trav – Blog o' Trav

Day 3 – 3rd January 2018 – Western Plains Zoo, Dubbo

Z-day! No, not zombies, but a massive open plains zoo, woohoo!

We had a nice bacon breakfast and packed up the rooftop camper quickly and left the camp spot by 7:45 am. Arrived at the zoo about 20 minutes later and the front gates were wide open so we drove straight in.

We were expecting the place to be just starting up for the day, however the car park was almost at capacity, even on this Wednesday! We parked the car and walked in to the reception area, verified our tickets and were told that we could drive through the zoo, rather than hiring an electric cart or a bike for the day.

Needless to say, on a low 30 degrees day, the car’s air conditioning was put to the test, cooling down the cabin every time we got into it.

Driving slowly through the park, the first animals we saw, and took many many pictures of, were the Meerkats. There were about eight of them in the enclosure with glass front panels, being almost accustomed to the presence of tourists. They went about their business of digging for bugs, looking out for predators and generally just being very photogenic little creatures. All the while completely ignoring the near constant taunts from the tourists “aww”, “Hey, hey look over here!”, whistling and a whole lot of clicking.

We walked a little further and saw a very sleepy Rhinoceros, scratching his underbelly on a log in his enclosure, looking perpendicular to the camera, I ended up with some very detailed close ups of his face. So many wrinkles and lines, the photos seemed to bring out every small feature.

Moving onto the next space was for the African Dogs, though they were all still waking up and basking in the sun, as were many of the other animals in the morning on this day.

Having a telephoto lens in an open plains zoo is very handy, but having a 2x magnifier that couples to that lens makes all the difference. I was able to get up high in the lookout and get some very nice pictures of many of the animals. This includes a new baby elephant, born in April 2017!

We walked and drove all around the zoo’s 5km round trip road. Stopping half way for lunch and some much appreciated cold ice creams, not without the expected flock of scavenger birds, ready to pick up any and all scraps left behind.

Once we had made it to the end of the track, we went through one more time quickly, as you could use the same ticket throughout the whole day as many times as you like. I got out and ran around like a mad man, taking quick pictures of the animals that were now very active.

In doing so, the animals I was taking pictures of noticed the sudden movement of me running around and the African Dogs ran after me, as such I got some interesting photos of them jumping into the green water moat between the enclosure and the perimeter fence! There was one Rhinoceros that paid attention to me running past, and turned to watch me jog by. I never would have thought to just move about a lot to grab the attention of the animals, and I suppose nobody else wanted to do that either.

Once we had out fill of the various animals, great and small, we headed out of Dubbo. Looking to end up at Carcoar Dam, where my parents were waiting, having gotten there yesterday late at night. They had a spot picked out for us where the car would be as level as it could be, so we didn’t roll out of the rooftop camper through the night. A rock and a thick branch were chocked up under the front wheels, and I drove up onto them. Teetering on the very top centre of the makeshift chocks, the car was reasonably level.

The wind picked up as soon as we arrived, and was forecast to be approximately 20km/h all night long. The window covers were already set up and flapping madly, but not flying away, so they were left as is.

Heading down to Canberra tomorrow to see the war memorial and to grab a new low beam headlight bulb for the car, it blew sometime today, but is the original bulb from the factory where the car was made, so that lasted a VERY long time! I hope to keep this updated regularly, or keep a log when not in service and update this page when I come back to civilisation.

Day 2 – 2nd January 2018 – Getting to Dubbo

Camping overnight at Mother of Ducks Lagoon at Guyra was not as cold as I thought it was going to be. Only using about 60% of the fifteen thousand layers of bedding we have prepared for the Tasmania temperatures.

Trekking south west towards a camp spot just outside of Dubbo, we went through Tamworth and picked up a new camera battery and battery charger. We somehow lost the battery charger and spare battery for the camera since we last used it. Though of course as soon as we get home the old charger will be sitting in the most obvious place, never the less a new charger that runs on 12v from the car is a very nice addition for this trip.

The owner of the camera store was very nice and had a long and somewhat drawn out conversation with us while he seemed to struggle to use MYOB for the stock tracking to do with our purchase, but gave us a discounted battery, which is much appreciated.

We didn’t take any pictures on the way to Dubbo, wanting to save SD card memory space for the western plains zoo for tomorrow instead.

