well, i haven't been camping since last year's trip to haddon corner...but mid-september i took a short little trip to girraween NP, in the granite belt region pretty much on the QLD-NSW border.
a few weeks earlier i had some wrenching fun to improve my car's load carrying behaviour: i added airbags in the back, to keep the rear end from sagging under load (the colorado also doesn't have headlight levelling, which makes any sag twice as annoying).
this time i was pretty lazy, only checked and prepped maybe half the stuff on sunday and left all the annoying bits for monday morning, in particular the lifting and mounting of the 55+ kg roof top tent without a second person.
the first few times i used the car's winch looped over the roo bar and the roof racks, but nowadays i'm experienced enough to just huuaaarhg lift it first onto my dodgy rails and huummmmmpf push it up said rails until it topples over onto the roof racks. (well, 'experienced'... is actually a lie: i'm just too lazy to fiddle with the winch...)
with me puffed up after lifting the tent, and the car back puffed up level, and all the good stuff packed up, i drove w/sw for roughly 3 hours.
i arrived a bit after lunch and the weather was very inviting for a walk, and so i didn't unpack anything but headed out to the pyramid, one of the prominent granite knolls. i had missed hiking up that one when i last visited in 2018.
it had rained a lot the weeks before, so everything was very green and bald rock creek was flowing strongly.
the hike was really lovely, and this being in the mid-afternoon, quiet: i met just one other person (but the camping area was pretty damn busy). this being one week before QLD school holidays, i had hoped for more quiet...alas, lots of other people also hoped for quiet...
(retired) friends told me of their recent camping trips and how the last two years have seen a huge upswing in camping (i'm usually way off the beaten track, so tend to not notice that as much...) but even with a bit too much visitor population, girraween is a good place to walk and scramble up rocks and vanish into the bush.
the camping area had lots of roos in the open spots (all of which had been reworked recently, for caravans and with some powered sites), and the usual thieving magpies and currawongs and kookaburras enjoyed 'sharing' my food. monday evening i quickly set up my tent and camp kitchen, but decided to be too lazy to cook...and with lots of fresh stuff from my garden in my fridge, a cold dinner of leftovers is not a bad thing at all.
the nights were very cold, down to 3°C. i should have brought some firewood but hadn't bothered, so shortly after the sun vanished i also vanished, into my comfy down sleeping bag.
tuesday morning i spent in the valley, walking to the junction of bald rock creek and ramsay creek. there was a lot of water running and it was quite beautiful. on the way back i scrambled through the bush onto an unnamed knoll instead of plodding along the marked tracks. very nice view, but getting down back to the camping area was a scruffy and scratchy affair.
the afternoon reward consisted of a cooked lunch and lots of reading and snoozing in my hammock. highly enjoyable.
on wednesday i first hiked up to the sphinx and then past the turtle rock as well until i reached the lovely open peak area of that ridge (the walking track stops a good km short of that, for now good reason whatsoever). the view towards mount norman and all the other southern ridges was very nice, and i enjoyed a late breakfast up there (leftovers from dinner plus a takeaway tub plus a ridiculous spork = fairly reasonable trail food).
interestingly i had usable mobile reception up there, exchanged a few pix and messages with conny, and checked the weather forecast - which predicted some rain for thursday, and much more rain for friday to sunday.
on the way back down from turtle rock i hiked up to the top of castle rock, because of the lovely views it provides (and to "use up" the good weather).
thursday morning the weather turned sour indeed, and i packed up just before the first showers - no mount norman hike this time, but here are a few views from mt. norman back in april 2018...
thanks to the rain i cut the trip short a little, went on to tenterfield to visit a friend; we hiked up the doctor's nose for an hour and a half (i think), in drizzly windy weather - but the cloud cover remained open enough for a few final photos up there. and very late evening saw me back at home, dry and snug and content :-)
]]>If you receive email from any of my addresses without signature you should doubt its authenticity!
The only exceptions from my "all-is-signed" rule are mailrobots which can't cope with RFC3156-conformant emails and certain mailinglists. Exceptions for personal mail are only done on an as-needed basis for people with broken mailers.
My crypto tool of choice is GnuPG.
You can get my PGP keys (0xB963BD5F current, 0x42BD645D old DSA, 0x5B586291 ancient RSA, or 0xD81055B9 work)
from all keyservers I know of. for example, subkeys.pgp.net or keys.gnupg.net work fine for my main private key.
or by dropping me an email with the Subject being
get pgp-key
If you are using any kind of unixy system, you might be interested in my tool kuvert which automates signing and encryption of outbound mail.
keyserver are slowly getting fewer...and the two listed above are long gone. nowadays my main key, 0x2FCCF66BB963BD5F, is available from the following ones:
besides the directly importable key file from my site.
]]>this time the tentative target was mainly queensland's channel country region, with particular spots of interest being currawinya national park, the burke and wills dig tree, haddon corner and diamantina national park.
not everything worked out exactly as hoped...fine, that's life. i still enjoyed it quite nicely, even if i did cut it somewhat short, to ten days.
here's what (little) i've got to show and tell about the trip.
friday and saturday i spent shopping and checking and prepping my gear, also worrying a bit about the weather: rainy weather was forecast for the east for sunday. i left it pretty open whether i'd leave sunday or monday - no rush while i'm on vacation.
the gear check wasn't a great calamity but not too promising: on saturday my (very old) 10l ortlieb water bladder ruptured and died, then the portaloo top part was found to be cracked unrepairably and wouldn't hold any water, one of the fuel canisters had a broken vent cap, and finally the uhf car antenna turned out to be pretty much finished...so i added a few pet bottles and smaller water bladders to the pile of gear, decided that any diesel stink in the tray would be less of an issue than bulldust, further decided that that portaloo could be used One Last Time without comfy flushing, and as i don't want to talk to anybody anyway, the uhf wouldn't be that vital. (having said that, i did take my trusty yaesu amateur transceiver and a newly acquired garmin inreach mini.)
the car was relatively full, what with about 80l of water, 60l of diesel, some firewood for my lovely pocket fire pit, food (including salad, radishes and oranges from my own garden) and the other usual things you tend to carry when you go camping in remote areas with a bit of comfort. (mind you, that's not quite the same as glamping). all the really important bits of gear were in good shape.
but "thanks" to queensland national parks requiring online pre-booking even for the remotest parks i had to nail down a semi-strict timeline before moving a single meter (in the end none of that worked out and i waste^Wdonated the national parks dept. some money).
sunday morning was dark and drizzly on the coast, but i decided that monday's forecast being good was more important; a yucky first day wouldn't be an issue as i had to get across and out of the populous southeast and the darling downs anyway.
my plan was to get to somewhere in the vicinity of st. george, details to be decided with the help of wikicamps and potluck. in toowoomba i spotted a handy bcf shop and bought a replacement 20l plastic water cube; then puttered along at my usual cruise speed - which is slow, rarely above 90 km/h because a) that's where my car is pretty efficient even with the draggy stuff on the roof, and b) slower speeds give me more opportunity to gaze. remember, vacation, no rush, no stress.
it rained until mid afternoon, then cleared up. the countryside was pretty lush and green and ful of sprouting crops, no surprise as that's pretty good and busy farm country.
in the mid-to-late afternoon, after 480km i got to weengallon (population less than 30, 5-10 houses, two streetlights, one barwon highway, one overnigh camping area with toilets and potable water) and decided that that was good enough. i quickly set up camp in a corner next to a nice wattle tree, and didn't even unpack the kitchen, just snacked a little bit - but the warm jacket had to go on even before sunset: it was not warm at all and somewhat windy. the night itself was also pretty cold but i slept very well (old but good down sleeping bag, silk liner).
monday morning was sunny but really quite cold, breath steaming, and less than 7°C at 0745. at which point i was finished with packing up and ready to go.
in st. george i got a coffee from a cafe to make up for the stowed kitchen and the consequential lack of morning caffeine.
west of st. george things usually start to get dry and dusty, but this time the countryside remained pretty green - and looked fairly wet, with very worrying puddles along the road everywhere.
along the way i spotted an emu family with lots of little ones. luckily none had a mad urge to cross the road in front of me...
cunnamulla was mostly the way i remembered it from earlier visits (in 2013, 2015 and 2019), and after a bit more sealed road to eulo i took the dirt road that tracks south towards hungerford - which was marked open, but did have some wet spots.
the real major bummer was that all the three access options for the interesting campsite in currawinya that i had booked were closed. the western park section that i wanted to visit had opened in 2018 and i had planned to spend 2-3 nights there. nope, no go.
after i tried all options i drove a bit further and checked with the park rangers: all of the national park roads and camping sites were closed thanks to the recent rain - except for one spot that i had already been to in 2015. after four closed road signs and a good 150km wasted travel on muddy dirt i ended up at the corni paroo. again.
so far i haven't had too much luck with currawinya national park and hungerford; last time i was there in 2015 i got stuck in hungerford for a few days with fully impassable roads all around me...
making the best of the disappointing situatoin i picked a good spot with access to the water...
