11 March 2013 - Argylla Discovery Holiday Park, Mount Isa, Queensland

Last night, a small Hippy Campervan joined us, parking at some distance in the large area. We still felt as if we were quite alone, but for the large trucks that continued to pull in for a break until late in the night and then again starting well before daylight. We should have realised that camping on the road side west of McKinlay would have this down side because immediately to the south of that small settlement lies the BHP Billiton Cannington Mine, the world’s largest and lowest-cost single mine producer of both silver and lead. It was opened in 1997 and supplied silver for the 2000 and 2008 Olympic Games. There is no rail anywhere near the mine so it was self-evident that the road would be busy with trucks.

And as for the tourists in the campervan, it cannot have been a happy hippy night. The heat and the flies in such a small capsule must have been quite unbearable. But then such types are young and they will put up with anything.

We soon reached Cloncurry this morning and stopped for just a few extra litres of diesel at my insistence  As it turned out, Chris was right; we had no need of it but I reckoned we would have looked pretty stupid stranded on the road east of Mount Isa if we had run out.

We had passed through Cloncurry and driven the road from here right through to Threeways about seventeen months ago and so had “done” the tourist things. Despite that, we were again enthralled by the landscape as we came through the Selwyn Ranges, the rugged rocky terrain which the famous Burke and Wills struggled through back in early 1861. We stopped again at the memorial to that passing about forty kilometres or so west of Cloncurry and paid homage by reading an appropriate  passage out of The Dig Tree, my bedside reading of the moment.

The road continued to weave its way through the ranges, coming up from Cloncurry’s 197  metres ASL to 361 metres ASL at Mt Isa,  one hunderd and twenty one kilometres west, enjoying the red outcrops and harsh landscape.

It was just before midday when we pulled into this camp, the one we had chosen to stay at during our last visit. We were rather shocked to find that even after our member’s discount of 10%, the tarriff was still more than $34. Chris berated the poor women at the desk for charging more than the advertised price however she stood by her ground. The fact was, as we later decided, we had set in our mind on returning here, and now that we were members of Big4 which it had been before, expected to pay 10% less than that historical price, all carefully documented in our records. We did not check the current caravan parks book or we would have seen that this was by no means the cheapest place to stay. There was much mumbling as you can imagine, and little of it by me.

But matters did look up, because after lunch we headed off to the Information Centre to find out about several matters, one being the whereabouts of a windscreen fixit man. We had been hit yet again by a stone flying off one of the speeding road trains yesterday. In Longreach we had been charged $99 for the repair of a first chip, here it would cost us $85, but Roger, the windscreen man said, "why bother?" And so we have not, thus saving ourselves $85 for now at least.

We called into BCF with the intention of buying diesel cans then decided to check out the Bunnings as well. There we bought a couple of cans for less and so we are now set to carry 40 litres of diesel in reserve as we cross the barely populated stretches ahead of us.

I was keen to make an appointment for a haircut at the salon I had patronised on our last visit. Alas, it and the IGA adjacent, have closed. I may just take to my fringe with the scissors and wait until we reach Darwin. 

So all in all we have saved a heap of money today rather than spent it. This is typical reasoning by a woman, is it not?

The other matter we wished to research was accessibility to the Lost City up near Cape Crawford in the Northern Territory. To reach Cape Crawford we would have to head north halfway across the Barkly Tableland instead of continuing out to the Stuart Highway. The road is sealed but ventures into very remote country. Our question related to whether we could ourselves explore this amazing landscape; ancient columns of sandstone. It seems that the preferred way to see these is by helicopter from Cape Crawford, although there is a less viewed “batch” of columns to the south of the settlement where we could drive ourselves and wander through this strange geological arrangement. But would it be worth the extra 100 kilometre detour, the cost of staying at the Heartbreak Hotel camping ground, the cost of extra fuel which surely will be at ripoff prices? These are currently unanswered questions and will be the subject of debate over the next two evenings. We will have to make our minds up before we leave Mount Isa and head westward over the border.