We arrived at the camp spot and had a good 15 minutes trying to figure out where we wanted to park the car so that it was level enough, and would get morning sun so that the canvas would dry early. We wanted to get to the zoo as soon as it opened to get the most time we could out of the day.

We had a little sausage sizzle and chocolate for desert and off to sleep we went, very excited for the zoo tomorrow.

Day 1 – 1st January 2018 – Happy New Year!

The night flew by with eager anticipation for the morning, unfortunately the many years of eager mornings have taken hold of my energy; I slept in until 6. The fact that I can say that a 6AM wake up is a sleep in is proof that time goes on whether I want it to or not.

As I write this my girlfriend corrected me from a 7AM sleep in to a “10 to 6” sleep in. She’s right of course, but I have to have some dignity (as I change the 7AM to 6AM in front of her). But I digress, on with the recap.

Frantically getting together all of the last minute things to go into the car, looking forward to that McDonald’s breakfast at Nudgee service station soon to come. Phone charging cables, sleeping clothes worn the night before, toothbrush/toothpaste etc. All in the car, packed neatly and ready to go.

My sister who had just come off of a overnight shift came to give me a hug, which was nice, I picked her up off of the ground a little. I’m going to miss her, though we don’t talk much, we are somewhat close. The two dogs she has came by with as much excitement as they always do, which is too much to measure, not that I want to measure it.

We leave with my parents, they in one car, Candy (girlfriend) and I in another, head up the street, out to the highway, heading southbound for Nudgee. We stop there for breakfast and before long we’re off, over the gateway bridge, out of Brisbane, past Ipswich (locked doors) and the rest of it is a blur of green fields, stranded fences, cows, sheep, rocks, rocks with legs (more cows) etc.

At one point Candy tried to take a picture of a cloud rolling off of a mountain (with her new polaroid camera), but the flash was on, and it didn’t turn out so well. It’s the thought that counts, I’m sure the cloud feels appreciated.

Through Warwick and then a few more hours to our rest for the night at Mother of Ducks Lagoon in Guyra (NSW). Where we set up, took the dog for a short walk, made him a flower crown (out of white daisies), took a picture, then had dinner.

All of this happened before 7:45PM, at which point the sun decided to kiss the horizon. Time works strangely here, I know it’s because of daylight savings time, but it still feels strange.

We clean up and get ready for bed, Candy and I hop up into the rooftop camper and I jump onto my blog to create this monstrosity! She (as said above) reads over my shoulder and corrects me every now and then for grammar and punctuation.Only had to put in three commas so far, doing well!

Now that she’s laid down again I can go back to the horrible form and post it before she can read it. Haha! A small win for me! … I love her. She’s a nice person I swear.

Now I sit in my pyjamas (moustache bear pants and “happy little vegemite” T shirt) finishing off this post, wondering how many hours of sleep I’m actually going to get, if the sun wakes me up, and I go to sleep now (9PM daylight savings time) that’s… a lot of hours. Never the less, on to Dubbo tomorrow (day 2) which is about 5 hours from here to see the western plains zoo on day 3.

If you want to view pictures Candy takes from her phone on instagram, you can find her through Candy’s Instagram

But I will upload a selection of images here every now and then.

Goodnight!

The Camel Named Chris – Top End 2015

So the luckiest day number of all has struck us exactly the opposite way a dart sticks into a dart board; slowly, and without so much as a whoosh. Its day 13!

Early start today as we have some ground to cover, and we also want to get to cable beach and enjoy the scenery! White sand, blue sea, red skin and a whole lot of camels. That’s right, camels!

We drove westward with a certain excitement, the same excitement that can be found in a young child as they are promised a trip to the zoo. Age does not define us, age only allows us to do more silly things, faster and harder with more money. The plans for this afternoon displayed our inner child more than anything else; we were to ride camels on the beach at sunset!

We trekked westward towards Broome and peeled off to cable beach where we found the caravan park we had previously made reservations in. We set up camp and before long we went out in the car down to cable beach just to see what it was like. The sand was white, the water was a pristine ocean blue. It was a postcard beach in real life!

Not too much later we all met down on the sand with quite a few camels. The group was known as “Red Sun” camel tours and they were friendly and knowledgeable about the camels we were riding on today.

I went on a camel with my auntie as there were five of us, and my mum and dad got onto a camel themselves, and my uncle got to ride the very last camel on the camel train by himself. So much camel!

