ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping
Welcome to the ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping. Michelle and David, the founders of ExplorOz and the developers of Australia's best offline mapset available in the ExplorOz Traveller app will take you on adventures and beyond. Tune in to hear how offline maps are made, and go on a virtual journey with the mapping survey team to hear how they find exciting new places and how they balance work, and holidays. You'll get expert advice, and insider tips on what's involved in long term travel including all the tech stuff, and featured locations that are being added and verified in the app content. You'll hear about the ExplorOz Team's adventures 4WDing, camping, hiking, and more across Australia, from Aussie national parks to the beaches West to East, the rainforests, gorges and islands. Fuel your passion for overlanding whether you're a camper, caravanner or motorhomer, and ignite plans for your next trip or tune in whilst you're on the road. Subscribe and never miss a new episode.
ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping
Crossing the Nullarbor - Perth to Sydney: Travelling around Australia 2024
Episode 11 of the ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Offroad Adventures and Mapping Podcast.
Join us as we share the recent adventures that kickstarted our year-long adventure around Australia. From the moment we swapped our three-month trial trip for an all-encompassing expedition, the lessons began —communication, gear upgrades, and the delicate balance between wanderlust and those homey comforts we all secretly crave. Our GT ultimate camper is our new chariot, supporting us from Perth to the bustling energy of Sydney; with our trials and triumphs meticulously recorded for you, our fellow travel enthusiasts, we're sharing each step of our adventure through social media, YouTube and our Podcast.
Navigating the unpredictable balance of running a business while on the move is no small feat. The tug-of-war between app updates and exploring uncharted territories for research could leave us at the mercy of delays. Yet, we're finding our best rhythm amongst the turmoil and corrugations. The tales of our journey are not merely waypoints on a map; we want to share a mosaic of encounters and experiences with you, like the Belgian cyclist whose drive echoed our relentless spirit.
As the dust settles on the road from Perth to Sydney, we sit back, hearts full of the raw beauty of the landscapes we've crossed and the kindred spirits we've met. The stories we share in this podcast episode are the detours, the fireside chats, and the laughter that comes with lifting tree trunks to clear a path. Unwinding in Sydney, we reflect on a journey punctuated by Christmas cheer and the promise of more tales to come. So tune in, get inspired, and you'll chart a course for your grand Australian escapade.
Welcome to the Explorers podcast. I'm Michelle Martin and, together with my husband, david, we present new weekly episodes focusing on all things outdoors, camping and overlanding, people, places and mapping. For those of you new to explore us, our website is wwwexplorerscom. Our app is called Explorers Traveler, which you can check out on the app stores, available for all platforms. Our podcast is not just about tech and maps. It's also about sharing beautiful places in our country. We chat with travel community and we want to learn from one another. We want to introduce to you living the adventurous lifestyle and hopefully you'll find it inspirational. Subscribe to the podcast, tune in weekly as we bring you stories, insights and tips from extensive four wheel drive explorers. Explorers is more than a channel, it's a journey. So gear up for another episode and let's explore together.
Speaker 2:Well, welcome back everybody.
Speaker 2:Wow, it seems like it's been forever since we've sat in front of the camera and data recording for you to listen to and or watch on the youtube and podcast channels.
Speaker 2:But this is the podcast number 11 and we're kind of calling this a round Australia 2024. What we wanted to try and cover off is why we're here, what we're doing, our trip planning to get started and the first part of our journey that gets us over from Perth to Sydney. So you know, last year, last year we decided we did a trip through the central deserts and and and WA and the coast of WA or the center of WA, going up Newman Way and everything. We had such a great time. You know, we've been trying to plan for years as to how to take the business on the road and work remotely and that sort of thing, and we sort of threw last year's trip in as a as a bit of a test in what do we do? Three months, two months, three months, three months through winter that was 22, that wasn't last year now, but that was that was seems like forever ago.
Speaker 2:But that was a three month trip to sort of shake down our set up and to work out what we had right and what we had wrong, and we learned all sorts of lessons about communications and telephone service providers and and all those sorts of things. So it was amazing to. I just got bitten by an ant. Ow oh, the joys of working in the bush without my boots on Gee that hurt. I hope it was an ant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there it is. Down there it's like a moth might have been a wasp.
Speaker 2:No it's that ant there. Okay, I hope. Wow, that's stinging Wild life.
Speaker 1:Wild life.
Speaker 2:Anyway, that's made it a bit hard, but anyway we'll keep going. So we did this trip and we learned all sorts of lessons, as I say, about all the providers and what to do with our phones, and you know, we decided we needed Starlink to do our communication systems and we needed better internet. We decided also that the camper trailer that we also had was, whilst it was an ultimate camper and the camper behind me is another ultimate camper it was the older model and it had a manual lifter and some bits and pieces and that wasn't as suitable for me and my backs and back problems and stuff.
Speaker 1:So For multi months.
Speaker 2:once it like it's perfect for shorter trips, yeah it was great and fine for for a few weeks, but if we're going to go for six, nine or twelve months, you know it wasn't going to be a hundred percent practical and also that we had to take our bikes on and off the roof our mountain bikes each day to lift it. When we found the, the new ultimate, when we found that we took the old ultimate in for a check up and we saw the new ultimate at the same time and we looked at the electric lifter feature and that sort of stuff and the fact that we could put much more weight on the on the roof of it and be able to lift it with the bikes and everything on without having to take them off each day, that was a a massive selling feature. And also, obviously, all new modern bits and pieces and all new modcons that the older camper didn't have like, like heaters and hot water and all that sort of stuff and running showers and all the things that we've now got in this one.
Speaker 1:So Just upping the comfort level.
Speaker 2:Yeah, increasing the comfort level a little.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if any of you have been listening to the podcast, you would have heard about the early days when it was pretty basic, which, like lots of people, when you're young, that's how you start out and, yeah, we get an older now.
Speaker 1:So the appeal of being on the road for at least a year for this, this trip that we've been planning for quite a few years, the reality of that last trip in 2022, the three months, made me particularly realize I needed a few more creature comforts.
Speaker 1:I used to be able to go for a very long time without a shower and just do the basics. You know APNC and a little bit of, you know baby wipes and that type of thing. That just becomes a little bit more challenging after months and we don't tend to go to Caravan Park, so we aren't having the luxury of going to showers and because we choose to tow such a small camper trailer, it doesn't have an on board, on-suite indoor shower like people with the big caravans do. So just trying to find our balance between what was practical for the type of touring we like to do and what is comfortable for the type of cleanliness that we desire and the comforts that we desire is is how we decided to make that decision to buy this new 2023 model GT ultimate camper behind us and that sort of really brings us to why our trip is really only beginning in 2024, because when we ordered it, it was actually 2022 in October and it's November was the show?