...and settled in, with the kitchen open. my daughter occasionally claims that i only eat ramen noodles on trips, but that's complete slander: i do cook and mostly good stuff on my trips. yes, occasionally i make vegie-bacon-whatever stirfry that includes noodles, but not too often.
around sunset i started a nice camp fire and enjoyed a pleasant but cool evening.
tuesday began with lots of bird noise (that i don't mind) and a lovely view from the roof top tent (that i definitely don't mind!).
after a big cooked breakfast i demounted the solar panel (for max output) and started the serious business of...relaxation. after a few hours of reading and lazing around i went on a short stroll along the paroo, where they do tie the tables down to not lose them whenever the paroo floods...
i even had an afternoon siesta - which is about the maximum laziness i tend to enjoy on trips: somehow i always have itchy feet when travelling, and my trips easily turn into road movies. so, two nights at the corni paroo were enough for me, relaxing as it was.
the night to wednesday was balmy and nice, and i started the packing up and other morning chores slightly early. before 0800 i was on my way, through the last few muddy spots and first back north to eulo, then west on the totally unadventurous 'adventure way' towards thargomindah.
i didn't want to travel the hungerford road twice but rather had planned to leave the currently inaccessible section straight north for the bulloo developmental road, but...ah well. at lake bindegolly national park i stopped for a quick stretch and a bite to eat, and didn't do the 10km walk around that lake...some other time. the view was pretty good, though; there was quite a bit of wind.
around eulo i briefly had a bit of mobile reception (on the separate telstra travel phone) and prepped the bloody annoying duplicated dumb sets of 27B-6 paperwork that you need for briefly crossing into SA and to be allowed back into QLD, all just to refuel in innamincka. this was more hassle than visiting some eastern european countries behind the iron curtain in the 80s, which is quite an "achievement" - not one the states should be proud of, though.
thargomindah is a bit dusty and small but nice, and has pretty good services for travellers. i didn't stay long, just emptied the portaloo and refuelled the car. no stink in the back, the diesel canister didn't leak and the 'business' side of the loo was never in question anyway...
the mulga lands and the channel country often feels quite empty and somewhat flat, and anything different draws the eye very strongly; so, when the road passed through the grey range (which at that point was just around 190m asl) i simply had to get out and hike up the 5 minutes up the ridge to take a few pictures.
despite the breeze the flies were pretty bad; i had forgotten to put the fly net on the hat, and didn't linger after taking those two panorama shots.
early in the afternoon i reached the noccundra hotel, next to the wilson river and its noccundra waterhole (which i had visited last in 2015, but going the other way). i topped the car up at the hotel's bowser (last fuelling opportunity in this corner of the state) and had the one beer i allowed myself for this trip. nice and cold, the coopers pale ale hit my mostly empty stomach a little bit hard...
afterwards i puttered along the track along waterhole, and about 2km north of the entrance i found a nice, quiet, idyllic spot again next to the water - complete with a tree for my hammock. lovely!
before sunset i wandered around a bit, amongst the many many blooming plants. some of these are good-looking but pretty evil, with supersharp built-in caltrops. of course a few of those migrated from my socks into my shoes. very sharp, quite painful. the green and flowering plants were more evidence that a fair bit of rain had hit the region recently.
thursday was another (mostly) lazy day. after a big breakfast i walked the 2km to the hotel where there are free(-but-donations-welcome) showers (it's just lightly screened river water, but hot and very welcome). i used that opportunity to also do a laundry run with my trusty scrubba wash bag.
back at the camp site i rigged my hammock, the clothesline - and the fly net for the hat: neither 'off!' nor the bushmans' repellent with lotsa DEET have much of an effect on the bush flies. luckily there was a slight breeze and that kept the little beasts at a bearable level.
i did enjoy that day a lot despite the flies (they were most of an annoyance around dinner), and the luxury of swinging in the breeze.
(that's what i meant with the earlier comfort-but-not-quite-glamping comment: i tend to carry a few items that are not strictly necessary but make a big difference in terms of enjoyment.)
once again, two nights felt like enough nights in one spot, and after another quick shower in the morning i moved on towards the SA border.
the paperwork-infested 'border' crossing to refuel in innamincka was necessary (or at least highly advisable) because there are no fuel stations west of the noccundra hotel; the next options on my planned route was windorah, a good 700km away - and i was not sure how bad the conditions on the arrabury road/track would be - it could have been 300km of fuel-guzzling muddy slog...
the recent rains were still fully evident; there was one 'water over the road' occurrence just a little west of noccundra and numerous puddles on the sides.
in innamincka i quickly refueled, checked the road conditions (everything in the innamincak regional reserve: closed, cordillo downs road: closed, but arrabury road: open 4wd only/with caution) and learned from the fuel station attendant that they had a lot of rain on the previous friday night.
the country was actually quite pleasantly green up to the SA border, where it becomes mostly gibber and rocky desert.
immediately dashing back into queensland meant not possibly getting stranded on the wrong side of the 'border' (rules and restrictions do change here without any warning from hour to hour), and i drove the remaining 60km to the burke and wills dig tree site.
it was a glorious sunny and hot day, and the cooper creek with the trees lining it make a very welcome change compared to the flat plains.
i got there just a bit past lunchtime, and after picking a camp spot i wandered around for a good hour and a half. it was pretty hot with very little wind but lots of birds (and the usual flies).
even with the recent rain the cooper creek is only intermittent there, with waterholes and rocky barriers separating the wet bits. overall very quiet, very pleasant.
the visitors hut has various info panels about the burke & wills expedition and its end near the dig tree, and i spent a bit of time there just before sunset. the dig tree site also sported some very 'special' plants...
a dinner of porterhouse steak and roast vegies capped the day.
the night was warm but noisy (birds and other critters), and i was woken by the birds and the rising sun that poked straight through the tent window; i conceded defeat and got up, earlier than usual, around 0630; about 0730 i was on my way north.
the very open, very flat landscape near the dig tree site is hard to photograph, i think, but i love this kind of country.
the arrabury road (well, a track) started out pretty scenic but very rocky and a bit wet in places, but soon became a smooth dirt (and bulldust) track. i think the recent rain smoothed it out some, but it also left a few deep washouts straight across the road...two of which i didn't spot early enough to brake for, but besides rattling the car i didn't do any damage.
here i also saw the sole snake of this trip, a big brown or black one trying to cross the (white gravel) road surface in front of my car (but i did swerve to avoid it).
near haddon corner i took a quick break. there were no cattle or anything for many kilometres around, but despite a substantial breeze it took just 15 seconds until i had a cloud of 40-50 flies around my head. my break was a short one...
haddon corner is in the middle of nowhere, and it's not far from the simpson desert - you have to cross two sand dunes to get to the point. i'm sure sunsets are great there, but it was a windy, hot day and the flies kept photobombing me...so i didn't stay. the visitors book showed two visitors earlier on that saturday, and before that some on thursday.
220km further on i reached windorah, and 12km outside of town i camped - again on the banks of the cooper creek.
the tray was dusty as, no surprise after about 350km of dirt track. i wanted to get some creek water (for dust wiping and toilet flushing) but picked an overly muddy spot on the bank and and sunk to the ankles. oh the joy.
on the upside there was (telstra) reception even that far out of town and i had a lovely videochat session with conny and stephanie.
around 0700 the sun came up and i rose; packed up, drove back into town to empty the loo and top up the water containers, then left windorah - towards the west, on my way to a few nights in diamantina national park.
about 25 minutes into the drive i tried to get two gps to confirm the route, one garmin car gps and (openstreetmap-based) osmand on the phone. except they wouldn't agree:
osmand didn't acknowledge the usability of the two dirt roads into the park that i was expecting to take after the diamantina developmental road, and tried to send me pretty much all the way to bedourie; lotsa extra kms.
the garmin offered that option, but as a much shorter one it suggested going north via jundah and half-way to winton. this caused me to worry whether i was going the wrong way; i stopped and dug a bit deeper through the available information.
my (6 year old) hema atlas sorta-kinda supported both options except for one road link along the northern option that it didn't show. the fourth source of advice, the official qld western parks visitor guide says 'head...north from windorah (350km)'. more confusion! but that distance lined up with the northern option suggested by the car garmin.
in the end i decided to accept the 'official' word and the car garmin suggestion, and turned around to go back through windorah and out the northern road. this was a mistake.
the guide is wrong, going north means going almost to winton and then across and back south into the park, all of which adds up to way more distance than "350km". the car garmin was wrong, too, because its lovely northern option tried to send me across the private-no-public-access-no-entry mt. windsor road. (that's the one that the hema atlas didn't show.)
driving back into windorah i grumbled about the wasted time and distance and fuel; but driving to and into jundah somehow is always pleasant. i topped up the fuel there, and began what i thought would be a good if longish trip into the national park.
after crossing the mayne river but before the private road debacle the jundah-winton road got progressively more and more unpleasant with rough corrugations; it was very windy (cross/headwind) and stinking hot (somewhere around 37°). my patience was running a bit low...and then came the 'turn left' advice with the no-go sign just afterwards.
much more grumbling, a fair bit of cursing, too; but i drove on towards winton, for another half an hour or so. then i stopped to look at what distance remained with this approach and to review my options. in the end i decided to not continue onwards but return to the mayne river and camp there.
basically i got fed up with everything, and getting into the diamantina national park no longer had sufficient appeal to outweight the hot, windy, corrugated drive. (so sue me - it's my vacation and i can change plans when i feel like it.)
the camp site on (almost IN) the mayne river was very good and improved my mood greatly; there's a small track starting just off the floodway and i followed that about 1.5km all the way to the very end, through one sandy and one rocky washout, and back to the waterhole. it was still very windy and hot, and i went through a number of waterbottle refills that afternoon (luxury: travelling with a fridge so that i'm never out of nice, cold water).
in the evening the wind died down, but a few thin clouds started to appear. i spent a very pleasant evening with a fair bit of stargazing and listening to music before turning in.
late at night the wind came back, and in the morning there was about 7/8 cloud cover - thin but nevertheless very worrying to me as the camp site would definitely flood very badly and quickly if the mayne was to rise.
because of the clouds i didn't stay in bed long and was moving by 0805. moving where? well, i had decided that i felt like going home and spend the remaining days of my vacation there.
back at the road i took these photos of the floodway across the mayne river; it's quite obvious why i wouldn't want to be anywhere near if there is rain anywhere in the region...
around lunch time he clouds had dissipated and i was back in jundah, for another refuel, a few more iced coffee bottles and a quick status update for friends and family.
i remember getting fuel at the old jundah store in 2013 and 2015; now that's gone and there is a new big store/servo next door...
after that my plan was basically 'heim zu mutti' (colloquial german for 'go home to mum') - except no, not this 'mutti', that's a bit too desolate.
a bit west of charleville i ran out of energy and daylight and camped in a patch of mulga next to the railway.
the final day, tuesday, was a cruising day - at 870km fairly long and slightly boring in stretches, and not made much more pleasant by the steady crosswind and the traffic on the warrego highway, but no biggie.
around 1900 i arrived at home, where it was already pitch black, and started to enjoy the major luxuries: running water, a big fridge and freezer, a hot shower that needs no rigging or prep, a toilet that is not a portaloo and a queen bed that doesn't have to be packed up every morning :-)
]]>4 weeks and 4 days ago my house went up for sale, 4 weeks ago i signed the contract and today i've left both house and gold coast behind, for good. 16 years in the same house was enough.
until i find a new nice place for sale near my new workplace (archerfield and/or carole park) most of my stuff is staying in rented storage, an i'm staying at a friend's place...not quite a hobo :-)
]]>welcome, stephanie! may your stay on this earth be a good one.
