I could have spent another month cavorting about the tropics, but I felt it was about time to come home.
I drove a few hundred kms to Townsville, and stayed in a caravan park so I could use the laundromat. Worst van park evah, it was between two highways, a freight rail line, a roadhouse with roadtrain break-up pad and a junkyard, with the choppers from the nearby army base adding to the noise.
After this I was pretty much exactly retracing my steps. Which worked well, because I had to drive that same 30kms of bumpy dirt road that caused the brakelight/indicator electrical fault as I came north. This was good, because ... wait for it ... driving south on this road
fixed the electrical fault.
I kid you not, it is working as it should and has been for two weeks.
I decided to shut up and be thankful.
A little further was this very lonely rest area. This is what they are like: composting toilet, table and bench with shade, a few bins, maybe a place for a fire.
I had food here, but then kept driving.
Not much further, this wedge-tailed eagle swooped down to the side of the road.
I stopped for pictures, but I left the engine on and this may have scared the bird off, but I still got this nice shot of it in flight, riding the thermal above the road.
That night I made another roadside camp, cant really remember where. South central Queensland, roughly.
Next day was just huge amounts of driving. I'd planned to stop at a rest area an hour or so before sunset, but it was too darn hot. The car has a function that tells me the outside temperature, and during the day this got up to 42. If I kept driving, the air conditioning inside was 26.
it was.
Even as the sun was setting (half below the horizon) the temperature was still 39. Glad I didn't try the desert tracks!
I camped for the night not far from Broken Hill, a mining town just on the NSW side of the NSW/SA border. I pitched my tent and made my bed, but after a while it seemed to be getting warmer! I could feel the heat coming from the ground, through the 5cm foam mattress, to me. Ugghhh. Even at dawn the next morning, the floor of the tent was still noticeably warmer to the touch than the air temperature. I was in the car within an hour of sunrise, and the temperature was already 32.