The beast I rode on, as I later found out, was the smallest of the bunch. He was 17 years old and he was the smallest and lightest even though the male camels are supposed to be 100-200kg bigger than the females. My companion was named Chris, he was a spritely camel that liked to wander just out of line. This worked well for me as I was videotaping the ride I got a nice view of the train in front of me; thanks Chris!

I learnt from one of the tour operators that a camel could drink 10 to 20 litres of water every day. If left for 10 days, they could drink up to 200 litres! That’s a lot of water, but what got me was the rate at which they could consume said water. He said that a camel could guzzle that 200 litres in 10 minutes! Though his analogy of the drinking rate was more humorous: “I like to put it in terms that any Australian can understand. That’s a whole carton in about 25 seconds. So here’s a stubby: gone, gone, gone, gone…” – Red Sun tour operator.

It was a great day today, and here’s some pictures to look at, enjoy!

Thanks for reading,

Trav.

The Faulty Dash Cam – Top End 2015

Day 12, happy new financial year!

The dash cam disagrees with us; last night when we tried to move the footage from the day onto the external hard drive, the transfer went really slowly. So I said that once it finished we’ll reformat the micro SD card and put the configuration files back onto it and it should be all good again. A few hours later the transfer finally finished and I went about hard reformatting the little card to an ExFAT format (as FAT32 was not available, and NTFS would definitely not work with the system).

Copied the config files back onto the card and plugged it back into the dash cam. Booted the dash cam and it spoke to us “Please check the SD card”. Damn.

Pulled it out, soft format again and copy the config files back on again. Please check the SD card. Not again!

Try something else, maybe it’s not seeing the card? “Please insert SD card”

Ok so it’s definitely seeing the card, but can’t read/access it.

I’ll save you the long story of “What the?” and “That can’t be right.”. In the end when we got back into mobile reception I googled the issue and within 2 minutes had the card formatted to FAT32. Awesome, now it works!

The rest of the day consisted of driving, driving and more driving! Woohoo!

We actually drove until about 20 minutes before sunset at a rest area called “The Boab Tree Rest Area” on the side of the Great Northern Highway. According to the map we could have gone to “The Big Boab Tree Rest Area” but I’m glad we didn’t. For starters, the boab tree we camped next to was way bigger than the so called “Big Boab Tree” which we passed the next day. Also, I climbed the tree we stayed near, it was awesomely big!

Anyway, Here’s some photos of me in the boab tree and anything else we took photos of today, enjoy!

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Thanks for reading,

Trav.

The Bungle Bungles – Top End 2015

Eleven days have passed, eleven bright mornings, cold nights and cocoon-like sleeps I have had since I left home to go on this journey across the top end of Australia. Today was a grand day for me; my dad and I were to go on another walk through the wondrous rock formation known as the Bungle Bungle Range in Purnululu National Park, Western Australia. We set off at 7 am, just after sunrise.

We headed over to the northern walks starting point where we chose to take the Mini Palms Gorge walk. It was a 4.4km return walk; 2.2km in, then the same path 2.2km back out. About half of the walk in consisted of a smooth rocky river bed that had been dry as soon as the wet season had stopped this year.

The other half of the walk in consisted of large boulders that had long ago fallen from up high and blocked the path. The track twisted and negotiated its way through, around, over and in between these obstacles. About 200m from the end of the walk a set of new looking stairs greeted us and aided our climb to the lookout at the end. More of these brand new looking stairs lay before us toward the end.

The view from the lookout was somewhat disappointing considering that there was supposed to be a natural amphitheatre at the end. We took some pictures and headed back down the track and about 200m down we ran into some other walkers who were on their way up to the lookout. We said hello and they said that the walk we were on opened yesterday.

This means that we set up camp the very same day that the walks were officially opened up again; that’s lucky!

Anyway that explains the new-looking stairs on the walking track.

We made it back to the car and drove back to camp at around 9:15am (local time) and when we arrived, the rest of the camp had awoken and were ready to go on the Cathedral Gorge walk. Dad and I said we needed about half an hour to rest before we went on the next walk.

At around 11 am we arrived at the start of the walk and set off toward the Cathedral Gorge. It took about half an hour to walk all the way to the turnaround point. We all walked through the path that was sandy, rocky and at times holey. It was pretty in itself but the Cathedral Gorge at the end was quite spectacular. Extending at least 200 meters above us was a mostly circular hole through the rock that, in the wet season, would have a magnificent waterfall cascading down the smooth side of the hole to the sandy pool at the bottom.