]]>i just read that the ACT has decided to legalise personal cannabis use; one of the odd things here is that the ACT is the last state you'd expect to make such a move, with a demographic dominated by politicians and governmental agencies.
the other odd thing is that the legalisation means not much, apparently, as you could still be charged under commonwealth laws. oh the convolutions!
]]>i've just returned from a four week road/bush/camping trip not quite halfway around australia.
the plan this time was pretty mininal: let's travel to and through central australia! (off the boring main roads where possible.)
the idea was that i'd go at least as far as alice springs following the outback way, and bail out there if i didn't enjoy the trip; otherwise to continue on to WA via the great central road, and back from there somehow, either via the australian bight or the far north. clearly not an exceptionally precise plan; more an example of making it up on the go.
as you can see on the map above i did reach WA eventually, then opted for looping via the far north and got to broome and the timor sea, thus covering both sunrise and sunset beaches.
read on for some musings from my travel diary and some photos.
friday saw me finishing the car pack-up that i had started the day before (40l diesel in canisters, 45l water, second spare wheel, portaloo, drifta camp kitchen box, fridge, general camping kit and so on) and head out towards warwick and dalby, avoiding the boring motorway and toowoomba. that's all cruise control country, i've been through there numermous times so nothing to report except strong headwind. i'm keen to see some new places.
after a bit of top-up shopping in dalby, i camped in tara at the settlers park which was very nice and cheap; tara had a camel race event on the weekend before and i must say i'm glad i missed that: would have been too many people for comfort. everything is working well, the new solar panel wind deflector frame works well and no loosening of the bolts yet.
day two started windy as well, and quite cool. driving on the back roads to roma was nice, but that was followed by more not-so-especially-interesting country between roma and charleville (also because more BTDT).
it's interesting how the signs of civilisation diminish: from big power poles (steel or concrete) to single wire earth return to nothing whatsoever; from mobile phone reception everywhere to zip except a few microwave relay towers, from normal fm radio to scratchy am and then nothing, and so on.
i stayed at the red lizard campground, a small campground nestled in the bush a few km outside of charleville, whose owners manage to make rustic tin sheds feel inviting and nice - not a small feat, and very welcome. the hot shower in the morning was utterly luxurious - the drying off afterwards wasn't: the night temperature had dropped to about zero degrees and the morning was cold. my light/backup/second sleeping back served as an extra blanket and i slept very well.
during the night i discovered that silk sleeping bag liner plus poly thermal shirt equals lotsa static electricity, which made the leds in my tent light up like aurora borealis whenever i waved something charged in their vicinity. very weird.
day three was cold but not as windy; i had a bit of coffee and breakfast in town at heinemann's bakery (recommended) and continued on my way west. no problems, except that reaching the nice little town of quilpie at lunchtime on a sunday means that almost everything is closed. i arrived just in time to get a coffee before the cafe closed as well.
after that i (re)visited the bald knob lookout a few km away, which provided just as lovely a view as it had in 2013.
the road towards windorah is relatively plain, but the last 45km or so i found quite interesting as it enters the cooper creek basin. upon reaching the cooper creek bridge i selected a nice campsite along the creek bank where there were lots of birds, pelicans and smaller avians.
it wasn't cold for once so i experimented a little with my camera and hand-held night photos. not too bad for a few minutes experimentation.
the whole day i had seen lots of raptors. wherever there's a dead roo on the road there are numerous smaller raptors (kites? hawks? no idea) and heaps of crows - and also quite a few wedge-tailed eagles. the smaller birds seem smarter and usually leave when you approach; the wedgies are not smart and wait until after the last moment, and then almost always take off in the wrong direction. i braked for wedgies quite a few times during the whole trip.
finally i left the bitumen for a while: windorah to bedourie on the diamantina developmental road. this passes fairly empty countryside almost all the way to bedourie where the scenery gets interesting again.
almost but not entirely empty: no, that's not uluru but mt. henderson. it has a hole.
i found bedourie and its surrounds unexpectedly green: the council workers told me that that's not local rain but the leftovers from the cyclones and big floods in february that happened further north. with water come flies however, and they're pretty thick. i bought a fly net for my hat; looks dorky but see me not care.
fun little facts: the diamantina shire is quite a bit bigger than all of austria (95000 vs 83000km²) and has whopping 350 inhabitants (vs 9 million). bedourie itself seems to remain about as sleepy as it was 2013, but it's got an artesian hot spa and swimming pool which i enjoyed greatly.
i spent one rest day there, doing a bit of laundry but otherwise mostly just enjoying things very lazily. from bedourie it's about 900km to alice springs but about 550km are 'somewhat cut-up' (according to a fellow traveller) dirt 'highways' so i was planning about 3 days to that first major milestone.
on day six i headed north to boulia and then straight west towards the nt border at tobermorey station. that nice but somewhat cold morning started at around 7 degree celsius, but a lovely hot shower took care of those cold fingers very quickly.
boulia isn't a great place. bigger than bedourie but much deader and less welcoming; but it's got a small supermarket and a motel/hotel/cafe and fuel and that's all i needed. the donohue highway towards the border was unexpectedly sealed further than i had expected, up to the georgina river crossing.
just west of boulia there are a few flat areas that are so big and empty that both of my cameras refused to take a panorama.
i decided to be lazy and stay at the georgina river crossing which was simply too inviting to push on; quickly looked for a nice spot for the car and found one complete with suitable trees for my hammock. the afternoon was very pleasant except for the flies (as the georgina river had some water), so i was swinging in the hammock with hat and net on.
looking at the map i realised that i had now passed north of the tropic of capricorn, ie. officially into the tropics. alas no lush wet rainforests.
day seven was originally planned to be short one as well, about 350km to jervois station in the NT. however, my camping neighbors (3 familes with kids each) and the road workers near the river crossing were all up at 0630...therefore so was i.
quite some years of lugging around my portaloo in pristine unused condition came to an end this morning; no more shall be said of that except that it was a loo with a view.
starting relatively early suggested that i change the inviolable plan, which i did; and eventually i drove a much longer stretch of corrugated gravel and dirt than planned, to gemtree, just 150km short of alice springs.
the plenty highway has plenty dust holes, plenty pesky dust plus plenty corrugated sections but also plenty reasonable ones. i kept it slow and easy with 2.5 bar in the tyres and cruise control on 65km/h (for the really crap section) or 85 (for the good ones). it worked, no punctures, no unexpectedly horrible experiences but after 520km of dirt i was tired of it. the car's tray isn't especially well sealed so all the stuff in the back was quite dusty. touch anything, open anything, just brush against anything and you're dirty, too. sigh
this day the countryside wasn't especially impressive except for the 75km around harts range where the hills to the south rise quite high above the plains; those looked beautiful and really inviting for hiking (but i think they're mostly aboriginal reserve lands, so no go).
i reset my clocks to the odd NT timezone (gmt+9h30m) and briefly explored the zircon fossicking field in the setting sun. there's plenty space and lovely mulga firewood to collect there - no idea about how fossicky that area is, though - and enjoyed a quiet evening with a little fire in a steel ring.
day eight started early and cool. the spot gps messenger wanted new batteries; not bad for 7 days of 10 min interval tracking. first there were 150km on bitumen to alice springs, on the stuart highway which is very boring, carries lots of traffic and has a high speed limit (130km/h) - high for australia. i puttered along more sedately.
20km before alice mobile reception returned (hello civilisation!) and i sorted out the two aboriginal council travel permits required for the NT to WA crossing and the great central road, then a refuel, a tedious hunt for a parking spot near the shopping centre (hello civilisation! sigh) and a quick bit of shopping at a busy woolies...and then i left alice, quickly.
not my place: i'd guess it has 60% tourists, a few locals, 30% unhappy/confused/aimless/hopeless aboriginal people. not a nice place, not a good atmosphere. i saw just one happy aboriginal guy, he was doing hwy rest stop maintenance and laughed about his work and how it keeps him active. not surprisingly alice made it on my avoid-if-you-can list and so is the yulara/uluru area itself (that has only droves of tourists).
so i drove on! another easy but utterly boring 350km down the stuart highway saw me briefly try out the 130km/h speed limit but it's not restful with this car and that kind of load and just guzzles extra diesel; then on the lasseter hwy towards yulara/uluru.
after consulting my maps and wikicamps i finished this day camping at a roadside rest area about 20km short of curtin springs (or 90km or so short of uluru), which was quite pleasant (if w/o facilities).
the plan for the next day was to mostly ignore uluru, briefly visit kata tjuta (aka the olgas) and then drive onwards to docker river and the WA border. then it'll be just around more 900km of dirt and then i'll be in laverton...where i will take a short break, even if only to do more laundry and decide where i want to go next.
the day started well, with an early pack-up and some scenic glimpses of no, not uluru but mt. connor at first. i did have to briefly enter yulara for fuel, and that's about as much as want to say about this 'resort town'. the degree of tourism and focus on commerce at all costs around uluru really really sucks as far as i'm concerned.
so, instead of flocking there with all the other tourists i spent two hours with a lot less other tourists walking through the kata tjuta (8km valley of the winds walk), which i found much more interesting than that solo lump of rock. these sandstone domes reminded me a lot of meteora in greece. (originally i hadn't planned to do any walking near kata tjuta but i'm happy that i ditched that part of the plan.)
the afternoon was then spent on reasonably good dirt driving towards kaltukatjara/docker river and the WA border. on the way i saw wild camels for the first time!
why did the camel cross the road? well, the first three didn't cross the road which made me quite happy. near lasseter's cave i saw three more camels, which also didn't quite entirely cross the road: a stretch of 200m of dirt road, three dead camels, some car window glass and related detritus told some of the story. an expensive story for somebody, as these are not small critters. lasseter's cave seems a bad spot for camel trouble, after his bolted he died around there in 1931.
but the planned overnight camping at kaltukatjara didn't happen as planned: this being saturday i arrived after the store had closed (so no fuel or campground booking) the campground they've got there doesn't seem to be quite ready and is setup very weirdly, and then there were the aboriginal locals who checked me out but didn't (want to) speak or understand any english. feeling decidedly unwelcome and this, the sole officially allowed campground before the border, i decided to move on towards WA, which was the right choice i think: i ended up camping below gill's pinnacle surrounded by the petermann and rawlinson ranges, and it was gorgeous (and felt very safe, with just one other family of four at that utterly inofficial bush camp site). the sunset was beautiful and so was the early night sky without any light pollution.