Speaker 2:yeah, october, we started trying to order it yeah, we went to the Perth show.
Speaker 1:We started trying to order it before the show and then, yeah, the November Perth Caravan and Camping show was where we were able to actually see the model and make a few final decisions about the options and what we wanted to do. Won't go into a long story about that, because buying an ultimate, you have lots of options, but pretty much the base is the same and it was, and anyway, as I said, I won't go into detail.
Speaker 2:It's basically a matter as to how you put the options together as to how much wallet you need to have, and and then adjusting your, your requirements to suit your wallet, becomes the, becomes the value, becomes the proposition yeah and so, anyway, we placed our order in November, I think the final order, after one order and changing it and then placing another one, and so we had the order in in November and you know, we had kind of a a July timeframe for the bill to be completed, which sounded all perfect.
Speaker 1:So July 23. Well, what we were aiming on for our getaway, for this traveling around, yeah, and we and we've basically been making plans.
Speaker 2:And you know travel planning is always a is a boat of contention.
Speaker 2:Some people love to plan, some people hate to plan, some people plan and some people don't plan. We we're kind of the not planners once we're actually traveling. But when you're trying to work out the business position and how we would be with our releases of the products, you know we don't try to over, we don't try to publish new versions of the apps and things over the primary travel seasons from, you know, april, may to sort of September, october, we try and hold off on any, any updates at all to make sure that we don't have any problems with people out in the bush, you know so and then working out how we're going to deal with our map updates, whether it was going to be a 2024 release or whether we're going to hold off, and would we do it before we started or after we started. And so we basically made the business plans that had sort of said okay, we'll get updates done till the July timeframe, we'll get ourselves in a position to travel straight across and up towards the top of Queensland or up into.
Speaker 2:You know, northern Queensland was our original plan through the outback, through the outback, of course, and then we were going to come down you know the great dividing range through Queensland into New South Wales as our mapping research project. So we would get you know a few months of mapping updates and things done into the last year schedule so that the Toppo 2024 release product would have a whole load of you know upper Queensland, new South Wales updates that we were going to be able to put into the system. And that was basically the loose plan we had right up until delivery date, I think of the camper trailer sometime in July when I hadn't heard a thing and I contacted Ultimate wondering where it was and it hadn't actually been finished being built, little loan being shipped to Perth at that point. So it got finished being built and then it got shipped over to Perth and I think the timeframe became August or September for that, I think, wasn't it?
Speaker 1:Yes, so it kept shifting. So when you rang them on the original delivery date in July, they said it was still in the factory. It was two weeks behind, as were all the others, and then they told us that it was going to come on a container from because they're built in New South Wales, in Maruah. It was going to be shipped on a container. We didn't know how long that meant, what that meant. They then explained that it would come to the dock in Fremantle, go through what do they call it quarantine customs?
Speaker 1:No, it doesn't need that to come from Sydney but it had to do, it had to get shipped to the warehouse and then it was going to arrive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was September.
Speaker 1:Well, I know what we wanted to do was on the camp site get all this branding done, which we'd also had done on the four wheel drive, which people that have been following in our channel for a while would have seen that we've been putting photos of the vehicle in the camper up. So that's all been a wrap, and obviously they take about three days to do a wrap of this size and, you know, doing all the artwork. But that's one thing, but the next part was actually getting the scheduling, the timing to put it in with the guys at Perth Graphic Centre who did the wrap.
Speaker 2:Anyway, to cut a long story short, Perth Graphic Centre and they did a great job with all of our stuff.
Speaker 2:But, you know, getting the camper out because we didn't actually take ownership and we'd had three or four different bookings, because you know, shifting it from July to August, september, october, whatever month it was exactly now I could look up the invoices but you know, by the time the camper trailer became available for us to actually get a hold of, to take, we'd had three different adjustments within two weeks of the wrap and that was becoming an issue for the guys at the wraps place.
Speaker 2:So we ended up being able to drive over to pick up the ultimate, put trade plates on it because we hadn't had it handed over or had any details In fact I don't think I'd even paid for it at the time and we whipped it off to the wrap shop and had the wrap done and then took it back to Ultimate. There was still some issues, or Ultimate in WA there were still some issues that we found at the time and it had to go back so that all of those things could be finished off because it didn't actually come with all the bits that we kind of expected. So you know, there was quite a series of dramas and by the time we actually got the camper in October, late October- we went away for Leon's birthday in October.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the end of October.
Speaker 2:That was our first shakedown trip and that was around about the 23rd or 23rd of October, and so we took it out for two or three days, found a few more things, we had to go back to Ultimate for a few more bits and pieces, and then it was another two weeks or so when we got it back and during this time you know obviously all our plans of that great Queensland down the coast do the mapping, get it all up to date, get to Sydney for Christmas with the families and that's it. All completely changed, because the reality was we didn't have a camper.
Speaker 1:We'd gone from a winter departure trip to a summer departure trip, and now it was coming into summer.
Speaker 2:So the complexities as to what we would do. We had had thoughts about doing a Tasmania start-up. So do Christmas drive for the Sydney Christmases and do a Tasmania adventure as the first path. But then we couldn't get bookings on the boat, the spirit of Tasmania boat. For weeks Shell tried a number of times to get us on the boat and we just weren't getting any success. Then, after we finally got the camper November timeframe, early November she just happened to have another look at the spirit of Tasmania website and managed to secure a booking for mid January. So we had some dates. Mid January we're going to stay for six weeks. We'd be coming out the end of February. We were a bit nervous about two weeks in Tasian school holidays but we figured it was better to be somewhere nice in Tassie than trying to hack through New South Wales or the more populated areas. So the plan had happened. And what was it? Two or three days after that we basically made the full plans and we were almost ready packed up to start heading out.
Speaker 2:But having said that, five minutes to pack up, we left on the 10th of December. All things being equal, we had a lot of things to finish off in the house, we had to tidy up the business, we had to tidy up the kids. We had a fair few things to do to get to the point where we actually were able to leave on the 10th of December. So obviously the plans of all the business, operations and things that we were planning to do all had a massive time shift. That's trip planning our style anyway.
Speaker 2:It's just wing it day by day as you come along and do stuff.
Speaker 1:It's not just like having annual leave or long service leave or quitting your job or something, actually having to know that you've got to keep the business running and be able to be effective the whole time. The customer service has got to be ongoing because we don't have any staff, so the whole sales process. There's a few back end things that we do, so management of that, making sure that that was tickety boo. There's sort of the big concerns that we have on our trip. A lot of people think the grass is always green and how wonderful to be able to travel and work, but there's some really significant infrastructure issues, as David's already alluded to, with the comms and all that has caused us a few hiccups along the way, but there's only to go into detail about that now.