Unfortunately this is the dry season, so the pool at the bottom was green and stagnant; dang.

We took some pictures and video and headed back out towards the car park, taking a small detour on the way back to see “The Domes”. These were smaller rock formations that were all topped with a somewhat domed shape. Not as grand as the Gorge itself but pretty nonetheless.

Once back at the carpark we all had a break and something to eat and at the same time, my uncle grabbed out his quadcopter. This thing is awesome, mostly because of the camera; it’s a 4k Sony camera on a 3 axis gyroscopic stabiliser situated just underneath the main body of the copter. The drone is legally limited to 400 feet (121.92 meters) above the ground directly beneath it, but that’s a whole 394 feet that I can’t see from! The footage looks spectacular.

That’s pretty much all that happened today, here’s some pics, enjoy!

Thanks for reading,

Trav.

The Dead Inverter – Top End 2015

By 7:30 am on day 10, we were packed up and moving toward one of the first big attractions in WA for this holiday: The Bungle Bungles. We rove about 2 hours, one of which was spent on a dirt road headed into Purnululu National Park. We registered our camp spot for 2 nights and got the pick of the park to camp in since we arrived at around 10am.

The nice lady in the visitor and registration centre gave us advice on what walks to do and when to do them to get the most of this beautiful land formation. We heeded her advice and set up camp with a bite to eat then headed straight back out again to a walking track named “Echidna Chasm”. The lady had said that between 11:30 am and 1:30 pm the gorge would look very nice indeed. So we headed on over to the walking track and brought our cameras and some water and headed on in.

What awaited us on this walk was vibrant red and orange rock faces, interesting honeycomb like holes in the rock faces and many plants and thin gaps to squeeze through. Throughout the walk I took many pictures of the amazingly high walls of the chasm. Once we reached the end we took a few minutes to soak it all in, it was quite amazing to behold!

Once we did all of this we ventured back to the car to grab some food for afternoon tea. We all were just about finished when my uncle requested we charge one of his batteries on our inverter (for those of you that don’t know, an inverter converts the 12V DC from your car to 240V AC just like a mains outlet). I grabbed the charger and went to plug it in, but before I did, I noticed that the little status lights for the other chargers we have plugged in were not alight. Alright so I checked if the inverter was plugged in, and it was. Uh oh, we have a problem.

Once we made it back to camp I grabbed the inverter from its usual position and took it out to have a better look. First we tried letting it cool off for an hour before plugging it in again, no dice. I ended up just removing the circuit board from the device for a visual inspection, I couldn’t see anything obvious; All of the caps were fine, no burn marks on any tracks or components, and we couldn’t smell any electronic smoke.

This is odd, so we turned it on again and waited to see if anything happened, and it did; a small tail of smoke arose from a pair of load resistors. Ok this is not good obviously we are getting power to that point on the output, but its being grounded or otherwise discharged.

Long story short, one of the FETs was faulty and had shorted the resistors to ground. We took the FET out and now we are going to leave it until we get home to fix that inverter, as we are going to just buy a new one when we get into Broome in a few days.

After all of this we all sat down and had general chit chat until the sun went down and it got cold. The national park does not allow any camp fires, so we had to go without. We had a nice warm dinner and shower and headed off to bed.

Here’s some pictures from the walk, enjoy!

Thanks for reading,

Trav.

The Cold Causeway – Top End 2015

Hello again its day 9 and I’m running in and out of service, so these blog updates will definitely be delayed!

After the good sleep from last night we had a short and simple breakfast, packed up everything and headed off toward Kununurra which is about 50km west of the Western Australian border. Taking pictures of the rock formations on the way we finally hit the border woohoo!

The border has restrictions on some foods, in particular soil like on potatoes and onions, and also honey. You can buy WA approved heat treated honey that you can take across the border but we just didn’t have any honey anyway. The border control man did take our snow peas and cherries, which my mum was a bit sad about but we would be able to pick some more up when we got into town.

A few minutes later my dad suggested we go and have a look at Lake Argyle, since it was less than 60km off of the main highway. So we went down the dirt road down towards the lake. I’m really glad we did because when we got there an amazing spectacle rose out of the land before us. Lake Argyle has a lot of interesting facts, a few of which are printed onto this nice stubby cooler I got from the visitor centre there.

