so we were certain to intersect with it.

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Country we walked through to Hot Dog Creek. Bloodwood tree?

The walk in was pleasant, and not too hard, although it was hot.

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First glimpse of Hot Dog Creek gorge

What we found was well worth the effort. There was quite a bit of water still in the creek, and some very pretty water holes and rapids.

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First glimpse – upstream

We spent some time scrambling alongside the creek, exploring in both directions.

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There were some interesting rock varieties there. We saw some good slabs of what we called ripple rock – sedimentary rock that showed the effects of shallow wavelets at what was once the water’s edge, some millions of years ago.

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Ripple rock – formed under water originally

There were some excellent examples of conglomerate rock too, where rocks and pebbles from earlier times had been “glued” together by later forces.

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Conglomerate rock

The creek valley was surprisingly deeply cut, in places, forming a gorge. As we explored upstream – to the east – the surrounds shallowed out somewhat. Of course, the place where the driveway crossed the creek was not too much further upstream from where we got to, and there was no deep valley at the crossing.

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Hot Dog Creek originated off to the east, then ran generally westwards into Karns Creek and thus eventually into the Calvert River.

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Sand left when wet season water levels receded

In one area, where there was a little side stream coming in, the creek widened out and formed pools, rather swamp like, with paperbarks fringing the edges and with water so calm that there were water lilies growing. It was quite different to the rest of Hot Dog Creek that we had seen.

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Nature’s landscaping

I remarked to John that the natural landscaping effects in this area were such that one would pay a designer a small fortune, in the city, to achieve something like that.

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There was a very attractive small pool in the main creek, with a small waterfall at one end. I suspected that was where O brought camp guests, to swim and cool off. A trip out to here, with an associated picnic lunch, could take up much of a day.

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After a most enjoyable time spent exploring at the creek, we set off for the less exciting walk back to Truck. A low, rocky rise that we had scrambled down on the way in, was more obvious from below.

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With no signs, no discernable track or much in the way of features to guide him, John did a great job of navigating, and brought us straight back to Truck. Had it been left to me, we would probably still be walking!

Back at camp, John headed off to the dining tent, where he’d set up a camp stretcher for his daytime naps – cooler than the van, and hidden away. Today, he was most disconcerted to find a large tree snake (we hoped that was its identity!) trapped in the tent and rather frantically climbing the tent poles, trying to escape. We opened up the tent as much as possible and helped it in the right direction! It was hard to think of a reason why it had gone into the tent, in the first place – maybe just idle curiosity?

John reported that he had trouble napping in there, after that.

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That’s not meant to be in there!

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Hopefully, after this, it will not want to come back!

O came for the evening meal at the van, featuring mushrooms, of course! Arrangements were made for tomorrow.

 

 

 


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2005 Travels May 6

FRIDAY 6 MAY     PUNGALINA

Today was to be a big day – the arrival of our first consignment on the supply truck from Mt Isa.

O had received a phone call yesterday, to say that the truck would be terminating at Hells Gate Roadhouse, not continuing on through to Redbank Mine, closer to us. He left at 1am, to go collect our goods, and had some sleep in his swag, on the way.

In the absence of O, we had to be up at the house in time to do the mail plane meet and transfer the mail bags. John got chatting to the pilot, who was fairly new to this run and interested in the place. He was a bit ahead of schedule, so John took him for a quick drive down to show him the safari camp. One never knew what might lead to some extra business for the camp!

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Airstrip; house and machinery shed at western end; safari camp and short cut track to it lower RHS. Calvert River, Karns Creek & Safari Camp Creek.

We were back at our camp, in the afternoon, when O arrived with all the stuff from the truck. He’d used a short cut track that came off the main driveway road, that he’d cleared a bit and smoothed out a few days ago.

O had some bad news: somehow my meat order of chops and chicken pieces had been loaded into the general cargo section of the truck, rather than the chiller part. After a couple of days of travel, in these temperatures, the goods were very “ripe”, so were discarded at Hells Gate. The trucking company would replace them, next load – in two or four weeks time – but there would not be the hoped-for variety in the diet, right now.

Other items were a bit hit and miss. What was meant to be a packet of cheescake mix was two frozen cheesecakes. No bread mix had been sent. 200 grams of walnuts had translated into a kilo of same. Two large tins of ham became two very small ones. Two dozen bottles of ginger beer had changed to Pasito – yuk, but not my problem, as O had wanted the ginger beer. Few of the garden seeds John had ordered actually came. Part of these variations may have been because the original order had been written for supply by Woolworths, but we’d missed the cut off time, so John had done it by phone to the wholesale company, who would not have had the same things that Woolworths stocked.

We also received a half box of mushrooms, that had not been ordered. That was a lot of mushrooms! These sorts of mix ups of orders were not unusual, and understandable on a route that had so much unloading and rearranging of the truck contents. Presumably, the mushroom box had simply been overlooked at somewhere like the Gregory or Burketown pubs.

With no fridge space for a carton of fungi, our meals over the next few days featured mushrooms, big time, including soup and stroganoff – even though these weren’t great in this weather! We asked O to every evening meal, to help use them up.