Speaker 1:Someone that's on the road travelling with communications has half a clue, if you can just imagine what it's like. We just cannot have a black spot and obviously we travel to black spots. So the Starlink is a godsend. We couldn't have done this a few years ago without the Starlink. That's making a huge difference, and you can continue on from there. I know you're ready to say something.
Speaker 2:I wasn't really. I was just about to say that, thank goodness now the pain in my foot from the ants being earlier.
Speaker 1:Is that what it was?
Speaker 2:I was just realizing that I could actually feel my toes again. So there you go, setting up all sorts of stuff, the comms and the rear of the car, because we wanted to make a few changes. Living on the road for a long time, we've done it before. We did it in the 98s, 99s, 2000 time frames. We travelled consistently for a couple of years back then, so we'd had half a clue, but that was a long time ago and things have changed a lot Now.
Speaker 2:The complexities of travelling and carrying a Starlink antenna and a set of poles to put it up a bit higher above the tree lines and those sorts of things is a technical challenge that's a bit different than what we used to have. Also the battery systems and then trying to manage power and trying to make sure we've got enough power to run our computer systems and the comms equipment and the telephone systems and all of those bits and pieces. It does add a lot of complexity and thought processes. How many solar panels do I have to have out? How many of these do we need? We don't use generators, don't believe in them. I think they're just noisy, disgusting, pollution creating devices.
Speaker 2:So to be set up to actually make this work. Those take a long time. So day we left, you know 10th of December, yeah, you know, we didn't really, as usual, we didn't have too much of a plan. I do recall that we got in the car and we'd had a thought we we always like to go a different way as many times as possible. But how many different ways can you go across the air highway? Believe it or not, there's quite a number of ways from east to west, and we've done them all but, you know, west to east and east to west.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, well, yeah, okay, either both ways, yep thank you for correcting you there.
Speaker 2:We both got. You know, we we have tried to do various different things, so this time we we decided, instead of doing our usual saying we try and do it differently all the time Hiden Norseman Road we tried to do something a little bit different.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the goal was let's avoid Norseman, let's see can we get to the air highway from Perth without actually going to Norseman, and so the Hiden Norseman Road obviously takes you to Norseman. So we didn't want to do that, and so there was a bit of a loose plan that we might go down towards Esperance and then come back up the is it Duns Track and come up that way and then, before getting to Norseman off the Duns Track, actually head out onto a track again that we have done before, which some of you that are into forward driving would know this the Overland Telegraph Track, which runs parallel to the air highway but south of it, and you pick it up just south of Norseman.
Speaker 2:So that was the beginning of the plan on day one, and then somewhere along the way, but we also we also leaving on the 10th, you know we had to realize that we needed to be in Sydney around about the 21st to 22nd. So because we wanted to be there a few days before Christmas, catch up with different members of the family and before Christmas, have one of our kids come over to be with us for Christmas, so we wanted to get there fairly early, and 10 to 11 days traveling from Perth to Sydney for us as well, that's fast, right, we don't like to travel that fast. Why should you?
Speaker 1:But that's because we, although we spend all day on the road, we're actually stopping and starting and taking photos and documenting, because we're doing all the POI updates of every single rest area, every single possible camp out the back of the rest area. Does it exist, does it not? What about the tracks?
Speaker 1:we're looking at the map on our devices of what is the current map, and we're looking at the window all the time. There's saying, oh, there's meant to be a track on the left and one on the right. We verify as we're going along does that exist? So it means we're slowing down and hunting for things that might be minor little tracks, and then we have to document and so they're in life, whether you enjoy doing that on the road or not.
Speaker 1:When you know you're on a time frame of yeah, limited days to get to Sydney and that really slows us down. We also then had fire warnings just coming out of Perth in early December and that completely changed some of the plan that we had in mind and the reality of going as far south as Esperance and around my favourite national park, fitzgerald River National Park, which I still haven't got to the centre in the east side of that, went out the window because it all got closed again where it had been open just a few weeks before.
Speaker 2:So, managing all of those complexities, we just got in the car and turned on the ignition and went and you know, we just headed south out of Perth and down the way to Williams and which is, you know, just down the main road, and then across the Narragin and Harris Smith. So what we were trying to do at this point was get some way down the coast, some way down WA, so that we could head basically due east without doing too many deviations. And so Williams, narragin, harris Smith was kind of the way towards a Ravenslaw, yeah, and it allowed us to go through Lake Grace.
Speaker 2:So I'm just having a look at our tracking map on the on the system and then this one.
Speaker 2:I found that track outside of Lake Grace. You know there was. There was a track on the on the map that went kind of in the right direction but it sort of stopped and did some wobbles and we didn't really know a hundred percent if it went all the way through. But looking at the topography and looking at the layer, the land, it it really did look like it was going to go through. And for those of you that are interested, it's out of Newtigate and you're heading east and you're on the.
Speaker 2:Lake King-Norsman Road and that's all great. And then you get to a little turn off and it and it disappears up Lake King-Norsman Road and we had a. We had a little minor track that shot out of there and went a certain way, but then it stopped and so we weren't even it did stopped on our map. It stopped on every map we could look at.
Speaker 2:So we had no real idea, but there was a track in front of us and so we took it we took it with the trailer with the trailer, with everything else, and we decided we decided, yeah, it was quite sandy, but we decided that it was there and just purely by looking at the mapping lines and the mapping data, it looked reasonable that it should make it all the way through to the little minor track that was going to be on the other side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we should mention this.
Speaker 1:We had of a track note for the Dunns track which was just lying a little bit to the south of where we were and I had a lot of information about that track because that sits on our system and of course we're offline at this point and you can read all that, all our track notes, offline and read all the information about the conditions and look at the photos and it gets pretty gnarly in the win in the rainy time but in the summer it and the what we were looking at it looked all pretty good and dry. Even the so-called low wet areas were already dry where we were and that would be your main concern because that would get quite boggy and slow you down and make a lot of diversions and make it a bit hard towing the trailer and not making it a shortcut, yeah well, this, this shortcut did have some curlies in it.