being now in WA i changed my watch a lot - NT +09h30m to WA +08h is a big change - and headed further west/southwest on the great central road. i was lucky time-wise, as the kaltukatjara roadhouse (the nearest one) runs on NT time so my early arrival wasn't before their opening hours. that was very good as i definitely had to refuel there.
the great central road wasn't too corrugated (i.e. nothing broke, it was bearably rattly at 75-80km/h and the seat belt inertial locks locked up often but not on every single bump). more camels, some indeed crossing the road before and behind me. more to watch out for! it was pretty windy and quite cold.
again lots of dust on everything in the tray. the smell of bull dust in the morning...sucks.
the modern traveller naturally has to match his attire against the countryside, from head (mostly automatic thanks to bull dust) to toes. colour-coordination is vital! ;-)
things you ponder while having one of the many zen moments cruising along the road: why do almost all abandoned car wrecks in these really remote regions end up on their roofs? i can understand that they're gutted, and often torched (makes them rust faster, so they blend in more nicely with the red ground) but why the heck would you spend any effort on tipping them over? is it like a rite of passing, making sure it's really permanently dead, or like bleeding a deer before cutting it up? and what kind of tasty morsels are there to a car that you could get to only from below? inquiring minds do want to know.
after one more obligatory refuelling stop at the only roadhouse along the way i ended the day camping at a bush site called 'desert surf central', a rock break formation that looks a bit like a breaking wave. nobody around, lots of spots to pick, mulga and similar shrubby trees, firewood galore (but it was too windy to enjoy a fire anyway), very relaxing - but cold; at 1530 i was wearing a jacket.
travel in this area revolves around the opening hours of the road houses for fuel, which are roughly 250km distant from each other. camping at the roadhouses is also possible, but some of the ones on the great central road resemble war camps (locked metal cages around the fuel pumps, high fencing, barbed wire) which didn't appeal to me at all.
from desert surf central to laverton the road improved (even including 40km of bitumen), deteriorated, then improved and deteriorated again, but nothing too bad. i guess it was mostly my bum getting a bit weary of the rattling.
most of the day was 3- to 6-finger driving (cf. 2 fingers for perfect bitumen and ranging to two sweaty firmly gripping hands on some of the crappier sections of the plenty highway east of alice).
finally i saw some (live) kangaroos again, also a single dead one, a dead steer and one dead dog, likely a dingo. strangely i didn't see any roos at all in the NT or west of boulia.
after 426km of dirt i stopped at the caravan park in laverton and enjoyed a really welcome hot shower. 6 straight days of bush camping left me and much of my stuff quite dirty.
i spent two nights in laverton, which is small but has lots of interesting history, mostly related to gold. laverton is situated in the WA goldfields, and there are quite a lot of prospectors. even at the caravan park there were a few stacks of brochures related to prospecting, there are prospecting courses run in leonora (the next town) and so on. just for fun i picked up the 'seven golden rules for prospecting' flyer and the 'prospecting in WA - your rights and obligations when prospecting' booklet (20 pages a5), both governmental publications and both actually interesting even for a total layman like me.
at the caravan park i talked to a youngish guy and he showed me his months' worth of gold - maybe 30-40g. he says he does this almost every winter all winter long, and it usually pays his expenses plus a bit, but that it's a lot of walking and digging (and predominantly of junk first).
laverton's tourist info centre is excellent and inviting, has good coffee and a great selection of both the usual free info brochures and maps as well as good topo maps for sale.
i spent a relaxing day doing laundry, some minor bits of maintenance, a bit of shopping and a lot of thinking about where to go next. not being fed up with the trip so far i was already leaning towards going north towards broome, the kimberleys and so on.
then i chatted to some fellow travellers from WA who strongly recommended visiting mt. augustus and karijini national park (in the gascoyne and pilbara regions), which are sortakinda along my route - mt. augustus requires a 400km+ dirt detour to the west, but karijini is pretty much on the route. over another nice coffee at the info centre i pondered the next days...
an early cold morning, a good hot shower, and a fresh coffee - what more do you need? well, i absolutely had to empty the portaloo and that's not an overly pleasant exercise. eventually we're minus the crap but plus some fuel, and on we go!
i believed one of the tourist brochues i had picked up and looked for a few of the 'scenic' things around laverton, except they weren't there or behind mine fences or not scenic, so i went back to the boring main road, northwards: laverton leonora leinster...are all mining- or prospecting-oriented, and all are somewhat dull. leinster is a bhp-billiton company town, and its supermarket was very well-stocked. my plan had been to stay overnight at the caravan park there, but i reached leinster before lunch already and really didn't feel to call it a day that early.
on i went to wiluna (yes, mining) and then 150km of dirt to meekatharra (more mining). WA is full of mines. many are massive eyesores, but on the other hand mining makes for good infrastructure (read: roads are maintained and there's good to great telstra coverage). as the goldfields region is quite flat and has lots of mulga and similar scrubby bush, you don't see too many of the mine pits from the road.
it got a bit late and meekatharra would have been a good stopping point but the caravan park in town was uninviting, so i ditched the oh-so-well-laid plan (again) and drove on into the sunset. about 40km north i found a small neat inexpensive caravan park, run by the 7th day adventists. i must say i found the propaganda leaflet that they handed out quite funny, but the facilities were very good and nice.
overall that day was a bit too long at 686km, but then it got me past these somewhat boring parts of WA.
once again i got up pretty early, at 0630 - when travelling i somehow tend to rise with the sun, but also go to bed with it. another cold morning, another hot shower, another quick coffee, another departure.
i left the bitumen towards mt. augustus, for 350km of not-very-rutted, mostly comfy dirt driving. apparently recently graded these roads weren't too rocky or worrisome, different from what i had read online earlier - very good.
that day i saw a just three cars and very early on one 4-hopper mining road train (he gifted me with one clump of something onto the windscreen, fortunately not breaking it) on the road.
apart from those mining and station vehicles this was fairly empty country - but not lacking in scenery! first things started out flat and boring but then came the area around the gascoyne river, turner creek and similar which is quite beatiful i think: the contrast of predominantly rocky gibber plains with the sandy river beds, lots of floodways and dips, then chains of high hills and minor mountains appeared on the horizon and the road follows the flat plain and winds its way around some of these rises - and eventually you see mt. augustus, an inselberg poking up 700m from the flats.
one day i'd love to hike up mt. labouchere which i drove past that day. there are cattle scattered in this area but personally i don't know what they're raised on as the plains seem to be too rocky to support anything. so, this was a day of dark browns mostly.
whenever i go somewhat off the beaten track i tend to become paranoid and easily worried: is that new noise i'm hearing percussion from the music track on the radio or an impending failure of something mechanical on the car? so far a quick mute of the radio clarified the source as benign every time.
relatively early i arrived at the mt. augustus campground (which is also the only fuel source for 350km or more - one reason why i made sure that all three 20l canisters were full before leaving meekatharra), selected a spot for my car and tent and then enjoyed a lazy afternoon.
the next morning before sunrise i quickly packed the tent up to go hike up mt. augustus...except the zipper for the tent travel cover wouldn't work anymore. zippers clearly dislike bull dust. finally after 10-15 min of swearing and tugging and fiddling i got going and drove the 25km to the start of the hiking tracks up mt. augustus.
i chose the harder but much more interesting track called the 'gully track': you scramble up bolders in a wide but quite water-polished steep gully. i started at 0705, and 3h55m later i was back at the car - not too bad time for 12km return, 700m vertical difference and an advertised time of 5h+. the views from the top of mt. augustus were pretty good, if only towards the east - the west was mostly blocked by scrub. back at the car my toes hurt as the way down involved traipsing over gazillions of big rocks, no matter which track. so i finished the scenic drive around mt. augustus and went back to camp, folded open the tent once more and had a very welcome afternoon nap.
a very windy late afternoon convinced me to turn the car and tent 90° into the wind to keep the flapping down, and i pondered the route onwards and the remainder of the trip home - mt. augustus was the furthest west that i got this time.
from mt. augustus the road towards the north doesn't track straight thanks to various hills, creeks and station properties, and to reach the town of paraburdoo (straight line distance of about 190km) i had to zigzag about 350km on occasionally very rocky dirt, some of which wasn't pleasant at all. the note board at mt. augustus said 'plan at least 9h for that road'. it wasn't all bad, but the first 150km were painful on my tyres...sharp gibber rock with not much sand or gravel on the road. beautiful hills around, just not relaxing driving.
i had read some horror stories about that particular road being a tyre shredder but fortunately it wasn't that bad. as advised i did let my tyre pressures down somewhat further, to about 2.1bar and drove most of the day in 4WD, but the rear tyres in particular did look quite chewed up after the extra 900km of dirt to get to mt. augustus and back out to civilisation.
the car ran really very well and i didn't even came close to needing any fuel canisters, so carrying all three turned out to be a bit overcautious (but BSTS).
in the mid-afternoon after 420km in total i arrived at paraburdoo, another company town, this time associated with rio tinto. yes, more mining again - who would have expected that!
i stayed at the inexpensive but somewhat noisy sodexo/rio tinto 'caravan park' - basically it's the miners' temp accommodation park with a few drive-through bays set aside for travellers. not expensive, good facilities including free laundry and driers, but don't plan to use the amenities around shift change.
a quick morning pack-up (the damn zipper still refuses to work thanks to all the bull dust) and a pleasant hot shower later and i left for the town of 'tom price', another rio tinto company town. the mine site nearby is huge and 'tom price' is a really crap town name.
just outside town i saw a sign saying 'mt. nameless - 4WD only' and felt the itch to drive up - i reasoned that even if i did manage to break something or break down it would be pretty close to town, hence not too much of an issue. mt. nameless certainly looks high and imposing from town with a bunch of comms towers and kit up there. so i rocked up said goat track, in 1st and 2nd gear low-range and jackrabbiting across pretty ugly rocks all the way to the top. having had the car lifted 50mm meant i didn't bash anything onto the rocks but it was still relatively harsh. but the view was really great and i had a quick bit of breakfast up there. on the way down i took a few photos but it looked uglier in reality - or maybe i'm just a big wuss ;-)
then i drove on towards karijini national park (with lots of gorges and lots of tourists). i (by)passed most of that national park and left it for a future visit, not having that much time left, and instead aimed for just one gorge on the western side, hamersley gorge.
