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.
Ended up a fairly long day. Setting up in the dark
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.
View from Thring rock. It's not very tall but everything else is flat
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!
A quick wheel swap to get back on the road
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.
This spaghetti tin demonstrates how rough these roads are
We are running pretty ahead of schedule, even without rushing. The roads were good today. Many more dunes but also some large clay pans which were pretty cool to see.
One of the many barrels that litter the road side. It's disappointing that people just dump these when they are empty rather than carry them out
There was some evidence of rain, with some simple water crossings and muddy sections.
I love how soft these flowers look
We climbed Slate Ridge and Helen Hill. Both provided gorgeous views of the country. The climbs involved scaling a little bit of loose stone but otherwise a fairly easy climb.
There's a few little hills like this that scatter the landscape in this section.
While on Helen Hill we put out some calls on CB 40 and found a party roughly a day behind us (Well 26) and one party a day in front of us (Thring Rock)
We eventually settled on Mamunara (Well 28) as our stop today. We are fairly ahead of schedule and even discussed the possibility of a Simpson Desert crossing if we end up with time.