Speaker 2:There was a river crossing, two creek crossings, according to the topography on the map and it was going through a big, large white section of the map which basically indicated that there wasn't much detail about the underlying ground and bits and pieces. It wasn't showing sand but it was showing, you know, lakes and lots of salt lakes in the area and rivers and crossing. So you know, turn the trailer and all that sort of stuff on an unmarked road, unmapped road, and say it was certainly there, it existed, it was a bit sandy and patches and stuff, but the usual nothing, you, nothing, you shouldn't be able to hand ties down and go through. And sure enough it came out the other side. So EO, toppo 2024 Road, update 1, was already locked in a new road that we didn't have before. We'd also noticed as we were traveling across there that there was a few intersections that I didn't expect that were there. So we made sure that we made some notes about that. That made sure that we'd make sure that we do a satellite check of that area as well on the mapping system as we went.
Speaker 2:And then we went in. So we spent our first night I sort of skipped the first night just off the Holland track. Jam patch, jam patch, just off the Holland track it was. It was a great little camp that had some great trees. It wasn't far off the road, but it's a really quiet road and when I mean the road, the Holland track comes north, south and that's sort of the major road that we were on, goes east west. There was hardly any traffic. We were, what I know, two or three hundred four hundred yeah, not for a yep yep off the main road.
Speaker 2:We didn't hear anything much all night. It was a lovely camp this photos on our socials from that, from yeah around that time, yeah so that was the 10th to the 11th of December and our next, our next target point just doing all that Newtigate Road and all that unknown road around Lake Grace and all of that.
Speaker 1:That was a target of Peak Charles and Charles is a national park and it has a number of out rocky granite outcrops and there's a this peak, charles, in particular, is in the national park and it has facilities and the camping is free and doesn't need booking and it has a fantastic summit hike and that's what we were going for.
Speaker 1:That sounded like a perfect location. There is an alternative way to get to the peak Charles National Park from Lake King and that's what the, the backroad, is. What David was referring to is the. The track that we took was not along that main road that takes you sort of up north and brings you back around in. So we've gone across through the guts, through the, the southern eastern section, to come in the back way and there certainly weren't any tracks and there were no other vehicles around and we were really happy to score the perfect campsite at this facility with a, with a hike, and it was all documented was really lovely and again if you, if you want it.
Speaker 2:We had a. We had a great walk up there state. We stayed one night.
Speaker 1:We could have stayed ages, but you know we had this timeline to. Oh no, we stayed two nights because we had to stay one oh yeah, the night we came in the afternoon we decided that we couldn't hike it but we left.
Speaker 2:The next day we still left it. We did a morning hike, yeah, so we we spent a few hours just kicking around in the campsite and and checking things out, the signboards and the features and bits and pieces like that. A couple of other people arrived that camp near us and they were nice and we had a chat to them.
Speaker 1:They're actually a full drive tour operator.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they just finished a tour they just finished a tour I think was get lost to us yeah, get lost to us.
Speaker 1:So shout out to them. They're really nice to them.
Speaker 2:We swapped some merchandise in the car park and had a chat, and that was all quite lovely. And then so the next morning our eyes and we did the peak Charles climb. Excellent place to go, wonderful thing to do, I'd expect that. Have a look at all the so, all of our videos on our YouTube channel there's and there's on our other feeds and stuff.
Speaker 2:You'll get snippets of that climb and day and that was terrific. We came back to the car and something that was new and luxurious to us was we had a shower, so that that that had to make a special mention on our on our feed, because we haven't. We had, whilst we had car showers before, we haven't had them so luxuriously set up that we have with the electric hot water, the gas hot water system. So the next day we headed out of there and we went along past this moya rock.
Speaker 2:So if anyone's ever been in WA and done any burying around WA, one of the things you can find sometimes is some of these big rocks are these little walls made of stone, you know, and they've been made by people and what they basically do is you get your big rock and then around the edges of the big rock they build these walls to make channels and they basically channel. As the rain comes down, the water runs down the rocks, they goes into these channels and then they go all the way into a feed pipe and then out to a big water tank, and moya rock had one of these and we didn't even know it had one of these, so we stopped in there and it had. It was just a nice place. We took some drone footage and bit pieces like that. The unfortunate reality was, you know, and we said earlier that we wanted to try and avoid Norseman, but it was blatantly obvious that we were heading towards Norseman.
Speaker 2:One, there was fires to the east of Norseman and we wanted to do the Overland Telegraph track because we decided we'd done it a number of times but it was better than the highway. It's better than the highway in my opinion. It's much slower, it's sandy, it's horrible, it's dirt, it's you know, there's not much corrugations but it's just. It's a fairly rough old track but I prefer that than the Tar-Bitjerman highway. Any time, I feel much more confident when I don't have trucks coming at me in a hundred k's an hour, you know, and it's just much more quiet, much more of our mode. But we'd heard about these fires so we didn't really know. So we knew we had to go to Norseman, one to get a little bit of fuel and two just to catch up on the fire situation and determine which way we were going to go, so we got to Norseman.
Speaker 2:It was about lunchtime, wasn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the wonderful people at the visitors information centre there very quickly got the gist of our mode of travel and seriously double checked whether the fires that how's this? The fires had closed the air highway and every single camp along the air highway between Norseman and Balladonia, they said was none of those rest areas were open for camping. They said they'd put roadblocks on them. It was just too much of a fire risk on the southern side of the highway to even let people stay overnight.
Speaker 1:So what they were doing was a roadblocked every single rest area said no camping and they'd just had to go all the way through because it was quite unknown.
Speaker 1:This fire had been happening for a couple of days and that's why we knew of it actually when we left Perth. But we thought by the time we sort of got to the area it might have dissipated and been under control, but they were conducting their final containment, so that was too high a risk. We did go and have a little look at the beginning of the track.
Speaker 2:And they closed it just like half a kilometre out of Norseman the heritage trail had been closed and we're talking about 200 kilometres away from the fire front, so they had a fairly concerted effort to shut everything in.
Speaker 1:So we absolutely double checked and so we found ourselves on the highway.
Speaker 2:After all that, from Norseman to Norseman. And not only were we on the highway, but it was like 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon by now, because we did a bit of shopping, did our fuel, did our bits of pieces and then we.
Speaker 1:We were just going to go down the road to the heritage track and stuck.
Speaker 2:And we were going to go half way along the telegraph track and stay there, so do another 40 or 50 kilometres. So then we were left with the proposition that we knew we couldn't camp until the other side of Baladoni and so that was a couple of hundred kilometres, I think, from where we were.
Speaker 2:But as it turned out, so we decided we just had to hightail it. It was middle of summer, the sun was setting late. For those of us in WA the sun comes up early and still sets a normal time, unlike when you get over east in the sun sets at 9pm. So we still had a few good sun hours. I think it was like a 7 or 8, 7, 8, 8 o'clock sunset even in WA, even as we were travelling east because of the timing adjustment and the sun going down quicker because we're further east, and all that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:So we decided that we at least had to shoot past Baladonia, which was some 200km, and we did. We shot past Baladonia and we found Afghan Rock. And we weren't 100% sure what Afghan Rock was. I'd seen it on the map. It's sort of south west sorry, northeast of Baladonia, at the Roadhouse itself. There's a track behind the rest area which is on the main road. It's a rest area that looks like you wouldn't want to stay.
