xssfox

Well 38 has now become my favorite Well. A rocky spring full of trees and life which became a lovely place for an early lunch. Unfortunately it’s probably a bit too rocky for us to camp at (and a bit too early in the day).

It dawned on us that as we were the last people to fill up at Kunawarritji that anyone heading north bound would be at least 1 and half days behind us.

Rock Art cave was an adorable little cubby hole to climb in.

I was surprised to see many more of those purple flowers today, it really lit up the environment against the spinifex.

We are staying the night at Well 41. The water we drew from the well was very orange. We’ll get water at the next well, we aren’t short on water.

Since I don’t get to fly the drone often in Melbourne and we still had some daylight left today I tried some of its more advanced features, and I’m glad I did as I found that there’s actually a toilet at this stop, something we didn’t expect or plan on.

Feels like we are coming to the end of the CSR portion of this journey.

Fuel and supplies obtained from Kunawarritji but most importantly a nice hot shower. We’ve been having showers while camping but that’s more of a utility than something relaxing. We stayed around over lunch while our washing dried then heading off to Kilkil (Well 36). Felt pretty exhausted by the end of the day.

So far the native wells have been more interesting to me. There’s a surprising amount of water out here, if it know where it is. (Hi, future xss here, for some dumb reason I forgot to take pictures of any of the native wells. The native wells varied from being a depression in the ground, to natural rock formations providing a well.)

Droppy cooked and tried some Kangaroo tail but I wasn’t feeling all that adventurous today.

I intended to start formatting and writing up the blog posts to go along with this journal but got distracted doing something. Such is holiday life.

An extremely busy day! First a 5k run in the morning. Performed better than my previous runs, so that’s a good sign that I’m recovering.

Then we meet our first person in quite time. A traveler heading the same direction as us but only doing part of the CSR. We parted ways after breakfast. After heading north for a bit we came past to other vehicles heading South and exchanged hellos.

A walk up Thring rock. I wasn’t going to climb this one, but it ended up looking pretty easy, and it was. About a 10 minute climb.

Lots of hard driving (my shoulder and arms are killing me). Lots of rock and corrugations.

At Well 31 it was discovered that we misplaced the phone used for drone photography but luckily some workers heading north bound happened to have found it and stopped at Well 32 to return it. Amazing luck!

At Nyarruri (Well 32) we discovered a flat tyre on our vehicle, and had to replace it. Side wall damage, so probably shouldn’t repair ourselves.

Eventually roll into Well 33 (just past Kunawarritji) under beautiful moon light. Another group of two are also here and heading South bound. We exchanged hellos and talked about what the road conditions are like in both directions.

I gave my SIM to Droppy as I’m still not ready for the internet, even though we have coverage from the road house.