that took about 80km of dirt from tom price, i parked, shut everything down and then pfffffffffffft: one of the rear tyres has a sharp rock puncturing the middle of the tread and is deflating as i watch.
i'm not sure whether the mt. nameless rockhopping was the root cause (not totally certain as the rocky roads from tom price to hamersley gorge were rough and rocky, too) but it certainly didn't help those tyres.
so i cursed briefly, then walked down to the gorge first; lovely view, inviting water but i didn't feel like getting into the water myself and just sat around soaking up the scenery.
then it was back to the car and do a wheel change to the first of two spare wheels. sweaty, hot, dusty stuff. afterwards i drove northeast, past wittenoom, a ghost town of asbestos 'fame' which still has about three ghosts living there (as of 2018, according to wikipedia).
eventually i crossed the great northern highway into the east pilbara shire, which looked beautiful when i saw it: lots of nice hills, fewer mines, and after a recent little bit of rain lots of green ground cover. very very nice to look at.
fun fact: the east pilbara is the third-largest shire in the world (380000km² and a whopping 10591 inhabitants).
after 500km in total (200km dirt) i reached marble bar where i stayed overnight at the local caravan park.
this day was for repositioning without much interesting stuff to report.
the marble bar road and the great northern highway are very boring. this area of WA is very very flat and home to migrant flocks of grey nomads, heaps of which were passing me leaving broome going southwest (spring, so getting too warm).
i'd guess about 80-90% of the many vehicles that i saw that day were caravans with two oldsters each. the other type of super-common vehicle in this state is adorned with flouro yellow 'go faster' stripes down the flanks...somehow all those mining cars and trucks seem to use exactly the same colour...monopoly manufacturer mebbe?
750km later i arrived in broome, which is bigger than i had expected and feels like the gold coast of the west: all hail tourism! my punctured tyre turned out to be an unrepairable ex-tyre (hole too big inside), but i got a cheap 2nd hand tyre mounted to get me home; then did a bit of shopping followed by some almost obligatory not-quite-sunset shots at cable beach. this was very nice.
i did, indeed, make it from the sunrise beaches of the gc to the sunset beaches of broome! :-) but i'm now clearly and definitely on the way home (which is merely 3400km or so in a straight line, so won't be there too soon).
after sunset i drove to the gateway caravan park 30km outside of town, which was tranquil and nice.
after a lovely warm night the morning brought dense fog and everything was dripping wet. at least it was warm and wet, not cold. by 0815 there was no sign of the fog burning off, so i packed the tent wet, something i don't like doing much.
on to derby, a sleepy place, and off the boring highway onto the gibb river road...which is sealed for the first 80km (to the turnoff towards windjana gorge national park) and then not for about 650km. lots (and i mean lots) of traffic as it's a bit iconic and the only road that directly crosses the kimberleys.
over time the road conditions got steadily worse, more and more corrugations and rocky sections. along the way at marchfly glen i encountered and actually used the real-world 'worst toilet in scotland' (for those of you who have seen 'trainspotting').
mid-afternoon i visited adcock gorge, which was really lovely. according to the swimmers there they had seen a small croc in the gorge earlier, which didn't keep them from swimming however. i didn't see it but would have liked to.
the 5km off the gibb river road to the gorge were the worst i've driven on in a looong time; no speed worked for those pesky high rolling ridges, and it was an absolute bone shaker.
i camped at frog campground a few km down the road and had a nice pleasant night, but in the morning i saw that one of the fog lights had vibrated out of its mounting and vanished. that was the first casualty of the gibb river road.
i got up early and was on my way by 0650 already. arriving at mt. barnett roadhouse at 0730 taught me that the early bird gets no fuel: they open at 0800. i should have had breakfast instead of rushing. ah well.
the road conditions around mt. barnett were pretty unpleasant, a mix of alternating heavy corrugations and rocky sections. more rattling, more shaking, my butt and back are certainly feeling case-hardened by now, and i cringe every time i can't avoid a rocky clump or an especially bad set of ruts. i found out that the uhf radio and trailer brake mount that the car's previous owner had cobbled together is woefully insufficient; the screws backed out more than once and everything rattled loose on that trip.
and to add insult to injury, the views weren't that great. the king leopold ranges on the previous day looked nice, and near the end of the gibb river road at kununurra things got scenic again, with high escarpments and jump ups and great views. but inbetween i found it to be mostly noisy misery.
halfway through the day the d-shackle fixing my winch rope to the bullbar had vanished, the radio antenna needed retightening a few times and i don't recall how often i reattached the suction-cupped car gps.
finally, better views and lovely vistas, just one more really shitty rocky section and then the start of the bitumen. and a suddenly very wobbly car: the last few rocky km cost me another tyre, as some sharp rock sliced clean through the tread and some of the tyre plies. it was hot and dusty and i was not amused. that was the second casualty of the gibb river road, and i'm down to one working spare wheel again.
kununurra looks quite inviting, lagoon, ord river (and heaps of caravan parks) but i couldn't be bothered to hunt for a tyre shop (and this tyre was certainly not repairable anyway), so i rolled on across the border back to the NT and camped in a lovely spot called saddle creek rest area...to find casualty nr. 3: 3 little plastic yoghurt tubs had burst and messed up my fridge big time, and casualty nr. 4, two (noncritical) screws are now missing from the roof top tent and there are some badly worn spots on the tent base thanks to the ladder banging up and down.
i must say that i was somewhat disappointed by what i saw of the kimberley area, which was of course very little as there are lots of coastal magic and areas like the mitchell falls that i didn't have time for on this trip; but the gibb river road itself wasn't much fun to travel on and the views were much less interesting than what i had soaked up in the gascoyne and pilbara regions.
i woke with the morning sun rays in my face, after a starry warm pleasant night with all three tent windows wide open. this was to be a transit day with lots of kms, but the victoria river region around timber creek turned out to be unexpectedly lovely: varying escarpments, the victoria river itself wide and windey (but even that one is seasonal) and the road often following the river bends and generally going up and down a bit. enjoyable travelling.
now back in the NT i realised how many termite mounds/spires/daleks that country has: lots! and quite a few of these are dressed in shirts and skirts and hats and what have you. i think that may be the territorian's way of compensating for the lack of opportunity to build snow men?
in katherine i was lucky to get a near-new near-perfect-match replacement tyre for not much cash, but otherwise nothing drew me particularly to stay there.
i stayed at mataranka about 100km further south, in the bitter springs caravan park which is set along the roper creek in fairly tropical surrounds - and some tropical flowers must have been blooming because it smelled extremely nice there. i couldn't pinpoint the source of the lovely smell but i'm not good with plant identification anyway, so i just enjoyed it after smelling bull dust for many days.
even though mataranka is just 380km south of darwin and quite definitely in the tropics, the morning was very cold. for the first time on this trip i used my gloves for the tent pack up, and at 0800 my car thermometer showed a measly 8°C. refreshing but a bit unexpected.
the plan was to move closer to the QLD border on that day so as to reach camooweal on the next, which necessitates some travel on the stuart highway - which is mind-numbingly boring.
at least i had the choice to head east on the carpentaria highway first and then south on the tablelands highway instead, and i gladly made that choice.
the carpentaria tracks through some quite interesting 'savannah'-type countryside, again with termite mounds every few metres.
those smaller, windier and usually bumpier highways are usually much better for me, because the view is better (most of the time); they're not slower for me either, because i tend to cruise along at 85-95km/h anyway where the driving isn't stressful, where i can look around a little instead of just staring at the road, and where my car's fuel efficiency is good.
the classification as 'highway' for the carpentaria and the tablelands highway is interesting though, as they're almost entirely single-lane with dirt shoulders. the speed limit for these is 110km/h and i certainly wouldn't want to go even that fast. (the stuart highway limit is 130km/h, ditto for the victoria highway of the day before.)
after about 600 relatively relaxing kilometres i bush-camped a few hundred metres off the road and enjoyed a lovely quiet evening and night. at that point of the trip the vague idea of making a detour to the carnarvon gorge on the way home firmed up into an actual plan to do so. otherwise the most interesting parts of the journey were over.
the day started pleasantly after a starry night at that bush camp in the middle of nowhere. the first 250km of the day on the tablelands highway were fairly unpleasant, because while it's a sealed road the condition is really rotten with 15-20cm deep ruts, potholes and generally a roller coaster ride.
there also was a large number of oncoming road trains (gee, i wonder where those ruts come from!), each of which required that i stop and vanish off the single lane asphalt until they rock & roll past. at least they were all very polite.
near the intersection with the barkly highway the countryside turned really bleak, flat, in full drought and dotted with dead cattle. uninviting.
on the barkly highway (which is bigger and in much better condition) there were occasionally whole fields of termite spires and in a few spots they encroached onto the road in an interesting manner. driving by yourself and just being in a zen-ish state i started thinking about this eerily alien invasion and that 'the salivation army is munching on' with the little critters apparently trying to reach us: 'dear travelling stranger, may we talk to you about the truth of cellulose?' i think this kind of stuff makes it clear how boring travel on the barkly highway is :-)
the day ended just over the border back in Queensland at camooweal's tiny caravan park after 538km.
camooweal tiself is in flat territory, but towards and around mt. isa the country lifts and the road winds around and over hills and the views get very interesting.
from the main road none of the mining around mt. isa is overly apparent, different from WA which i found good. what is not good at all is that both big supermarket chains are closed on sunday in and all around mt. isa. bad planning on my side means i'm now out of fresh vegies and pleasant cookable stuff. bummer!
the radio program also sucks on sundays: very little news even on ABC, just lots of mind-numbingly boring sports programs (and one numbers station 100% devoted to just racing odds...only in oz).
a short while before sunset i reached winton and its lovely but busy bush camp at the long waterhole. most of the waterfront spots being taken i retreated another 600m onto an empty quiet plain. 665km of long repositioning haul, during which i managed to not hit one lazy corvid (waited too long over a roadside snack) and one snake (why did the snake cross the road? no idea).
the distances, timing and availability of nice stopover spots conspired against me; the plan to visit carnarvon gorge meant either a few more days of little travelling (which i didn't want) or having two very long days, this being the second.