Speaker 1:It's just two bins and a bit of tar, but there were people staying there, but literally just to the west of the gate it was basically the first unblocked campsite or roadside, peabay from Baladonia.
Speaker 2:It was only 5 or 6km from Baladonia so we drove to the rest area Decider we couldn't stay there. Saw the road to the rock I thought was there a gate there?
Speaker 1:So there is a big gate. It's just about 50m to the west of the roadside rest area and on the gate, when we first went past it we presumed that it was saying private property, keep out. But I actually got out of the car and went up close and had a good read of what the gate said. And it just says close the gate behind you. Afghan Rock, rah, rah rah, enjoy your stay. It is accessible.
Speaker 2:It is on property. It is on property and it is in an aboriginal area, not an indigenous protected area. But the signs basically said close the gate, no shooting, no pets, enjoy your stay, sort of thing. So we shot up there and spent the night there and it was quite a nice spot.
Speaker 1:So it's not a large rock, it's nothing quite significant. It's literally like a flat plateau.
Speaker 2:It's not a high rock, it's a big flat plateau of rock, but yeah, so there was no other underlying features or anything special about it we were able to get about 2km back off the road had some nice trees, beautiful sunset, I mean it was very pretty.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it's not really a major point of interest. But it was an opportunity for us to get off the highway and surprisingly, that first part of the drive David was saying oh, this is really nice driving on the air highway.
Speaker 2:No, I wasn't.
Speaker 1:There was no one around. It was dead quiet, I think because of the fires, and it was late in the afternoon when we were heading across and all that.
Speaker 2:So we didn't actually encounter too many trucks and things. But I knew we had another three or four days of the tar to go, so I was fighting my time and fighting my time trying to think about that.
Speaker 2:So we say that Afghan rock. And the next day, in our usual work mode, we had a few thought bubbles, that we wanted to check out a few places along the way and do some updates that day. What did we drive through on that day? It was a rock hole, a kaiguna. I'm looking at our mapping line and all I can see is these little blocks in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out of every roadside P-bay.
Speaker 1:So every single rest area that there existed we stopped, and also all the rocks and the caves and the point of interest features in the track. So everything got verified, photographed, wrote a comment, did an update. And the way we do a lot of that updating is literally through the public app that everybody else has access to use. The Exploros Traveler app is fully interactive. So we're just using the same tools that if you own the app, you can use, and that is just tapping the ad photo, tapping the updates and putting a comment in, and those things are the interactive features that make it really useful for the next traveler. But the difference that we have is the ability, obviously, to verify the positioning and moving it, checking the actual tracks, which is on the basemap below, and so of course we're doing all that as well.
Speaker 2:So yeah, yeah, always working and yeah. So, looking at blobs in and out on roads, I just remembered that after we left Afghanistan Rocks and before the actual Baladonia station, the old station or the Telegraph station, I wanted to find the start of the Overland Telegraph track because most of the times I'd done it before I'd come down the Dundas track, which is from Baladonia Roadhouse in the head south. They've closed that road.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And I don't know whether they've really closed the road to the Overland Telegraph track, but there is a thumping great big road close sign right there at Baladonia Roadhouse on that road going south now. So I wanted to make sure that I thoroughly found the Overland Telegraph track start, which is just near Old Baladonia Telegraph station, and I'd driven past and I'd looked for it in years gone by, coming back and forth from Sydney, a few times and I, just for the life of me, could never see it. I did see that some one of our other users had uploaded a track log with it on so I thought, oh, it's got to be here. I had a look on satellite. I could see where it roughly was, so we made sure we found that. So there's a little blop on our tracking map. If anyone wants to have a look at our tracking map you can actually see our full journey.
Speaker 2:If you zoom all the way day by day, every, every place we stop, every little roadside P-bay we pull into. You can see the whole lot on our tracking map, which is available on the website, and I'm sure we've got links from our socials to that tracking map of our active tracking so you can jump on the website and go to the tracking page. You'll also be able to find us in the recent updates because we're pretty much running it all the time. So we, you know, we went to Warbler Rest Area, Taylor Maze Campsite. We found all sorts of different places, a couple of P-bay's.
Speaker 1:Look. A lot of the P-bay's have been massively upgraded since our last trip across the highway. There's a lot of new facilities, upgraded toilet facilities but a lot of them now have a rest area at the front. And for those that actually want to explore out the back and get off the highway. There's a lot of tracks leading out the back. I mean, there always was that sort of thing but there seems to be a lot more rest areas than there were pre-COVID.
Speaker 2:I think COVID has really changed a lot of these main roads. There was a lot of rest areas but they didn't have very good facilities or they didn't have, you know, bins and that sort of stuff, and now they sort of do. One of the things that we decided while we're doing some of this work was because, if you don't really know, most rest areas in most states during COVID and post-COVID haven't been necessarily changed back. Most rest areas have been designated as an overnight stopping spot, whether it's a camping spot or not, as dubious, but you're meant to be able to do an overnight stop in any one of these rest areas.
Speaker 2:As a driver-reviver, as a driver-reviver kind of function, and that's since COVID had started.
Speaker 2:Some of that hasn't been reverted yet. So a lot of our rest areas and P-Bays on the system had been designated as sort of free camps, which we've never really been that happy with because they're not really. They're really a rest area. And so one of the things we started doing as we've come across the air highway was making sure that we designated the P-Bay or Roadside rest area as a rest area and then if we thought it was worthy and there was a camp out the back, we would drive out the back and we would place the markers for those campsites off the road and out the back. So if you're using the system, coming across the air highway and you want to know where a decent spot might be, they'll still be marked as free camps or campsites off on our system, but they'll be away from the rest area or behind the rest area. So that's a new thing or something that we've just adjusted slightly in the way that we do our rest area P-Bay designation.
Speaker 1:But there's more than that too. We tend to only bother putting the free camp marker a camping marker if it actually is a spot that would be worth camping at. Like it's not just, it's not a gravel pit, it's just not some dodgy thing.
Speaker 2:Well, some gravel pits are okay, some gravel pits are okay, but it's not just some dodgy thing on the side of the road where there's a fence and there's lots of toilet paper and rubbish. You know we wouldn't mark those as camps. We want to make it so that there's some trees. Hopefully there's some trees and protection.