Some of the facts are:

– 1000 km squared surface area, with 2100 km squared in flood

– <insert more facts here>

After we ogled at the size of the lake and had some lunch at a little park near the outlet of one of the walls, which was quite pretty, we continued on out of the place. We drove further westward to Kununurra in hopes of grabbing fuel and groceries. The rest of the day is full of driving and finally stopping for the day at a little causeway which was once part of the Great Northern Highway but had since been outdated by a new shiny bridge. The camp spot was called Muluki rest area and it was quite nice, however it was very cold at night, dropping down to 3.6 degrees Celsius. That was our coldest night to date!

Here’s some pictures of day 9, enjoy!

Thanks for reading,

Trav.

The Rental Reunion – Top End 2015

Day 8 arrived with splendour and a nice toasted chicken salad roll from the visitor centre at Katherine Gorge.

We left Katherine Gorge at 10:15am (local time) and headed south west back toward Katherine city where we would complete the final shopping for some fruit and vegetables. We filled up with a whole 168.65 litres of diesel and headed on our way westward (again) to the camp spot we towed my uncle’s broken car back to and where all of our plans unravelled.

The camp spot was an overnight stay and was named East Baines Rest Area. The spot was surrounded by long dry grass and various types of drought resistant plants including Boab trees. My dad and I went searching for firewood so we could light a camp fire and get some coals so we could cook the roast lamb we had in the fridge. We did that and started the fire with a piece of newspaper and a single match, the wood was so dry and so small that it caught quickly and within half an hour we had coals to cook on.

About an hour into cooking the roast something amazing happened; a voice on the radio appeared that had been gone since Friday afternoon. It was my auntie and they were in range of UHF radio, so they called in and announced their arrival! Once they pulled in near us at the camp spot they jumped out and shared their story of travelling from Darwin to here. They got a flat tyre but the rental company took care of that so it was no extra cost to them which was great news.

We all sat down with beer and cheese and enjoyed the afternoon before us. Not too much longer and the roast was ready to eat, yum! We cut it up with roast potato, carrot, onion and gravy, dished it out and chowed down on this most tantalising of meals. Once all was said and done we washed up and jumped into bed for the night.

The day tomorrow would be one of driving in parts of the country that we have not yet seen, woohoo!

Here’s some pictures from today that I took out of the window on the way to the rest area, enjoy!

Thanks for reading,

Trav.

The Nature of Nitmiluk – Top End 2015

Today to soak up some time we all went for another half hour drive north east out to Katherine Gorge which is situated in the Nitmiluk National Park. There are many nature trails to walk along that are well signposted in the area. I took the Baruwei walk which was a 5km looped walk that started and ended at the visitor centre. The visitor centre has various displays and a nice café connected to it.

I went for the walk by myself with my day pack filled with a bottle of water, some snacks, two GPS trackers, a handheld UHF, stills camera and even a first aid kit! I have to keep testing out the setup I have with this bag as I will be using it for the Mitchell Falls walk later on in the trip. Mum and dad stayed out on the veranda at the visitor centre and had a coffee and some cake; they’d been on a similar walk before last time they were here.

I started out on my walk and passed about half a dozen people on the flat section. Once I came across the stairs part there was nobody in sight so I took some pictures of pretty much anything that caught my eye including the stairs themselves. I then came across a nice lookout overlooking the river at the bottom of the gorge. As it so happens I hit the lookout at the same time the river tour boat floated up the river past me.

I gave it a big wave and quite a few of them waved back so I took some pictures and took in the scenery. After all of this I packed the camera back into my bag and took off further up the mountain. About 5 minutes later a big sulphur crested cockatoo swooped past me and landed on a tree not 5 meters away from me. I tried to get the camera out in time to take a good picture but the bird moved on before I could get a good shot. It continued to hop from tree to tree peeling bark off of them, sort of odd I thought but that’s just what they do I suppose.

A few more minutes of walking led me up to the local water supply and purification plant, right on top of the hill. There was a water bubbler there for tourists to take a drink from so I took a mouthful and continued on again. For the remaining half an hour of the walk I continued to take pictures of whatever caught my eye including different coloured mountain sides, sunlit winding tracks and lots of different plants.

I got back to the visitor centre at around 9:45 am (local time) and was just in time for the breakfast menu at the café there. The food was pretty good and the people were very friendly, I would definitely recommend spending some time here.

Here’s some of the pictures I took, enjoy!

Thanks for reading,

Trav.