The day started out early with a quick packup of the van.  We had to have our first stop of the day and be back at the camp by 9:30.

Mataranka Hot Springs was that first stop and it was smelly one.  The area is very beautiful, but is also populated by oodles of flying foxes … hence the smell.

The area is also the site of the replica of the Elsey Homestead used for the movie ‘We of the Never Never’, that was based on the experiences of Jeannie Gunn in the early 1900’s.

The hot springs themselves were good, provided you had sufficient pegs available for your nose.

Apparently the freshwater crocs here jump up and snatch low flying bats of an evening, but we weren’t hanging around to wait for that.

We had to be back at the park for the 9:30 Barramundi feeding.  The host is full of info about this interesting fish.  Not much remained inside my head though … but it was informative at the time! Lots of head nodding and oohs and ahhhs.

Hannah and Blake even had their own go at hand feeding the Barra.  A bit brave of them I thought. Guess who was the bravest?

 

Next brief stop was the old Elsey Cemetery and the site of the real Elsey Homstead.

 

There’s a lot of history around here and the lives of these early pioneers must have been pretty harsh and isolated.  The road is long and unforgiving now, I shudder to think what it would have been like back in the day.

The day was creeping away from us and we still had a long way to go.  We’d only done about 20km so far.

We made it to a late lunch at the Daly Waters pub.  A good fun place to recharge.

An absolute ton of stuff to see here.  Everywhere you look there’s something to pique your interest.

After all that looking around you tend to build up an appetite, which is just as well since the food is larger than life too.

Hilux Burger

Continuing on, we planned to stop at Banka Banka station for the night.  We had to pull over to let a few oversize loads past a couple of times before that though.

We started to run out of light before getting to our destination, so we ended up staying near a communications tower about 1km off the road.  Nice and quiet, but a bit remote!  The comforting buzz of the rectifiers was soon drowned out by the whistle of the wind.

Not much else around here!  The temperature has already started to drop and by evening Kel was even mentioning jumpers.  Not toasty enough to require a generator and aircon down this far south.  Not really that cold though as we slept with all the vents and windows open to take advantage of the breeze.

Hmmm … well it started out as a breeze, but by very early morning ‘gale’ was a better term and a lot of the windows got shut and we just endured the buffeting of the wind until the sun came up.

The wind hadn’t abated by morning and it looked like it was going to be a tiring day of gusty crosswinds.  The plan was only a short drive of 300km or so with a bit of sight-seeing thrown in … as usual the day didn’t go to plan … 😉

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