Day 2 – September 2 2012

An absolutely cold night but cosy in the Karavan.  A freezing start to the morning at Birdcage Reserve.  The birds didn’t seem to mind as they went about starting their day.  Our first breakfast of the trip we watched the sun filtering through the trees & the reflections off the river, and then we were away by 8.45am.  Suddenly the phone rang, James called to wish his father a happy father’s day.  That call made the day!  Ron phoned his dad & we had a chat with him.  Amazing, when you are on the road how good it is catch up with loved ones (we only left home a day ago).  We turned off the highway into Hay to see what it looked like, a huge improvement on my last visit 30 years ago.  A U-turn at the end of the main street & a stop for fuel then off again.  The land has now turned even flatter (if that’s possible) from horizon to horizon with a scattered small trees & lots of saltbush.  There are lots of cotton farms on either side of the road, getting irrigation water from the Murrumbidgee River.  We were planning to turn off at Balranald for the trip on the dirt road up to Mungo Lake, but with all the rain recently I thought it may be prudent to head on to Mildura before heading north.  We stopped at Mildura for lunch & refuelled, plus buy a few fresh fruit & vegetables now that we were inside the fruit fly exclusion zone (no fruit or vegetables allowed into the fruit fly exclusion zone).

We had about 20km of bitumen road then we let the tyres really down before proceeding on to the final 88km of dirt road to Mungo Lake National Park. It is a World Heritage listed place because they discovered Mungo Lady & later Mungo Man.   Some parts of the road were good, some parts bad.  We travelled at around 60km/hr, kicking up small & large stones behind us, slowing for all oncoming traffic.

Arriving at Mungo Lake we turned into the Main Camp & set up for the night.  Once settled we sat down with some cheese & red wine (Favourite Son 2006 cabernet merlot to celebrate father’s day) before heading off on the “Grasslands Walk” from the camp area.  This took us about half an hour, stopping & reading all the information signs on the trackside.  We saw some nice parrots, emus but no kangaroos. The temperature is a very pleasant 22C & the walk was a nice way to relax after 502km of driving today.