winton to longreach is boringly flat. i spotted a very rare creature: an efficient bulk carrier of...no, not ore or grain for once, but for lumps of protoplasm! :-) it's weird how little general-purpose rail infrastructure this continent has. the train was labelled the 'spirit of the outback' but i think they got it wrong - their spirit of the outback smells of diesel whereas in reality it should have the burnt smell of bull dust.
on towards emerald on the capricornia highway you get to follow the tropic of capricorn in a very straight line for many kms. that part is very green but still fairly boring. the countryside gets much nicer and interesting later, shortly before emerald where there are gem fossicking fields and then south towards rolleston (where there are also some big mines, coal i think).
after way too many kilometres (833 to be precise) on this day i arrived at my chosen bush camp site not too far from the carnarvon gorge, but somewhat after sunset which i normally avoid. the last 30km i drove much slower than usual, saw only very few roos and luckily didn't hit any.
the morning dawned very cold, around 4°C; with beanie and gloves i packed up and drove the 60km to the carnarvon gorge. i had a pleasant 14km hike into the gorge, and around noon it was 31°C again. carnarvon has lovely views, lots of clean water burbling in the creek and numerous crossings of said creek - and lots of old tourists, and i mean old.
i'd say the ratio of over-50s to below was 90:10. i found out that there is a multi-day hike through and around the gorge which is now on my personal todo list.
at lunchtime i was back at my car and drove on to roma, where a bit of shopping was needed, then south to surat which i had passed through on the way west. i stayed at surat's caravan park which was lovely grassy and dotted with bottle trees.
day 27: it's all over, man! except for the cleanup/maintenance/washing, that is just starting...
there's really nothing to report as i just drove from surat via dalby and toowoomba to capalaba and then home. at a friend's place i gave the car a very well-deserved half an hour with the pressure washer to get most of the exterior mess off, but lots more dust and gunk awaited my efforts.
things that worked really well this time:
otherwise there's not that much else to share with you, beyond some bare bone stats:
Sure, you could use mailsync to sync MH-to-IMAP on one computer (and inversely on your other computer), but that detour is not very nice.
I've also looked at syncmaildir, which syncs maildir-to-maildir, hence not directly useful. But its mddiff tool which does most of the interesting work is easily modifiable to deal with MH boxes instead of maildir, and I did try that. Unfortunately syncmaildir's messy mix of c+shell+lua is pretty ugly, and mddiff's heuristics aren't quite up to scratch (it's one-and-a-half-directional at best..).
Net result: I decided to write my own direct, bi-directional MH-to-MH sync tool in Perl, which is available here: feel free to experiment, mangle, modify and/or simply use it. Feedback very welcome.
mhsync needs to be present on both machines, and you need both ssh and sshfs, ideally with key auth and/or ssh-agent up and running (or you'll have to enter your credentials twice for each sync run).
When I say bi-directional, I mean it: You should be able to work with both mailboxes at will and mhsync will try very hard to get both mailboxes into a consistent, sensible state - but as it lacks human intelligence it won't always guess right which conflicting mailbox modifications to pursue. Also, MH has no locking: don't run mhsync concurrently with other major mailbox editing (delivery of new mail is fine, however).
So, no guarantees. mhsync may very well renumber mails to resolve
name clashes. It should never ever overwrite mails, but might give you
duplicates. It will not ever remove mails unless you give it the
-X
option (and then only if it's seen the mail as properly
in sync in the past but gone on one side now).
In any situation that it doesn't understand it'll print out the
problem status on STDERR. It's got a dry-run mode (-n
) and
three levels of verbosity (-d N
: 0 = show unresolvables only,
1 = info about high-level decisions, 2 = which file ops are made.
Let me know what you think.
i've updated my trusty old mhsync tool to also handle multi-way syncing, e.g. one main box and two different laptops.
the tool remains available here.
]]>the worst part is commercial air travel, every time: i'm by no means rich enough to afford business class tickets and at 186cm tall travelling in cattle class between australia and austria is fairly painful at best.
even a nice view like this cannot make up for the cramped surrounds.
the sweet parts were certainly seeing family and friends again and spending time with all of them. but even six weeks do evaporate very quickly, and i didn't have a lot of slack time.
my nephews and niece particularly enjoyed my presence and availability - and so did conny's cat and dog!
this time i also managed to spend a little time outside of vienna; a few days of camping at the river kamp and one day trip to the waldviertel region.
the bitter-sweet aspect is that it feels somewhat odd to revisit austria; almost everything is very familiar, you certainly do know your way around and it's interesting to see some things change (and others not at all) - but i'm not quite feeling at home there anymore.
my family did everything to make me feel welcome and they certainly succeeded; but even the very nice places of my two sisters and my daughter weren't my place...i'm not sure that i can describe this kind of odd feeling properly.
somehow my visits to austria also tend to be very busy, no matter how long or short, and not especially relaxing for me: i feel quite restless there and 'doing nothing' isn't easy for me but i do try!
consequentially i spent a fair amount of time doing a variety of stuff for my family, along the lines of "while you're here, could you maybe help me with whatever?".
i don't mind because visiting austria doesn't quite feel like taking a vacation to me anyway (maybe because it's all so familiar?), and being restless means Doing Stuff gives me the satisfaction of improving things. my family also rewarded me with a cool t-shirt :-)
]]>i also suspect that there aren't that many companies outside the australian market that would proudly call their engine starter spray "start ya bastard" and market it for a target audience of 'frail people who are not strong enough to pull a start cord quickly enough'.
the last time i had to use a similar product must have been about 30 years ago, helping my dad to convince one of his his citroen gs/gsa to start...all of which were indeed bastards to get started.
apropos nothing: other australian things.
]]>in the meantime i've also added a tele lens (14-140mm), which reminds my sister of the aardvark in the pink panther cartoons when it is at the the maximum zoom.
]]>we've got 25 million human inhabitants, but less than 500 000 live outside the coastal areas (the yellow area on this map from amazing maps)
you don't have to drive very far inland to get away from everybody.
for somebody like me who can stand humanity in small doses only that's a pretty good thing.
]]>an inspection indicated that all panels are on the way out, not just one. these 'znshine' panels are clearly not much good; they lasted just 8 years, and the warranty is pretty useless: '5 years for faults and defects' and '25 years for output degradation but only if that's your sole problem'...so for all practical purposes '5 years'. meh.
fortunately the solar sparkie that i talked to (who did a good job for my neighbours recently) offered some second-hand better quality for a very good price, and now there are 7 renesola 250w panels on my roof and i'm happy again.
]]>these are located at orchid beach and at cathedral beach;
with four stations most of the eastern, ocean facing side of the island is now covered. two more stations on the western side (at kingfisher bay and wanggoolba) will follow in the next three months.
things worked out pretty well and we did find a few hours for sightseeing, too; here are a few photos.
to capture the size of some of the big trees i experimented with my phone
to get a vertical panorama (up, up and lean baaaaaack),
and while not perfect it doesn't look too bad :-)
*sigh*
i like camping trips. i dislike snakes, goannas and other critters that might want to share my ground tent, or shoes or the like.
consequentially i upgraded my glamping kit for my most recent trip (more on that in a few days) by buying a roof top tent, for the canopy of my car. oh the luxury!
my sisters have already remarked that travelling with a fridge and an
rtt is Not In The True Spirit of camping. see me not care too much ;-)
however: the tent weighs 49 kg and has a somewhat awkward shape for solo handling (120x140x40 cm). how do you get that onto your car's roof racks without banging the car to pieces and without another person to help with the lifting?
my original answer to this loner quandary involved two wooden ramps and some temporary support bars. like this:
idea: lift the tent onto the angled rails, push it up and over the corner then shove it forward into position and bolt it down. the supports should keep it from banging onto the canopy roof on the way.
well, it didn't quite work out that way.
lugging the tent over was doable *huff*puff*
but pushing
the thing up by hand was a no-go. so i used the car's winch! i see no reason
why a 5.5 ton winch should only be good for car recoveries, i just needed
the 49 kg tent moved. the (synthetic) winch rope looped nicely over the bull
bar and the roof racks, nicely rounded corners all the way, and it
didn't touch the car body anywhere. so far, so good.
at that point the second problem with my original idea became apparent: the rails supported the tent fine but i hadn't put in anything to stop the rails themselves from moving forward and up.
the friction between wood and tent bottom meant that the winch pulled the rails forward and up and made them steeper, instead of the tent sliding up the rails...which clearly made a total mess at the crucial top corner. (i also had been stupid enough to install some of the mounting hardware on the tent bottom before getting it into place, which then stuck out from the bottom and Did Not Help At All.)
with a bit of frantic tugging and shoving and swearing eventually i got the tent up and in place, at the cost of one new scratch on the canopy.
this is how it looked when ready to go, and how it looked ready for me spending my first night in it. it is indeed pretty luxurious.
ha, all is not lost :-)
i improved the rail setup a little, and today it's worked just fine. now the rails and top support bars are fixed to each other and also fixed to the roof rack, and i glued carpet onto the surfaces where stuff should slide.
