Min Min Adventure - Day 4 - Windorah to Betoota.
So…our stay in the cabin was not as restful as we thought it would be. The air-con was noisy and there were lots of mosquitoes in the room. Will spent a good while getting rid of them but more kept on appearing. I awoke in the night to find he had escaped to the bunks beds in the other room. I spent a good half hour then killing more of the blighters before finally getting off to sleep again.
I awoke feeling nervous as we had once again changed our plans and decided, rather than head straight to Birdsville, to stop and spend a night bush camping by Browns Creek at Betoota in the hope of seeing the vast outback night sky.
It was all unknown and didn’t know what to expect.
We set off at 8.00 and after nipping to see the Windorah Solar array and quickly using the WiFi at the Information Centre, headed out into the wilderness again.
Will was driving today.
The scenery was very different now, endless flat plains with very few trees and the occasional sand hill. We stopped to look at some more Native Wells and then saw another ‘Point of Interest’ sign which pointed to the hole in Mt Henderson.
The road out of Windorah was sealed all the way to the Birdsville turnoff but after that there was a lot of dirt road kilometres to travel. Some of the dirt stretches were quite rocky and others very smooth.
It was always a relief when we came to a bit of road that had been sealed over.
It’s incredible that you can travel out here for hundreds of kilometres and not see another car.
The weather got hotter and hotter and at one point Zooey was telling us that the temperature outside was 44 degrees!
We stopped at Deon’s Lookout to admire the road ahead. Deon was a young man from Birdsville who had died in a helicopter crash years ago a few kilometres from the lookout. It was a nice memorial and a great view.
After Deon’s Lookout we only had 20 27 kilometres to go to Betoota. We had seen signs that the Betoota Pub was open. We had read in the information about the area that Betoota was a ‘Ghost Town’ and that the sign said ‘Population 0’.
The pub was indeed open and we went in for a pie and a drink. We found out the owner was away and that the two people there were just covering for awhile. It had been empty for sometime but is in the process of being renovated. They still had some way to go but it felt like a real outback pub.
Robyn was telling us they had been very busy the day before because it had been Melbourne Cup day and she hadn’t got to bed until after 1.00 am. I guess no one checks around here if you are open after hours!
We went to find a shady spot for our bush camp down by the creek. It was scorching and the flies were terrible. We spent the afternoon alternatively sitting in the creek to cool down and the retreating into the boiling tent to escape the flies. It was no fun at all.
Late afternoon we went back to the pub for a few more cold drinks and chatted with Robyn for a bit. We didn’t see any other customers both times we visited. WE left and headed back to Deon’s Lookout to watch the sun go down but were cheated as it sank behind a cloud. So we returned to our hot tent and Will cooked a pasta tea on the camp stove while I hid in the tent to avoid the mosquitoes and bugs attracted by the lights.