Speaker 1:Just some shelter from the noise and a little bit of privacy and a little bit of security for your vehicle. So you know, some of the rest areas are literally just turnouts that get your wheels off the main road and they're a rest area. We don't want to make that a camp that would be designated as a rest area only. But if there is a track that goes out the back and gets you out away from that over a hill or just a few hundred metres off the track and it's pleasant enough, then we would mark that as a camp, so that just verifies what we're doing with the market.
Speaker 2:So you know you'll keep looking at us going in and out, in and out marking free camps or not free camps at some of these spots. And one of the other things is we drove faster into Cocklebitty. We knew we had a little bit of work to do because for some reason we didn't have the road to Capson Cave. It wasn't showing up on the map.
Speaker 1:The icon was there. The icon was there. The track to Cocklebitty was there.
Speaker 2:There was actually two icons for Capson Cave, the old GeoScience one and the new. Exploros, one that we'd found through satellite research.
Speaker 1:So we should mention that. So there are quite a lot of outdated maps that are using the old GeoScience data for a lot of the nama holes and caves and these features still in existence on maps that are actually wrong because of the GPS inaccuracy in those days, perhaps, or just the method of the surveying that was used in the original days, and so this is sort of propagated across more modern maps, and so one of the things we're doing is we're trying to reposition and get exactly verification of the exact location of where these places really are, because everyone today has got devices that have, you know, modern GPS in them, which are a lot more accurate. And then, of course, if you're using a very highly detailed map such as our EO Topo map means you can zoom right in and you'll see it's significantly off location if that isn't in the right spot. So we're trying to fix everything that we come across, and this was one in particular the original marker was one and a half kilometers from the actual position of the huge inaccuracy.
Speaker 2:And so in our older map we actually had the old marker still on there and you know, one of the things I wanted to make sure was that we covered that one off. So we drove out to Capsin Cave so that we to the marker that we knew was on the map, and and we found a track out there and it wasn't complicated, it wasn't wasn't hard at all, it was just that hadn't been done thoroughly in the past. So you know, Topo 2024 has that update attached to it now as well. So these are the things that we do on a day to day basis. You know, we then had it headed out from there and within within four weeks and within four kilometers, we'd headed south into a bush camp around about the Mara Elven Cave. Now, if I haven't said that right, then too bad, because that's what it's called in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Mara Elven yeah.
Speaker 2:Elven. Elven yeah okay Down there. And again, you know, we've gone in there and we've seen the cave, which is a great big hole in the ground. It would be an awesome one to go into if you could. It's fenced off, it's fairly unsafe and it's a long drop in.
Speaker 2:You would need some serious equipment to get in there, but we also drove out the back of that and found a decent camping spot. In fact we stayed there. We stayed there for that night that was our fourth night, being the 13th of December, you know and then we did some great stuff. You know you're coming across from there you go to through the border.
Speaker 1:I have to mention Cornelius.
Speaker 2:The village of Cyclists.
Speaker 1:So look you know, we're cyclists and we've got our bikes, even though they're only our mountain bikes. We're just up on top of the camper trailer, so they're in view and anyway, we stopped at one of these rest areas along the air highway and we'd seen this cyclist.
Speaker 2:We've driven past him.
Speaker 1:And he's got these. He's on his own, he's got no support vehicle. He's. He's got two big pannier packs on either side of his bike. It's like a gravel bike and he's in the headwind and we're going.
Speaker 1:You poor guy, he's got his head down and he's turning away and we end up stopped at a rest area and he comes along and I've got David, I've got to give him some water. So I've given him some water because I know what that's like. You always want water when you're on the bike. You can never carry enough because it's quite heavy.
Speaker 2:So I could see he's unsupported, so he's doing hundreds of kilometers a day without support.
Speaker 1:So then I start having a chat to him and I find out you know, he's got a foreign accent, but he's speaking English quite well he's Belgium. We've come across a lot of Belgium.
Speaker 2:He's got to be foreign. He's driving, he's cycling across the air highway in the middle of summer.
Speaker 1:So I asked him why, why did you choose summer to come across the air highway? And he goes cause I hate Belgium winter. Good enough reason, that's quite funny. And then I gave him some food and then I found out that he's vegan, which was handy because what I was offering him was also vegan, so it wasn't inappropriate. So we had a good little chat and, would you believe, the following day, well, we drove off, we drove off we driven and we saw him again and he over.
Speaker 2:Now we saw him again at Madra pass. We pulled in. He'd done over 180 kilometers on the previous day because we'd camp and then we'd done our road research that we do all the next day, moving along fairly slowly and bugger me.
Speaker 1:this guy rode past us, so you know this is an example of our mad dash to city, of how slow we're really going, that a push bike in summer can race us and beat us to the end point. Yeah, over a hundred kilometers.
Speaker 2:It was quite hilarious. So, yeah, he was, he was worth a mention. Well done remembering that. Oh yeah, so you know, yeah, madra pass, that was, was it? Kygoon, I can't remember exactly which was one of those was Madra pass and Kygoon One of the two that we saw him at? And that was, and that was hilarious because, as we say, when we do hit the road, we drive as fast as we possibly can to get between one location the next. But wow, that was, that was cool. Then, obviously, you know, we got to Euclur and bought a village in the quarantine checkpoint and that was un-eventful for our direction.
Speaker 1:That was a bit un-eventful for our direction.
Speaker 2:We didn't have to do anything other than just drive through. One of the things we did want to do was try and have a look down at the back of the checkpoint and the camping area there. We saw it that there was a crack down to the coastline and we thought that would be pretty cool. So we drove down there and it was interesting because we got to it like a big stone can that was marking the WASA border. I think we did a bit of a social video about that again.
Speaker 1:I don't know whether it got published.
Speaker 2:We took some videos and bits and pieces of us walking on each side of the border. I think Michelle was in WA and I was in South Australia and I was wondering how she could hear me because she was like two and a half hours of time difference from me. It was two and a half at that time, isn't it? I can't know, but it was a massive time difference and she was in a whole different world. But I could hear her quite clearly. It was kind of fun. So we drove down and had a bit of a walk around there the Wilson Bluff cliffs and a look down the coast in either direction and flew some drone and got some footage.
Speaker 1:Absolutely gorgeous. We've come to the Nullarbor many times before far too many but this was the first and only time we've ever seen it with no wind.
Speaker 2:It was sunny and just beautiful.
Speaker 1:So we did actually spend a fair bit of time exploring the coastal part here. So this is off the air highway, not at any of the rest areas. We've come right down to the coast and picked up a track.
Speaker 2:We've come to the coast, picked up a track and we've driven east until we picked up the air highway again as it gets to scenic. Look out 13 kilometre pegs. So that's 13 kilometres from border that we've rejoined the highway.
