On the road again.  From A to B 540km a little bit too much but there wasn’t a lot in between Longreach and Cloncurry.  A lot of caravans were on the road and some road trains whizzed past. The scenery didn’t change very much from flat dry, poor looking grass land, very rarely a few sheep grazing, no homestead, just the railway line and telegraph poles. A lot of road kill, crows and some wedge tail eagles and black kites.  It was rather exciting when we came up to some jump ups (little mounds popping up in a dead flat land) and termite mounds as we got closer to Cloncurry.

Another amazing site was the swarms of locusts we came across.  One swarm was so large I first noticed what I thought was a dust cloud about 5km away & I commented to Tereza that it was unusual to see a dust cloud that big, there must be some farmer ploughing to create that much dust.  No, as we got closer & closer it turned out it was a massive swarm of locusts.  Driving through it we must have killed thousands of locusts, but travelling at 90km/hr they just bounce off the windscreen, rather than smear all over it.  As the day wore on & it got hotter, (up to 30C at around 3pm) the locusts flew higher than the car so we didn’t hit as many.  When we finally stopped in Cloncurry I cleaned all the dead locusts out of the grill.  We have a wire mesh screen in front of the radiator for just these occurrences so the radiator didn’t get clogged with them.

We found a little caravan park (about 20 campers), very basic bush setting (Wal’s Bush Camp) but it has good hot showers. The $10 nightly fee is paid into an honesty box.  We were immediately accepted into this community, people came and chatted to us about the usual.  We cooked our dinner with another very interesting couple from Kurunda (near Cairns) on a wood fuel stove under a beautiful huge black sky full of stars.