Day 11 Way to Cloncurry After spending half a day browsing tthrough the Waltzing Matilda Centre, it is time to hit the road again. It has excellent interactive displays and theatre about the birth of the song of "Waltzing Matilda" and the life of Banjo Paterson. On the way to one of the dinosaur tours, we took a picture of the majestic Coolibah Tree under which where Banjo Paterson wrote this infamous song. As we approached 100 km out of Cloncurry, we saw miles and miles of sculpture-like red termite mount everywhere. It is quite a scene with a clear cloudless blue sky. Tourists have been clothing these termite mounts. Chee Kong took my photo besides a female termite mount. We strolled through the bush after we stopped at a roadside night rest area 60km outside Cloncurry. I found some interesting stones that I would require geologist John to identify for me when we get home. Sunset is beautiful.
Day 12 - Cloncurry Mt Isa Cloncurry The air was still very crisp at dawn and dusk. We thought we should be in short and tshirts by now. We watched the sunrise in bed as we are too lazy to get up. I managed to make pumpkin scone (out of a packet) together with my hot stewed lunch in our thermal pot. Cloncurry is a rather modern town with a decent council chamber which also housing an art gallery. The John Flynn's Flying doctor museum is also in town. We hastily took off riding to the Chinaman Dam for sightseeing without carrying any repair kit. It
was really refreshing to see some really clear dam water with mountan backdrop afer travelling in such dry and flat inland country for days. On the way back from the dam, both our front tyres were punctured by sharp nail-like weed. A kind cop offered to take us back but we decided to walk the 6km back to town for exercise. I think our bikes are only suitable for in-town riding. Glad we have spare tubes and tyres. Mt. Isa Mt Isa is a big mining town with full service and was the only place with striking and shinny rock formation in the hills. We felt we were back into civilisation. We had a coffee at Macdonald and shopped at Coles using the Thiess voucher. When one travels through the east end of NSW to almost the border of Qld without seeing a Macca and Coles is really something. Day 13 - Camooweal After camping north of Mt Isa for the night, we pushed on to Camooweal, the border town of Qld and NT. There were no roses to be smelt but plentty of red dust and endless red termite mounts with all shapes and sizes. We met some young kids from England and and gave them some tips and maps and tourist info leaflets. These kids just travel without knowing distance and available campsites, very brave. We crossed the border to NT at a blink of an eye as there was no much landmark except one sign. It was a very long day driving for about 530km. Tomorrow we would be in Tennat Creek and hopefully we could start smelling th roses slowly when we get to Katherine.
Day 14 - Tennant Creek Well, we have made 2 weeks on the road. We have passed towns with a pub only or nothing, so we learnt to have no expectation when we arrived in a town. It was indeed a delight to see this was a decent size town and the diesel was only 178 cents /L. We paid 209 cents /L yesterday. We visited Mary Ann Lake and was greeted by some original landowners. We found a few groups of the indigenous people sitting around with a case of XXXX.