Speaker 1:Is it 13?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's 13.
Speaker 1:Okay, yep, that's why I've got glasses, because it was like 13. It wasn't 131 peg.
Speaker 2:It was only 31 peg. And we drove along there to look out 3, which is a little bit further along, and then we came across this track that was going down and we saw some roads into this Nullarbor wilderness protection area, and I think it's got another name in here, doesn't it? Wasn't it called something else?
Speaker 2:I don't know it had a cliff mark or a few contour lines. That looked a bit sketchy, but we thought, oh, let's go and have an experiment, let's go and have a look down there. When we saw the road, it was almost sunset.
Speaker 1:It was really late.
Speaker 2:It was getting late. Yeah, we were looking for a camp, to be honest, and so we thought we'll go down there and camp somewhere. And sure enough, we shot it down this track and it was all fine, but it was pretty steep and it was pretty rocky and it was four-wheel-drivey. It was definitely four-wheel-drivey.
Speaker 1:With the brand new camp.
Speaker 2:With the brand new camp, a trailer and all these different pieces. There is a video, I think that definitely made the social channels.
Speaker 1:It's on YouTube. It's on YouTube and it's on Nullarbor Cliffs YouTube, instagram and all those other ones.
Speaker 2:But you'll never find it on those ones again. It's on the YouTube channel. And yeah, it was one. It was an awesome campsite. Two, it was a bit of a decent forward driving to get in and a bit more decent forward driving to get out.
Speaker 1:It would be fine if you're in a vehicle on its own, but it's when you're towing and you've got an incline like that and it's all loose rock.
Speaker 2:And it was all washed out and yeah, and the rig was new and you don't want to hurt it, so you're trying to be extra careful. Anyway, it was a great spot to camp, wonderful spot. You get down really close to the water and, as we said, there was no swell and there was no real wind, so it was quite comfortable.
Speaker 1:It was a great campsite, amazing atmosphere, one of the better ones.
Speaker 2:Moving across, you know from that day. We drove a fairway that day. I remember that was one of the big days we had to catch up.
Speaker 1:Do you remember, though, when we went across into the, we changed from one shire to the other, and all the lookouts to the cliffs then became quite established. So on the WA side they're all nice and natural, a bit loose.
Speaker 2:Most of them are all on the South Australian side, all those cliff lookouts but as we got closer to your latter, in some of those areas it changed. You weren't able to access some things. The things that were accessible were well formed so that you don't look. Really they're trying to stop people venturing along the cliff edge and accessing 100 and going through a million different spots.
Speaker 2:So they've really well defined some of those lookouts. Now. They're all great to go to. You don't get much more from some of the other ones. You may as well go to the designated nice, flat, easy driving and drive out ones. There is obviously some attempt at stopping people driving along the cliff road and that sort of thing, certainly once you hit your latter and that's to be respected and you know there's no reason not to do that. So we came shooting through and got through to the junior and that was a quarantine checkpoint.
Speaker 2:That actually had something we lost, some of our. We lost some of our produce there.
Speaker 1:We handed it through.
Speaker 2:We always try and manage. We know roughly what's coming, so we try and eat everything we've got. We usually go through with one chili or one lime or one something that we haven't been able to consume.
Speaker 1:So I think we lost a few bits and pieces, but you know by then some of that fruit can be probably, but I made the most massive guacamali with everything we could put in it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we had a few cheap avocados that we decided we just had to mash up and eat and then we headed from after the junior, you know, again getting later in the afternoon. We wanted to pitch a camp and Palluvie beach camp area popped up on the map. It was a paid camp. Was it $10?
Speaker 1:It's just a shy booking situation through the Air Peninsula Council so you've got to book and pay online. It's $20 for a single night's camp. That's for two adults. I had read about it and knew that it was going to keep the riffraff away because it was a little bit sandy to get onto the beach to get into the camp, and it wasn't hard to get into the camp at all, but the further up that you take the camp site, so you actually book them by a number.
Speaker 2:It gets softer and softer.
Speaker 1:And I think we took site 14 or whatever and it had all been churned up by the previous caravan that obviously had pulled out in the morning.
Speaker 2:Well, they'd also dug a big hole for something.
Speaker 1:There was kids digging holes.
Speaker 2:There's all sorts of stuff, but that was a beautiful spot to camp, right on the beach, literally on the beach. The water laps up near your wheels at night time when the tide changes. It was beautiful. It was perfect, good spot to stop.
Speaker 1:A lot of people were there with kayaks or fishing. It's still peak school holidays then, so we had kids absolutely everywhere, so it was a bit of a shock to the system that they were really sweet, so it's fine, that was nice.
Speaker 2:And then in our usual way, you know, trying to head across without doing too much of the road, we came across through Minipa Wondina and Kimba. Kimba had an awesome RV rest stop I remember driving around. Wasn't that the one that had the really?
Speaker 1:Oh, I think you're right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, kimba has a, Not that we used it. Oh yeah, the Kimba Recreation Reserve RV 24 hours 72 hours or whatever rest stop.
Speaker 1:Wow, it's all brand new and it's free and it had everything. We didn't stay there, but, you know, for those people that do like to stay at those RV stops, why would you not?
Speaker 2:It's really good. If you're near Kimba, that's worth going to that one. That was that. You know, as you say, we don't necessarily stay at these, but we go through, we research and we photograph them. We look at all of this stuff, just like the caravan parks in towns and all of that sort of stuff. It was good, it was notable. It was notable, notable enough that I've mentioned it to you. We ended up pulling a fairly dirty camp, or not a dirty camp but a quick camp, kimba East rest area.
Speaker 2:I was tired, I'd had enough, I had to get out of the car and stop driving. So it wasn't actually that far from Kimba.
Speaker 1:I had suggested to David, however, that we go to like Gile.
Speaker 2:Gillies like this one up here. Yeah, like Gillies.
Speaker 1:There was a free camp before that that we should have taken, but it was a 10 K diversion north off the air highway out to a salt lake called. Lake Gillies and when I'd mentioned it to Dave, he was going I'm not, I'm fine, I'm doing fine, I'm not ready to stop yet. And we've been past so many good rest areas that we just assumed that the next rest areas marked on the map were probably going to be just as good. So the one that we pulled into that you said was, um yeah, the East.
Speaker 2:Kimba rest area. Yeah, kimba East rest area. It was all right, had a bit of a few few trucks. We stayed there because we pulled in a bit early. I was, I'd actually I was coming apart, you came apart, yeah.
