Day 13
Up at 7 as we need to packup and be at the visitor’s centre by 7:45 ready for the 8am Lunette Tour. You’re only allowed on the viewing platforms when self-guided, but on the tours they take you down on the dunes and you can wander around and have look up close.
It’s a warm morning, but there is a nice cool breeze too, which feels a bit odd. Nearly perfect conditions really.
The National Parks Guide, Lance, checks our names off and advises we’ll need to follow him in our own cars to the start of the tour. We enquire if we need to come back. if we don’t we’ll take both cars and do the loop road after the tour (which we end up doing). The guy who rode his pushy from the campground is less than impressed, but ends up hitching a ride with the guide (I’m not sure if he a ranger or just a guide).
We drive the 10k’s across the lake to a spot called the Walls of China, named by the Chinese labours on the sheep station that was started here. Speaking of names, Mungo is not an Aboriginal name, but rather the Scottish name of the sheep station that was run here!
He talks about Mungo Lady and Mungo Man, you can google the stories, but these are human remains that are around 42,000 years old. They’ve recently been re-buried somewhere in the area (obviously a secret location).
After a bit more of a chat, where he mentions the lakes last had water in them 17,000 years ago, he opens the gate from the viewing platform and we head down onto the lunette. The first thing that gets me is how hard the ground is. It looks like soft sand, but most of it is in fact rock hard clay. Lance shows us some exposed firepits and bones of animals and explains how the sand is moving so in a few months or so these will be gone and new ones will be uncovered.
Finally up to the top of the dunes, and these are more regular soft sand dunes.
After two hours the tour is done, it was good, a little phoned in, but certainly worthwhile. Again we had a brilliant day for it.
We jump in the cars and head south back to Red Top lookout and take the self-guided drive. We don’t really stop anywhere. I was hoping to take one of the northern0 tracks out of the park onto Garnpang Road, but they are all “closed” so we practically end up driving back to the visitor centre, and burn an hour. That’s OK, I would have hated to come all the way out here and not drive this loop.
Heading north east, we cross a couple more “lakes”, even bigger than Mungo, but without the Lunette dunes. The road ends up being pretty good. We come to an intersection at a place called Clare, the road here turns into not much more than a 2 wheeled track, but again in pretty good condition, it reminded me a little of the Old Strzelecki track. Another 60odd K’s and we hit a spot called Mossgiel (I think). We’re about to approach the intersection and we see a car up ahead. A Pajero, only as we approach, we see it has red and blue flashing on the dash, the guy signals to Doug to pull over, initially we’re not 100% sure until we see the gun, yep it’s a cop, assuming a plain clothes detective or something. He asks about where we’ve come from, going to etc, then asked if we’ve seen a red car, which of course we haven’t, we haven’t seen anyone really.
From here I think it should be another 60k’s to Hillston, it’s not it’s 100. On top of this, I expected this road to be in pretty good condition as it would be used more, but it’s not, it’s crap.
As we’re driving this road, we see a truck coming the other way so we get off the road to let him pass easily, and not long after we catch up truck going the same way as us, fortunately we catch him on a small section of tar for a river crossing so that makes it easy to get around. In both cases being able to get on the UHF and talk to them makes life so much easier.
Finally, after several hours we arrive in Hillston, fill up with fuel, air up the tyres for highway running and grab a bite to eat at a great little café on the Lachlan river.
The plan was to camp at lake Cargelligo, but this is more for vans and we’d like to get a bit further. I see a spot on Wikicamps called Kiacatoo Weir, so we make for that, What I didn’t realise this this road to Condobolin is dirt. Anyway the camp spot is great, no one here and it’s far enough off the road to be peaceful. The water is running over the small weir at a bit of a rate and is a nice background noise. We have a fire and burn the rest of the wood we have. Given it seemed all S.A. national parks had fire bans (from 1 Nov we assume) we’ve missed out on our quota of these.
Finally bed and ready for a big drive home tomorrow.
Day 14 –Condobolin to Home
Up at 7 and one the road before 8, about 30mins, playing leap frog with the local school bus, this road is one way to wake up the students!, and we finally get to Condobolin for morning Coffee. I made a quick stop at the information centre and the “Utes in the paddock” art installation, I’ll have to stop here longer next time to have a better look.
Through Parkes and Orange, a quick stop at Bathurst for Fuel and lunch and we finally arrive home mid-afternoon.
Post Trip Summary
14 Days just under 4000k’s (I think we only did 65k one of the days!)
Well, this is not the trip I expected.
Starting with how busy Victoria was with the Melbourne Cup weekend. The tracks in the Grampians where good, and it would be nice to spend a bit more time there in the future.
The SA beaches were just so much harder than I expected. The ranger suggested the tides where higher at the moment, but looking at the records, they seem average too me. But however you look at it, we had our arses handed to us. Things could have ended a lot worse and I guess we were lucky with the way the tides worked.
Some of the inland tracks, particularly through Canunda National Park where sensational, I’d love to do these again. I would have hoped some of the track inland at the Coorong would have been better than just regular dirt roads, but you can’t win them all.
It was great to visit these SA coastal towns, like Port MacDonnell, Kingston, Carpenter’s Rocks, but particularly Beachport and Robe, such a favourite.
Mungo was good, maybe not up to the hype, but certainly worth a visit. It might have been better at the start of the trip when we were still fresh.
So, all up good trip, maybe not up to the Simpson standards, but a great couple of weeks away.
Now to plan the next one.
Well done.Welcome Home.