Despite the horns going off to scare away the bats from 6am, we managed to sleep in a bit. We could still see lots of bats in the trees when we got up, so not sure how effective the sirens are.🤔. But I guess there were less bats on the trees than what had been in the sky last night, so maybe something is working. We headed off and clocked up more kilometres today. We drove through the border and into Queensland and through the small town of Camooweal. We had stopped by the road to take a few photos, as we drove through all these plain grassed paddocks, with no trees, and felt like it looked more like a desert than the Tanami did, and we can imagine that with no grass on, when they are in drought, it would be. Matt noticed that the surface of all the small rocks above ground, were all really smooth, but the part of the rock that sat under the dirt, was rough. Clearly, the rocks get wind blown and weathered.
We stopped further down the road for Matt to have lunch, and then drove onto Mt Isa. We stopped here to get some windscreen chip repair resin, as a truck had thrown up a rock and chipped the left windscreen. So hopefully this will prevent the cracks spreading. We also drove up to the lookout to see out over Mt Isa and all the mines and power generators. Not a bad view. I get a Broken Hill vibe out of mount Isa probably because it’s dominated by the mine overseeing the township, but it feels a little Broken Hillish to me. I don’t mind it. We had a couple also viewing from the lookout say they had been spotting us since we had been at El Questro. We have had so many people say they have been seeing us in their travels here or there, I guess we are easy to spot, unlike all the 4WD cars and their caravans.
We drove through some scenic rocky hills and a windy road, out of Mt Isa and stopped for the night 40km down the road at Mary Kathleen, an abandoned town created for the Mary Kathleen Uranium mine. The mine has long been closed down, but the town has been cleared out and only slabs remain. They have opened the area up for free camping, so it is a huge area. Cows are freely wandering around and there are no bats.We are parked up in the old open air cinema😜!
The whole township of Mary Kathleen has been levelled but the streets and house slabs remain, so everyone gets a house block for example as a camping site. There are over 200 house blocks and then there’s the town centre buildings that people can camp on too. When I got out of the bus where we parked , there were drink can ring pulls in the gravel and dust everywhere, the old style ones that tore out of the can. I remember these from primary school and I’m pretty sure they stopped making them in the early 80’s.
The thing that instantly took me back to primary school was that we used to break off the tab from the ring pull, then insert it side ways and flick the ring pull like a little frisbee. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has done that. Then we later discovered that we are parked up in the seating area for the open air cinema, which explains the stash of 45 year old ring pulls from people drinking while watching the first screening of Star Wars….
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