Speaker 1:So it was about this point that we'd made a bit of a plan, that David needed some rest, so we'd been pushing it Um, and he was getting tired just day by day by day and said I just can't keep this up, I need a bit of a break. And I have a cousin who lives in Port Elliot, which is near Victor Harbor, so I had been hoping I'd been able to squeeze in a quick visit there.
Speaker 1:So we decided that we could allocate two nights staying there and that would give David just some time just to not be on the road and just rest yeah.
Speaker 2:So we high tailed it down there. Yeah, so we did that state at Port Elliot was was was lovely, Got out on the mountain bikes and did a tour through town and oh, you went on the mountain bikes.
Speaker 1:I went horse riding. My cousin yeah, I was a rural property Michelle went on the horses, it was great.
Speaker 2:We had a, had a, had a couple of nights with family there, so that was great. And then, um, uh, after we left there, headed up towards Victoria um, we're out of out of South Australia, Strathalburn, um and into a thing called Cullington, and then across towards Murray Bridge, which we didn't actually go into Murray Bridge. We skirted past Murray Bridge, I think, didn't we All the way? On the outside we had that really awesome camp oh yeah, no, we were right on the outside of Murray Bridge.
Speaker 1:At the State Forest. Yeah, well, that was.
Speaker 2:that was a bit further on, but um, that was um, that was over here somewhere once we'd gone. Actually, was it there, is it?
Speaker 1:there you go there we go yeah, so we'd already got through.
Speaker 2:Victoria. So we've gone through Owen, is it OU, yn? And then, yeah, we went to an area called pound bend, which was on the Murray in Victoria, and wow, that was so nice that we drove. We just pulled off the roadside onto a little dirt track and you can drive for a long, long way around the place. And it was. It was great. There was large trees, the river was right there, it was flowing. It was a great spot to see to find this spot on the map.
Speaker 1:You look for women, wemen on the map and then you'll see the marker to pound bend on the Murray River and literally the tracks take you past unlimited numbers of beautiful bush camps. It wouldn't matter where you went, like from the first section, the first 500 meters when we pulled in, we could have stopped there. It was perfect. But we had enough time up our sleeve that we thought we'd just keep driving around and around and around and around. And we did, and it just got better and better and better yeah massive big river, red gum.
Speaker 1:So you've got to be careful about big limbs falling at night, widow makers, and the spot that we did go to was very precarious for that, but we did find a spot we usually.
Speaker 2:We usually find ourselves in precarious tree, have a hanging limb spot, so I don't know why we do it to ourselves, but we seem to do it all the time and we get out and we look after we've set everything up and go. I looked at that tree but we try really hard to avoid it, but sometimes we just get it wrong. So after that the next day, houston, bell, randall, you know, getting back onto sort of major, major wave Dalit's and Point.
Speaker 2:Norendra, and then we headed down towards Wagga and we we pulled a camp which was probably one of the best camps we've had Beavers Creek, murrumbidgee Valley National Park. It's behind a Peabay, there's a little grid, there's no fence.
Speaker 1:There's a fence but there's no gate and there's a national park sign, and, and it actually says camping on the sign and everything.
Speaker 2:So it was all completely legitimate. And it's behind the Berry Gerrie rest area off the Stuart Highway and it's just just west of Wagga. Some I don't know how far is that on the map about 5, 10.
Speaker 1:I thought it was about 40 k's before Wagga and it was fantastic.
Speaker 2:The river was the creek, it's. It's a feeder creek to the Murrumbidgee and it's called Beavers Creek and it had a flow and it had some massive water. It was really wide, probably, you know, eight, eight meters wide, and it had a constant flow. You could put a stick in and it would be gone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was really moving and that was also because of all the rains and the floods and the bits and pieces that have been happening over over eastern. We hadn't really seen it until then and just the volume of water moving through there you're thinking, wow, this is, this is pretty impressive amount of water so we should mention here.
Speaker 1:Look, we've been in living in WA for 23 years and whilst we travel all the time and explore, we haven't actually come in our vehicle into Victoria or New South Wales or Queensland for years, although we have family over East and we will fly over for visits and what have you. We actually haven't been camping in this area for such a long time and one of the big things that we've been watching on the weather for years is how the weather over East has changed.
Speaker 1:I mean, for those listening that live that way, you've been going through fires, floods, unbelievable amounts of rain and we sit in WA and the weather is very predictable does not rain every day with the sun yeah, and having that concern about where we've been going to camp and where the trip, whether the tracks are open and are accessible and what condition there are, has been something that's been concerning us a little bit, because we don't really plan and we just follow our nose. This particular spot, you definitely needed a four-wheel drive and you could see it had been underwater through recent flooding, but probably multiple floodings the whole area it was like a green carpet yeah, but made it beautiful for us.
Speaker 1:But on the way out it was really quite tricky to sort of navigate the way out.
Speaker 1:The track was furrows of wheel tracks and big, big, big ruts and massive, big dip ups we would have been better going out the way we came in, but we wanted to have a bit of a tour around and look at the other sites that were in there there was also a lot of overhanging trees and because we carry the bikes on the roof of the camper trailer, the way David's got set up, there is just some low branches that occasionally he's got to go really cautiously through. And there was one funny moment there that there was no point in filming it, but it's memorable to us because to be able to get in I had to actually lift a tree trunk to enable the bike to go underneath and it was all twisting and turning. It was quite funny. If it had been filmed it would just show you the links that we got.
Speaker 2:The reason it wasn't filmed is that I was driving shoes holding the tree. So there you go.
Speaker 1:There was no stand-in to film, no film crew and it was a really, really worthwhile spot to go. So you do need a four-wheel drive If you're in that area and you've got a four-wheel drive and it's not pouring with rain at the time.
Speaker 2:That's definitely worth a look at. So from there, you know, wagga, wagga, yass. You know straight up straight up the main road.
Speaker 2:It was very boring, very unexciting, all the way into Sydney and you know we stayed at my brother's house near Penrith and that was all wonderful. And you know, that's kind of the first part of our podcast that we wanted to cover. You know, we wanted to talk about how we, how we'd spend all this time planning, and then the plans all got changed and then a bit of a blow-by-blow on the, the travel journey. Don't know whether that was exciting for you or not to listen to, but it was certainly fun. We condensed, you know, 10 or 11 days into 40 or 50 minutes, so I hope that wasn't too too much of a stress for you all. But now you know we'd hit Sydney.
Speaker 2:It was Christmas time with family. We do have a lot more to talk about for from what happened after we got to Sydney and the time we spent in Sydney. We did some great walks and hikes and we'll talk about those in podcast number 12. So with that all being said and us now sitting pretty in Sydney, we'll leave you there until next time we come out on the on the podcast journey.
