Day 12 – Tailem Bend to Mungo National Park

A warm windy morning and we hit the road at 8.

Up through Kooranda, Berri and we finally stop in Renmark for an early lunch, my last S.A. Pastie and probably the best.  

We could head to Mildura and then head north to Mungo, but there is a backroad that skirts the north of the Murray, and drives past Lake Victoria.  It’s not far out of Renmark that we turn onto the Wentworth-Renmark Road, so reassuring when the intended destination is in the road name.  It’s turns to dirt pretty quickly, but the road is in good condition and when we let the tyre pressures down a bit is pretty smooth.  Like most dirt roads it gets patchy in areas.

We stop at the border crossing this time for a photo opp.  Past Lake Victoria, it sure is large.

We’re driving along, I’m 2^nd, doing just under 70km/h and out of the corner of my eye I see a goat running towards me.  A big black goat, I try to hit the anchors, but I don’t think I wash off too much speed before “BANG”, I’ve hit him (or did he hit me?).  At all happens so fast, it seems he went under the car, and amazingly gets up and runs off into the bushes.  I’d prefer to make sure it’s dead, but I’m not going hunting for it.   I quickly pull over, there’s more damage than I expected.  The bonnet has been pushed in and is out of alignment.   All the lights and radiator all seem OK, so we should be good to continue on.   All the goats we’ve ever driven by have normally stood their ground or moved away from the car, so a goat was the last animal I was expecting to hit.  Sheep, Kangaroo or Emu yes, Goat no.

165k’s later we arrive in Wentworth, and you can’t drive through here without a stop at the Murray Darling Confluence.  

Fuelled up, as this will be the last fuel for a while, we hit the road to Mungo.  It almost immediately turns to dirt, but it seems they are going to seal sections of the road, so it’s all being graded and prepped for sealing, it’s in excellent condition.  We even pass a couple of graders at work.

For once, I’m sorry to see the roadworks finish, as the road quickly turns to rubbish. The other thing that is rubbish is google map’s direction.  We’ve been told to ignore them, but it’s surprising how inaccurate they are.  They have me going up tracks that simply don’t exist.

• Of course not the exact route, as google doesn’t know the right way!

Around 4, we finally arrive.  A quick look around the visitor’s centre and we take a walk over to the old shearing shed.  Amazing structure and it surprising that it’s still standing after all those years.  It would have been one hot place to work in summer.

Done, we then go an find a camp spot in the main campground, about 1km away.  The area is meant to take 30 bookings, I’m not sure there are 30 sites, but it’s not a busy time of year so that’s fine.

Apparently sunset is worthwhile on the dunes, it’s about 18k’s to one of the lookouts I’ve read about.  We have no service so we calculate sunset based on the other night, we need to allow for the 30min time difference, and I completely balls it up, so we arrive about an hour early!

That’s fine, we have plenty of snacks in the car so we wait quietly for sunset to arrive.  It’s really peaceful out here. 

Finally close to sunset, a group of couples arrive, of all things in an Audi A3, with low profile highway tyres, I’d would’ve hated to be in that thing driving the 100 odd K’s to come out here, it was bad enough in our 4×4 with proper suspension and tyres.

Anyway a nice sunset, and we head back to camp.   After such a long day, we couldn’t be bothered with dinner. A kangaroo wandered around the campground, certainly looking for food as I suspect a lot of people feed them, and finally it’s an early night.