]]>2/3 of that went for 420l of diesel (my car is reasonably economical even with the brake parachu^W^Wroof top tent in place), and the remainder covered (national park and other) camping fees, some grocery shopping and a few coffee and cake breaks. i mostly camped in cheap or free places and somehow i can't bring myself to eat out even when i'm on the road (at least when travelling solo), which should explain the low cost.
i've long wanted to see more of australia. being off work right now makes this the perfect opportunity to travel, except that the season is not ideal for visiting central oz (late summer/early fall is both hot and normally the rainy season); furthermore the current drought makes the inland regions a bit less appealing than usual (ie. many creeks and rivers are bone-dry, fire bans in many national parks and so on).
so i decided that i'd tag along the great dividing range towards the south, visiting most of the higher areas on the way - for the views, the hiking and a bit of cooler weather. the tentative plan also included visiting the victorian alps and possibly the great ocean road as well, but that part of the plan went up in smoke - lots of nasty bushfires in victoria, pretty much exactly where i wanted to go - so the eventual southernmost goal shifted to mt. kosciuszko, the highest hill in oz.
here is the whole trip as a single track; read on for photos and more details.
on the first day, a thursday, i left the gold coast tracking west and checked out the lions road area with a short sightseeing stop at the border loop railway. that part was dry but then the rain started - just when i had reached the scenic parts of the border ranges... the forests still showed quite some damage from the cyclone scare of a weekend earlier, lots of branches down everywhere.
in a brief break between showers i walked up to the pinnacle lookout, and the view was pretty good despite the clouds.
then onwards to kyogle, then back up north along the cambridge ridge road (which is really scenic and beautiful - lazy me didn't take any photos there though...) and i got to the peacock creek camping area in the richmond range national park. nobody there but me and lots of birds and roos.
that was the first night in my roof top tent, and it rained quite a lot during the night. my tent is second-hand and about five years old but held out very well. but packing up wet, inbetween showers is not something i like much; this being the very first time and in a rush i also skinned my knuckles quite a bit.
the second day saw a short drive
to minnie water where i spent two days on the beach, just relaxing and
not doing much beyond a bit of beach walking. the weather improved
somewhat and there were just a few short drizzly showers, but it was
fairly windy. very relaxing, except that the large monitors in that area can
be a bit startling. yay for sleeping off the ground :-)
on the fourth day i packed up mostly in the dry, drove back to grafton for a quick coffee and then on to higher country along the waterfall way. it was raining most of the day. of the various camping (and hiking) opportunities in that area the cathedral rock national park looked most inviting, and so i picked the barokee camping area, nice and high at 1380m or so. again not a single soul around but even more birds than before. because i was restless i walked the quick 3km loop around cathedral rock despite the rain, and the smell of the wet eucalypt and other trees was really nice.
next day the weather was good and i hiked up to cathedral rock, which offers really great views (altitude 1560m or so).
but somehow or other i did manage to catch a cold and the next two nights and one day were really lousy. being feverish is not fun and even less so when you're camping. i tried to sleep it off but didn't succeed completely, so on day seven i packed up and headed straight home.
fast forward a few days of rest at home, then on a tuesday, overall the eight day of the trip i left home again, this time tracking straight west. i stayed overnight at the lake coolmunda campground, and even though the dammed lake/reservoir was at only 15% capacity the views were great and there were lots of birds to see. a frogmouth even visited the tent a bit after sunset.
as it was nice and warm i had all four sides of the tent open; the bird noise started around sunrise and i woke up just long enough to take a nice photo.
on day nine i reached mt. kaputar national park which had been one of the main goals for the trip. i stayed at dawson spring campground for three nights, two of them without anybody in the area. the dawson spring campground is a bit small but has great facilities especially given it's in a national park.
the weather was good (if cool) and as i had arrived early enough in the day i quickly walked up to mt. caputar summit to enjoy the marvellous views.
the next two days i spent hiking on the various tracks in the mt. kaputar/mt. dove area, doing 15km and 20km, respectively. the weather remained good and i enjoyed these days very much (even though i didn't see more than four other people in total).
the roos at mt. kaputar were really cheeky and even slightly annoying; they must have seen me as the only potential source of goodies (until the last night) and begged accordingly, investigated everything repeatedly, overturned a cookpot with coffee water (thankfully not hot at the time) and ate half of my dishwashing sponge. they were also really noisy until late at night. a currawong stole some of my breakfast bread.
the next (twelfth) day the weather started worsening and i moved on to warrumbungle national park. this was a fairly short drive with a brief detour to the siding spring astronomical observatory; the 3.9m telescope there has an interesting visitor/viewer gallery that was definitely worth the visit.
just after i arrived at camp blackman a storm arrived with lots of rain and driving wind that made the late afternoon pretty miserable. it also rained some more during the night.
the next day i walked just a few kms around the belougery flats, then there was more rain around noon; later on in the afternoon i felt like cooking - and this time it wasn't cheeky roos that bothered me, but very very insistent noisy miners. they just wouldn't take 'no' as an answer...
in the end i stayed three nights at camp blackman, and on the second day the weather was good - good enough for a decent hike: 19km to the breadknife, the grand high tops and back via spirey creek. the views were awesome and you could see to the plains beyond the warrumbungles in pretty much all directions. a sweaty exercise but very satisfying.
on day fifteen i drove to sydney via the blue mountains, to spend two nights and a day with barbara and her new family. after weeks of countryside i hated the traffic coming into sydney from the west.
the weather in sydney was very wet but started to clear once i reached wollongoong on day seventeen. after passing nowra i drove through the morton national park (quite beautiful countryside) and camped at charleyong crossing right next to the shoalhaven river.
because of the bushfires in victoria i had revised my original plans to visit the snowy river and alpine national parks and picked a quick dash to mt. kosciuszko as a compromise. day eighteen saw me drive mostly in the rain to jindabyne, which is the kind of horribly touristy town that i don't like much and won't revisit if i can help it. that day i really didn't feel like camping and got a motel room. in the evening the weather cleared for a while and i could at least enjoy the view of the lake.
in the morning i left jindabyne early to beat the weather and get to the mt. kosciuszko summit before any further rain (which did arrive just after noon).
the hike from charlotte pass to mt. kosciuszko summit at 2228m was disappointing in a variety of ways; the weather was windy and on the verge of rain all the time, and on that very day a long-distance running event was held on the kosciuszko plateau, so there were hundreds of runners everywhere.
furthermore the plateau walk is pretty boring, the view from the summit was just soso thanks to the weather, and the running event made the day anything but serene. in the end i more or less quickmarched the 18.6km there and back in 3h 15min.
if i ever decide to hike near mt. kosciuszko again it'll have to be the hummel spur, the only approach that looks in any way interesting.
i found jindabyne, thredbo and the mt. kosciuszko national park hopelessly commercial and while the alpine way is an interesting road to drive (once) i don't think i'll visit again.
after a few km through northeast victoria i camped at oura beach reserve, just outside of wagga wagga. that evening was nice if noisy (sulphur-crested cockatoos, but the morning saw more rain and i packed up wet once more.
day twenty saw me well and truly on the way home. the morning was rainy, but it cleared sufficiently that i did get to enjoy the views of the rolling hills and undulating countryside around young, bathurst and mudgee.
i picked the big river campground in the goulburn river national park for my last overnight stay, and was lucky to get enough of a dry period in the afternoon for both drying out the tent as well as for leisurely cooking dinner.
the scenery was magnificent and i liked the place quite a lot. once again i was by myself; both campgrounds in that area were completely empty.
the last day of this trip, day twentyone, started with rain and yet another very wet and unpleasant pack-up.
after leaving the national park i made the mistake of letting the gps misdirect me onto the 'bylong valley way' which is one continuous pothole and likely worse than the dirt track alternative that i had rejected (gravel/dirt roads are not that much fun in the rain).
it stopped raining once i passed tamworth, and i puttered along the new england hightway northwards. i picked the inland route on purpose as the coastal motorway is faster but just too boring.
i had marked a few options for camping another night in case i ran out of energy or daylight (e.g. turn east in armidale and stay at ebor, or turn east in glen innes for the mann river reserve, or pick one of the small overnight rest spots east of tenterfield).
in the end, however, i didn't stop but drove the full 876km in one day
and arrived home at 2015. the next day saw me dry out the tent, after
which we had four days of rain...lucky timing! :-)
well, this is australia so it's not edelweiß but flannel flowers. the leaves have exactly the same texture though! these were observed at yuraygir national park, on a hilly headland maybe 500m from the beach.
as you might tell from this i've been camping a bit; read on for some more photos and a bit of a report.
summer is hot here, and i really don't need any sunburn on my head.
this is at 'tommys rock lookout', near the mann river nature reserve. i found driving up that trail quite scary, really steep and with near zero chances of turning around should that become necessary. as usual i was totally by myself, which didn't lower the anxiety level any. the colorado did scrape in a few places and i had it in low range second gear much of the time, but made it fine in the end. there's a clip on themtube where a bike rider makes it look effortless and almost flat - clearly i didn not find it that way, but the view was pretty good.
it's just oh so pleasant to have that much storage space. in the pic above the tray area has swallowed tent, chair, mattress, sleeping bag, tarp and poles, portaloo and shower tent, drifta kitchen, 40l fridge, solar panel, 40l of drinking water, food bag, recovery gear and toolbox, secondary/'dual' battery and other bits...
and the stuff in the back seat i put there not because i had to but because i found that more convenient that piling it up in the tray.
its 3l turbodiesel is also quite frugal in my experience so far (just under 5000km); it averages around between 8 to 8.6l/100km - quite a bit less than my old forester; note, though, that in oz diesel is usually more expensive than petrol for whatever unfathomable reason.
with the weather as hot as it was last week it was utter bliss to be able to donk in a bottle of fresh but hot water and get it back out cold a few hours later. and with the solar panel powering things it felt like a guilt-free luxury :-)
the book is less uptodate (naturally) but paper doesn't fail. on the other hand i find the comments in wikicamps are easily worth the few dollars for the application. getting that to work w/o gargle services or gargle account on my phone was a bit of a hassle, though.
i like these two as a source of inspiration as to where i might want to go and what area might be worth checking out; i'm not averse to paying a little for camping permits etc., so it's not entirely 'free camping or bust' for me.
this 100w foldable/blanket-style kit with semi-flexible panels has failed after just a few weeks of use. i hope to get that sorted out under warranty; in the meantime i've picked up a used classic framed style (and thus heavier and clunkier) 120w panel.
the trip started with spending a few days with friends at the illaroo campsite in yuraygir national park. besides the usual beautiful beaches (some bluebottle jellyfish though!) there are some nice walks around the headlands, great little coves (mad mix between pure rocks, pebbly and sandy ones). the weekend was a bit busy at illaroo (school break isn't over yet) but it quietened down quickly.
later on i headed out west onto the old glen innes/grafton road, and camped for a night at buccarumbi bridge, near the confluence of boyd and nymboida rivers. it was so hot that even i went swimming numerous times (which is not common). beautiful clean water, not many people around, great scenery. with my ground tent the shady but rocky spots lower down near the water weren't much good, so i camped a bit higher up in dense grass. i got woken by lots of cows all around my tent and the sun expelled me from the tent very very early...
after checking out a few more prime spots in that area (dalmorton, mann river nature reserve, tommy's rock lookout) i drove on to kwiambal national park on the river severn.
camping at lemontree flats camping area was quite nice - really hot though, but the river severn was flowing so swimming (well, soaking) was very much a necessity. this time i managed to put the tent into a spot with shade for the morning sun, but even so i didn't sleep especially well - the nights were too hot and without enough of a breeze.
the place was almost devoid of human visitors (just one old couple nearby) but had lots of cheeky kangaroos.
one of the roos used an unsupervised moment to pull my rye bread (with walnuts) off the kitchen top, got it out of the bread bag and then started nibbling.
most of the cheeky ones liked my handouts of salad leaves, cucumber and zucchini, except for one that preferred green olives and haloumi cheese - maybe because of the salt?
despite the heat i did the 7km walk along the severn rapids to the confluence of mcintyre and severn rivers. the views of the severn were great, but the mcintyre is not really running right now. the heat was pretty harsh, though, and i used up almost 2l of water on that fairly short walk (i'm not a total doofus, so i had carried 3l).
some of the afternoon was spent soaking in the severn's fairly cold water again.
on the next day i checked out the mcintyre falls, but there are no falls right now and the water was stagnant with a fair amount of algae in it. a pity.
on the way back home i revisited the upper clarence area (rediscovered one usable camping spot, too) and also checked out tooloom falls near urbenville; but as that was on a friday evening there were a few doofdoof-type campers there and the falls were just trickling so i didn't stay overnight.