The alcohol supplies to keep the camp going for the next lots of guests also arrived, ordered by A from a hotel in Mt Isa. There were several slabs of pre-mixed cans of spirits: gin and tonic, rum and coke, whisky and dry; there were boxes of red and white wines – reasonable quality, and beer cans. O took all these up to the house, to store in the garage area of the big tin building, beside his living quarters.

I spent much of the rest of the day packing all my new supplies away in the kitchen tent.

It was clear that I was going to need more storage space in that tent, eventually.

O came to the camp with a new mesh wall he’d had made for the kitchen tent. It zipped onto the side that faced toward the dining tent. We helped him fit it. So now there would be three meshed sides and thus much better air flow for those working inside – principally me! Putting it on involved partial taking down of that side of the big tent. Then, the old canvas wall would simply swing up and make a verandah/awning – and shade that side of the kitchen tent. This shade and the extra air flow was good because the back of the fridge was up against that.

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New mesh tent side & awning created by old wall

I had to rearrange some of the kitchen interior, but was satisfied with it after that. I could see that, along the one canvas wall, space could be made for some extra shelving, but was not quite sure where this would come from.


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2005 Travels May 5

THURSDAY 5 MAY

Just a routine day with chores about the place.

I did the watering again.

John continued with framing up the shelter.

I took a photo of a big legless lizard that was lurking in some growth at the safari camp. It was a big one and scared me, initially, when I thought it was a snake.

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Legless lizard in there! Curved shape across centre of photo.

A pointy nosed frog was sort of wallowing in a wet patch – the result of me tipping out washing water – near the van. I thought it was the same variety as the one that had been by the van wheel. This place was an absolute haven for wild life, being so close to its natural state.

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Pointy nosed frog in wet patch

Our resident cane toad was a regular presence too. At least I assumed it was the same one……

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Our totem!


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2005 Travels May 4

WEDNESDAY 4 MAY     PUNGALINA

My son’s 31st birthday. I’d sent out a note and cheque in last week’s mail bag and hoped it reached him in time.

Some previous discussions with O had thrown up the fact that he thought the sun was too strong for good vegetable growing, so he would like a shade structure built over the vegie garden. There was some milled timber left from a couple of years ago that could be used for this. He thought that a heap of shade cloth that A had brought up (to maybe make a cover for his plane, when here) could be used to roof the shelter.

John went and measured and decided the shelter could be made 10.5 metres by 9 metres.

Today, John began the shelter, by digging holes for the posts and starting to set them in. Whilst it was good that a start could be made now on the structure, John had really been hoping that timber would have to be milled for it – he had come across a brand new Morrison Mill in the shed, still in its box, and really wanted a reason to have this set up and use it! He had long coveted one of these, but of course, with our home base being only a suburban block – albeit a large one – there was no reason for him to be felling and milling timber.

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Some uprights in place for the new vegie garden roof

I did John’s garden watering for him. I had been trying to keep up water to some pumpkin growing mounds that O had established on various parts of his “lawns” – hoping to encourage these to actually grow some pumpkins.


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2005 Travels May 3

TUESDAY 3 MAY     PUNGALINA

The nights were starting to cool down, a lot. Sleeping was much easier and more comfortable.

This morning was actually quite chilly, and the creek by the camp was steaming lightly, because the water was warmer than the surrounding air. It made a very pretty scene.

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Steam over the creek

Two men arrived yesterday, to camp in one of the riverside sites. Apparently O had them here to see if they wanted to lease some of the place for cattle. They were paying $50 a night for the site.

I actually hoped that there would be no more cattle introduced to the place. My personal preference was for wilderness. But I could see the logic of an extra source of income.

I cleaned and made up the tents that were used last week, with the clean linen, and got them ready to go again.

We were getting some beautiful sunsets. It had become a very pleasant ritual, after work was done for the day, to sit outside in Cane Toad Clearing, with our cans of beer, watching the birds in the trees about our camp, and admiring the sunsets. Totally unpolluted air, only natural sounds, solitude. Bliss!

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Sunset over Cane Toad Clearing


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2005 Travels May 2

MONDAY 2 MAY     PUNGALINA

It was our day off.

I found a little frog with a very pointy nose, on a board beside the van wheel. O told me it was a Rocket Frog. Cute little critter.

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I finally got to open and inspect my box of book goodies and was really pleasantly surprised. There were ten books, all to my taste and all recent releases that I hadn’t read. What a great service!

Paperwork and information had come from Birds Australia and we talked about what sites we would survey, and when. The camp environs were an obvious choice and we thought we’d have to try to add a wetland area as well, and incidental observations as we went about the place.

Just relaxed about camp – I started reading a book.

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Our camp looking more habitable

It was still hot in the day times, but not quite the extremes of when we were first here. Maybe we were acclimatizing, too.

O was setting up the computer in the “office” – a room in the old silver bullet caravan. A was insisting that this become functional to aid all our communications. I really needed it to research supplies. John gave him some help, when it was asked for.


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2005 Travels 1 May

SUNDAY 1 MAY     PUNGALINA

We were up early to do the breakfast for the guests, after which they departed.

