Day 5: Dunblane (near Barcaldine)

Pfft.

I’m going to say it again. Pfft.

Last night’s “sunset from the tub full of hot artesian basin water” was a bust. Seriously.

Not the sunset’s fault. The sunset was spectacular. Indescribably beautiful.

Here is some proof, even though the photos simply do not do it justice. You had to be there to see it.

The problem wasn’t even with the tub and the hot artesian basin water. The problem was with the pump that pushes the water from the bore to the tub. Although technically there was nothing wrong with the pump either.

The problem was that Ergon Energy had a “significant outage” that plunged all of the Barcaldine district into the dark ages. Literally. A network outage that started about an hour before sunset and lasted until about an hour after sunset.

No electricity = no pump = no hot tub full of water.

Just the sunset. Which was spectacular.

As I said, the power did eventually come on and we filled the tub and went for a plunge anyway, but it was very dark, with a cool breeze blowing. We had a nice soak after dinner, then put on some warmer clothes and went and sat by the fire for a while and drank coffee.

And listened to the cows mooing, and the sheep baa-ing.

And nothing else. Not a sound. Well, maybe a few crickets.

We also spent some time looking up at the Milky Way and named all of the constellations that we could. Beautiful.

I wonder what the poor people are doing?

Monday morning, and we woke to a beautiful day. Sunny, warm, blue skies.

We had no particular plans for today, and David (the lucky guy who owns these 40,000 acres) was dubious of our claim that we would be happy just sitting around, reading books, and napping.

He proposed an alternative plan. A self-drive tour of his property.

All we had to do was follow the road leading out of camp towards the shearing shed. Not the road that we came in on, which could hardly be described as a road, but the one leading in the other direction.

Which, as it turns out, was even less of a road than the one we came in on.

Lucky we didn’t bring the Ferrari on this trip – it would never have made it!

We followed the road for about 15 minutes, saw some kangaroos and emus, and finally made it across the train line (that’s the QR Travel line to Winton), and to the shearing shed.

David’s instruction was that we should text him when we got to the shearing shed, and he would give us instructions for the self-drive tour.

Although we texted him, unfortunately he was tied up and didn’t respond. We found out later that he was busy unbogging a bogged caravan.

Probably that turkey from Victoria that I complained about yesterday.

If a less than perfect road and no response from David were the biggest problems that we have today, then it’s a pretty good day.

We decided to head back into town (Barcaldine) to have a look around. It was only 5km or so and I think that Elsie appreciated the opportunity to let those horses run free, without Percy on the back.

In fact, we (I) had a bigger problem than just David not responding. If you cast your mind back a few days to when we went through Roma, that was the last time that I had mobile coverage. Several months ago I ported across to Woolworths mobile on the understanding that it was on the Telstra network, and to have the added bonus of 10% off one shop at Woolies each month.

And given how much we spend at Woolies each month, that meant that the Woolworths mobile plan would pay for itself!

Bargain. NOT!

Roma was the last time that my phone connected to a network and I was able to send or receive calls and text messages. MBW’s phone still works and is getting good reception and decent internet, but mine?

Nada.

Here we are, centre of Barcaldine, underneath a Telstra mobile tower, and no mobile coverage on my phone. Zip.

It turns out, as my learned oldest son informs me, that Woolworths mobile is on the Telstra Wholesale network, not the “real Telstra network”.

And he’d know, because he works for them.

So that means that I am doomed to no mobile coverage for most of this trip. Unless …

We went to the local Barcaldine IGA and got me a Boost Mobile SIM card. Boost are on the “real” network. MBW is on Boost, and she gets good reception and internet – remember?

All I had to do was to activate the SIM and my phone is alive again. Except …

To activate a SIM, you have to be able to receive a text message with a code in it. To receive a text message, you have to have mobile coverage. And I don’t have mobile coverage.

Bugger.

So we had a quick poke around Barcaldine, got some groceries and some more cash, and headed back to camp for a quick lunch.

By this time it was hot – about 30 degrees, so we changed into shorts and T-shirts, had a quick bite of lunch, and headed back to the shearing shed for the self-drive tour, take #2.

With instructions from David, and in possession of the black folder that gives us the detailed directions, we headed off.

The self-drive tour is the opportunity for us city-slickers to get out and have a look at how the other half – our country cousins – live. On our little 400m² blocks, it is quite hard to comprehend the size of David’s 40,000 acres. And I’m sure that we only saw a small part of it.

It is also an opportunity to let Elsie do what she was designed to do – go off-road.

It also turns out that David is smarter than the average bear. The self-drive tour is constructed to be followed as though we are working for him and doing a property check, looking for issues with the fence, checking the water tanks/troughs, and checking for any evidence of his sheep being killed by wild dogs.

His instructions are quite specific about how to check the water level in the tanks, and checking the condition of some of the equipment that he has around the property.

In one of the photos above you can see the dog fence, designed to keep wild dogs out, and to keep his sheep safe. And they are designed in a compartmentalised way so that if a dog does get it, it is confined to one small area and can’t go any further.

In fact, the dog fence surrounds and protects several properties, covering several hundred thousand acres.

As a part of the tour, you are asked to send him any photos or reports of any issues on the property. Seems like a very clever way to get people to see a part of his world, and for him to get property reports without having to have to go out and do it himself 🙂

The tour took us about 2 hours to complete, and we travelled about 15km, and it was well worth the experience!

Here is a fun fact – I read somewhere that David has approximately 10,000 sheep on his property, and that he also has more kangaroos than sheep.

Once we’d completed the tour, we headed back to camp for coffee and a rest. We spent some time looking around the camp, and checking out the neighbours.

It is obviously lambing season because there are lots of these little fellas running around the paddock.

I had wanted to put the drone (Sam’s drone) up to get some photos this afternoon, but it seems that I neglected to confirm that the batteries were charged before I left home, so I put them all onto charge ready for tomorrow morning.

Fortunately we have power here at this campsite, so while we are very remote, we still have the ability to run 240V appliances, and charge drone batteries.

I busied myself with getting the tub ready for sunset tonight, given that Ergon Energy had lifted their game and we had power restored.

Last night we found that the water – while it comes out at about 45 degrees – it is not quite hot enough to be really relaxing. David has a hot water donkey that you can hook up to get the water even hotter.

That was all a bit of an exercise in frustration because the water pressures are not great, and so it was hard to get the water flowing effectively through the donkey, and the hoses are old and cracked, and the connections are bad … but being the resourceful people that we are, we found a way.

Where there’s a will … as they say.

Tonight we got to sit in the hot tub and watch the sun go down … and what another spectacular sunset it was.

Sunset was about 5.47pm tonight, so you can see how that unfolded – from the luxury of a hot tub.

Dinner, coffee and a sit by the fire for a while. What better way is there to end the day?

Tomorrow we are packing up and heading off to Winton, about 3 hours away. Fortunately Woolworths Mobile considers Longreach (on the way from Barcaldine to Winton) worthy of their mobile service. So we will stop there briefly to start the porting process and bring me back into the 21st century.

I’ve been cut off from the world for so long that I have been practicing smoke signals, just in case.

Winton is the place where we will stay for 3 nights, and we will get to experience the Opera in the Outback. It should be amazing – even though we are not opera buffs.

Winton is also the place where the water smells awful, full of sulphur … so we will be stopping in town (Barcaldine) to top up the tanks so that we have sufficient clean water to get us through the next few days.

We are still having fun, and hope that you are too!

Ciao

#Retirement2024

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