]]>:-)
]]>it's quite obvious that australian beer prices are mostly driven by very high taxation, when aldi can make a profit selling the far travelled egger märzen not that much dearer than local(-ish) beer: the egger goes for $5 per litre, whereas aldi's nice kiwi low-carb goes for $4.42 per litre (that's aldi prices, the other booze 'discounters' are nowhere near except for headache generators like xxxx gold...).
]]>i'm going camping tomorrow, and i like reusing containers (well-cleaned containers...). obviously i also like making silly labels with my label maker.
]]>so here are some more photos and phacts.
for comparison here is a photo of my old subaru outback, an average length station wagon ('kombi'). the colorado just fits into the garage, ie. iff i drive up to and carefully bump into the wall. stock length is 4.9m, add about 25cm for the bull bar on mine.
stock weight is about 1920 kg (cf. 1460 kg for my previous car, a forester), but this one lugs around a bull bar, winch, canopy and dual battery; installing a lift kit is very much in planning.
it's got about 120 kW and lots of torque thanks to the turbocharged diesel; agility is...well, this is not a race car. it doesn't feel underpowered but there's the inertia of 2 tons of car.
]]>believe it or not, but i do actually own a sewing machine - and i can even operate it (if not exactly well).
it's a relatively old elnita 150, and the only electric bits in it are the motor and the light bulb. i do admire the mechanical design of mechanical sewing machines: two cam drums, a comb full of cam followers, a few levers, a bunch of springs. in this machine that's enough for 15 different stitch patterns.
however, mine doesn't get used often. today i wanted to prep it for some upcoming fiddly fabric work, only to find out that it would only zig spastically, not zig and zag.
after applying occam's razor to isolate the involved ziggy bits it turned out that the issue was just stiffened old grease and/or insufficient lubrication: one follower lever had gotten too sticky to return properly when released. for zig that one gets pushed but for zag it needs to return under spring tension, which it didn't do reliably.
the solution was trivial; a bit of fresh light oil, some soaking
time and vigorous exercise of the mechanism and it's all working
again. me happy :-)
i live in a pretty humid climate, and using vacuum storage bags (for things like spare blankets and pillows) is quite important; but the dyson vacuum that i inherited from my daughter has this nice-but-unhelpful clicky connector that sucks because it doesn't suck -- there's no flat interface that you can press against the bag valve.
so i spent a little time on designing and printing a sucker adapter (in PETG because i wanted to do more testing with the material).
or this one, from earlier this week: the built-in cupboard in my
hallway has a broken door catch (cylindrical post in the frame,
claspy catch on the door) and i couldn't find any even remotely
similar replacement at the (sole remaining :-(
) hardware chain.
however, calipers and persistence and one failed test-print later i've now got a parametric model and an actual replacement part that works.
on the last photo you can see my newest mod to my printer, a mk52 (clone) magnetic heatbed. the print surface is PEI on a removable sheet of spring steel, which is held to the actual bed and heater by many strong magnets. when your print is done you take off the steel sheet and flex that, rather than prodding and prying with spatula/chisel/knife.
so far it works pretty well, but the bed is made from PCB/fibreglass and prone to warping. i haven't fully bolted the bed down (like official prusa does it) because i like the ability to level things manually, but i may want to change that later; for now i've setup 7x7 grid level compensation with my smoothieboard clone and that takes care of the imperfect flatness.
]]>a universal repellant, so to speak.
it's a 2011 holden colorado 4wd turbo-diesel ute. so far i do quite like it, even though it's much more of a lumbering dinosaur than the nimble subaru forester that it replaces; you do feel like the captain of a big ship navigating the twisty shallow shoals of suburbia.
but on the other hand it will be pretty nice for camping and trips. on sunday i'll have a bit of a bigish outing to pick up a canopy for the car (the previous owner had had a home-made hutch of extreme ugliness on it, which the car salesman offered me for nothing but i declined).
]]>almost exactly three years ago i built a minimal-budget online weatherstation for fido, john sinclair's fraser island defenders org. that station was installed at happy valley and it's been working pretty well ever since - well enough that we followed it up a few months later with another station which ended up at eurong.
both of these were build on a shoestring budget, and for the second i used the same fairly yucky 'authentication' chip setup on perfboard and hacksawed 2mm 2x10 pin connector, and everything was housed in a really ugly fashion inside a weatherproof box.
recently fido got a budget together for four more stations. about two months ago we started acquiring the bits and pieces for these stations, and this time i decided to make everything a bit nicer and easier to assemble.
this new litter of beagles will be housed decently: i designed and 3d-printed a custom enclosure that attaches to the back of the weather station console. thanks to the odd geometry it was a bit annoying to print but the resulting four dog houses look good and work really well.
this time i've also decided to 'design for manufacturability' (bwuahaha - translate: i wanted less messy manual soldering and no connector butchery). this meant switching to a different pic microprocessor, an 8-pin PIC16F18313, and making a printed circuit board with keyed connectors to make everything a bit more fool-resistant.
the 16F18313 is a little powerhouse, and i found it amazing how much functionality microchip crammed into this chip (datasheet for the 16F18313: 471 pages. 16F88: 228). at au$1.31 it's also much cheaper than the older PIC16F88 i used for the first two stations, and thanks to freely reassignable pin functions it's much easier to route a single-layer pcb for that processor.
but getting it to actually work was immensely painful: none of my infrastructure would deal with this fairly recent chip. my version of xc8 wouldn't compile for it, pk2cmd would not program it (nor would mplabx talk to my pickit2). lots of swearing and fiddling later i've got a working PK2DeviceFile.dat for that chip, and proceeded with the pcb making.
after a little time with eagle (and a brief detour to build a small drill press for drilling the circuit boards) i made these four boards in the most pedestrian fashion possible (read: using the toner transfer method). soldering on the smt connectors was easy, using solder paste. and everything did work the first time round :-)
in about a month the four stations will get installed on fraser island and i'll post an update when they're live.
you can find the updated code for the new pic and the board design (in eagle format as well as printable image) at https://github.com/az143/davis_weather.
]]>...except that one is not a homeomorphism but rather an example of subtractive manufacturing.
]]>i must say they look very unimpressed with whatever human caretaker that had this attack of the math hahas.
]]>one is the inherent tinker factor: there's always something else that you might want to try to improve the printer. (yes, silly but fun...i'll document my own progression from a small chinese kit pinter to a prusa/3030 homebrew in a separate post later.)
for me the ability to build a custom part without too much hassle (most of the time...) is what makes the printer so awesome.
here's one: you want some custom hooks to gather your kitchen curtains out of the way? easy. 15 minutes with openscad, a little bit of PLA plastic filament, some printing time later and two pieces of double-sided tape and you're done.
or this one: you live in a climate that means any dust in connectors will cause them to corrode and rust into oblivion pretty damn quickly? easy. design and print some connector caps. oh, you'd like some that are angled at 85° to fit the sloping sides of your lapdog? that's just a small tweak in the design.
or this one: your daughter wants a transparent base for her wedding cake and roses underneath, but doesn't like any of the commercial supports available; so you're asked whether you could design Something Cool, and you try, and it works out pretty damn well:
or: you want some simple but functional hooks, to arrange your extension cords in your laundry's cupboard? no problem.
or: after a few unsatisfactory iterations of double-sided tape and other hacks you want something not too ugly to help you park the power supply for your kitchen led strips underneath the cabinet; well, there's a general-purpose customisable mounting hook design on thingiverse and it works really well.
or this fun reason: your colleague manages to drop her whole key ring down the lift shaft (13 stories plus a few underground levels for good measure), so you think it'd be fun to rub it in by 'helping' her with a glow-in-the-dark never-sink-em personal key buoy (guaranteed to not fit into the gap between the lift car and and the floor!).
eeeasy! less than 50 lines of openscad.
on a slow evening you think about making parts for a custom pendant/mobile for your daughter? can be done even on a small printer.
or this, very recent, typical case: your old but nice burr grinder loses the built-in deflector hat, so the beans tend to jump around rather than vanish down the Maw of Future Fresh Coffee? no problem! but it might take you two tries until you get the size right, as the old deflector is long gone. (the translucent orange one was my first print using PETG plastic today, after years of using PLA and ABS.)
one of the early reasons: you inherit a nice bicycle mount with a led light, and the led light is dead; but as you dislike waste you want to use the mount for other stuff? sure, doable and not even hard; eventually i made mounts for my new light, a spot messenger, and others for a small 808 action cam and for my mobile phone (not shown here).
or a toy-related one: your very custom wheely king crawler conversion needs a bumper to become kid-safe again (the previous ones made from shapelock blobs didn't last long enough), so you design and print one:
or this reason: you end up with some surplus LM2596 stepdown modules and decide to make a few whatever-to-5V converters (for car and camping and the like) but with decent heatsink please! which, of course, is only good when it's housed in a not totally shabby case:
occasionally i'm also lazy and don't design my things from scratch (or with inspiration from others' work); every now and then i just take a design off thingiverse or elsewhere and just reify it...like this digital sun clock or the headphone cable organiser, or the case for this raspberry pi.
]]>source: the always awesome pearls before swine
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