Their Guest Book comments were: “Thanks for a great visit and canoe adventure. Thanks Wendy – excellent food.”  So I felt good about their stay, too.

My next set of tasks was to put the kitchen tent into rest mode, till the next visitors. Turn off and defrost fridge and take all the foodstuffs from fridges up to O’s place, for storage there. I cleaned the kitchen fridge and the drinks fridge and generally cleaned and tidied up the place. Mopped the tarp floor.

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At work in the kitchen tent

It had been very good to start off our time at the camp with only a couple of guests at a time – good trial run, to work things out. I had the rather extensive procedures manual provided by S and A before we came – useful, but some of it not up to date with the place as it was this year. Also some unrealistic – like keeping up our supplies via the weekly mail plane; this could only be done on a very limited basis due to weight constraints and ban on frozen items, meat etc.

Reading the section, now, about what to do when there were guests was really interesting – it was obvious all the things that were done poorly when A and S came up here, last year!

Now, having run the kitchen for a few days, I had really clear ideas what must be purchased to bring things up to a standard that justified the charges – like having plates and cutlery that matched, and enough of it all! We were really poorly equipped.

I had the bedding and towels from four guests to launder, plus the one and only table cloth, hand towels and tea towels that had accumulated over the time. I carted all that in Truck, up to O’s, and did it all, in several loads, in the washing machine there. I decided I was going to do our washing in that too, from now on, whether he liked it or not. We had accumulated quite a bit of washing over the past few days and I had not had time to do any of it by hand. Everything was hung out to dry on the lines that stretched across the house yard. It did not take long to dry, once through the washer.

In between loads, I wandered across to the vegie patch and helped John.

Apart from the vegie and house garden watering, John was able to get back into his normal safari camp routine – watering the grass, raking leaves and so on.

He refuelled Truck, hand pumping diesel from one of the drums of fuel at the house. The speedo read 434kms. About 180kms of that was the distance we’d driven since our last fill-up at Hells Gate. The other 250kms, or so, had been accumulated by the driving we’d done about the property, but mostly by my trips between the house and our camp. John was mostly driving the property’s old Hilux and he kept this at our camp each night.

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We had been here three weeks now. It felt longer! I thought we had achieved a great deal in that time.


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2005 Travels April 30

SATURDAY 30 APRIL     PUNGALINA

John stoked up the donkey again, first thing.

It was the usual breakfast routine.

I hurried to make up rounds of egg and lettuce, and cheese spread and celery sandwiches, plus some slice, for A and K to take with them. They left not long after breakfast. I was quite sorry to see them go! With only two of them in camp, and just us a lot of the time, they had come to feel like friends.

But there was no time to reflect on that, apart from feeling that their stay had been successful for us, and really enjoyable for them.

The couple – V and P – were going to have an exploring day, so I packed lunch for them too.

They  planned to walk along the Safari Camp Creek, to the house and the main river. P arranged with O to collect a canoe at the house and then canoe upstream on the Calvert as far as Surprise Falls. O would drive out and collect them at the Escarpment water hole at 5pm. This did not work quite as planned – as John predicted, it proved impossible to follow the creek through the dense vegetation, and they finished up taking to the vehicle track we used.

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Thick vegetation along the creek

Once the camp was empty, and John had headed off to put in some significant time in the vegie patch, I did the usual cleaning, then went to check A and K’s tents, and close them up until I had time to strip and clean them, after all guests had left. The lovely K had left us a $100 tip! I was so thrilled that he’d had such a great time that he wanted to do that. They’d written really positive comments in the Guest Book, too.

With the guests out for the day, I did not have the interruption of lunch service, which was appreciated. I was able to have a leisurely shower, for once.

O brought the requested barra down to the camp, in the morning. It was still mostly frozen and clearly had only been taken out of the freezer this morning. When I investigated, after there had been some time for it to thaw a little, realized that it had not been scaled before being frozen! Late morning, fish and I went up the track a ways, and I sat down on a clump of grass, to scale this large, slippery, very cold and un-co-operative fish. At least, barra scales are big ones! It probably would have made quite a comical photo, with me looking like I was cuddling the damned thing. But I was not thinking happy thoughts about O as I worked, though.

I made pannacottas and set them to chill. Put together a green salad. Wrapped fish in foil, with the garlic, ginger, spring onion flavourings, ready to bake in oven later.

O took John with him to the pick up point at the southern part of the Escarpment – so John would know for the future. They had to wait for a while, whilst P had a try at fishing in the water hole. Unsuccessfully. The canoe was left, securely moored, at the river, for future guest use.

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Mud map of area around safari camp and house (not to any scale)

By the time the party got back from the Escarpment, time was getting on, and they still had to clean up before tea. So I did not have to worry about serving pre-dinner nibbles.

Dinner was the foil-baked barra, French fries, salad, followed by pannacotta with berry coulis (mashed tinned raspberries and strawberries). It seemed a success. I went in and sat with the group, over coffee. It meant we were rather late getting the dishes done, though, and things set up for the morning.

Feeding these two who booked on such short notice had taught me the wisdom of always having a large frozen fish, preferably a barra, for emergency use. I told O to replenish that supply, as soon as he could!