Winter is coming so the north is starting to cool a bit. Time for the Grey Nomads to start touring the northern part of Australia. Still seems backwards to me but that’s the way it is here south of the equator. During the late Spring, Summer, and Early Fall, any travel north of the Tropic of Capricorn is considered foolish, especially if you don’t have air conditioning in your caravan. We do, thank goodness, so our trip last December up to Cairns was tolerable. Our sailing adventure in the Whitsundays, much farther south, was hot, even on the water. Now that Winter is approaching, we have decided to take the caravan out to a town that we have come to admire as a stepping off point to the Outback … Longreach. Our plan is not to proceed past Longreach, but get there, spend a day, and return using a different route. Here’s our route.
We traveled out to Longreach some 9 or 10 years ago with a rental car just to do some exploring. We were visiting our family for a couple months and decided to give everyone a break and Nancy and I took a week off and take a trip.
Our first stop will be in Emerald. Emerald, and the small town of Sapphire just beyond it, host the largest natural gem field in the Southern Hemisphere. People come here for a day, week, month, or years of “FOSSICKING” (looking for gem stones). Some people come out here and file a claim and stay for years. We just want to see the area and maybe pick up a Ruby or a Sapphire that’s just laying around waiting to be picked up. So Emerald was our first day’s destination. We got a good start out on Wednesday morning. took the Dawson highway through Calliope and when we got to Biloela we turned north on the A5 to catch the A4 west to Emerald and Longreach. We were in no particular hurry but made good time and arrived in Emerald early enough to do a little exploring after we unhooked and set up the caravan. There’s a big dam and lake just south of the city, Fairbairn Lake and Dam, so went out and eyeballed that a bit. Then we went back into town to find a huge easel with a picture of some flowers. Van Gogh has a couple of these around the globe, one in Goodland Kansas. It’s 80 feet tall, and atop it rests a 32×24-foot representation of one of Van Gogh’s“Sunflower” paintings. It’s about a half-mile off of I-70 and the others are in Aries, France. This one, apparently the folks of Emerald decided to be original, is of a bouquet of Sun Flowers, also by Vincent Van Gogh. We did find it and it is nice … and very BIG. From there we went back to camp, freshened up and went hunting for a place to eat dinner. We did that, turned in early and got a good night’s sleep.
The next day we proceeded west to Sapphire looking for Jewels. Quite a small town, lots of junk laying around. Mostly mining claims. People come in. stake a claim and start mining for jewels. We decided to take a shortcut and found a place that would sell us some aggregate that we could sift and pick the jewels out of. It’s a tedious process and the jewels are quite rock looking so you need to know what to look for. We spent a couple hours with a pleasant lady who talked and helped us through the process. We ended up with some jewels that we found. Quite a few of them really but discovered it was only the first step we had taken.
So I bet that was disappointing. Here’s the rest of the story. In addition to the one container of jewels you saw, we had several more of different sizes and types. What we need to do now is to ship them to a jeweler in Thailand that will cut and polish them for us. Some that had inclusions or cracks we will just tumble and make shiny rocks out of that look like jewels but not cut to Jewel specifications. When we have this done, I will add them to this post so you will be able to see the before and after of our efforts. I think we collected several hundred thousand dollars worth of jewels once they are cut and polished … we’ll just have to wait and see. Right now they just look like gravel to the untrained eye.
After spending the better part of the morning there in Sapphire getting rich and learning all about Fossicking (you can Google “Fossicking” and learn all about Fossicking in Australia) we left and pressed on westward to Longreach. We arrived fairly late so we set up camp and drove downtown looking for dinner. Here are a few pictures of downtown Longreach.
For dinner we went to the local RSL, (The “Returned and Services League” of Australia, known as RSL, RSL Australia and RSLA, is an independent support organisation for people who have served or are serving in the Australian Defence Force.) much like the US American Legion, which serves a fine meal and operates a nice tavern where many people go to eat and socialize. They are found in many communities and are open to the public to stay solvent. After a pleasant evening that included a great dinner we went back to the campground and turned in. that night we both dreamed of the riches in store for us once we get the jewels we found tidied up.
The next day we decided we were going out into the outback and finding a place they called “Starlight Lookout”. It was about 60 kilometers out into the outback so we took along an extra cup of coffee and off we went. As expected, about two kilometers out of town the pavement stopped and we were on various kinds of dirt roads. Not to be deterred we pressed on, past the herds of cattle, bands of Emus, and loads of nothing. About five kilometers from the location we ran into some flooding across the road. The advice in Australia regarding going through flooded areas is this. “If you have not crossed here before and there is water across the road, turn back.” It can be hours or even days before someone comes along to help you of you get stranded and there is no cellular service anywhere near. The condition of the road can be changed substantially by the water running over it so you never know what is going to happen once you venture out into the water. Even with posts marking the side and depth gauges (I have pictures of them in other posts) you have no assurance you will make it. Most locals have a SATCOM telephone or at least a long range UHF radio in their vehicles. We had neither so, we turned around. Here’s the trip.
To abate your disappointment I am posting some photos I lifted off the internet of the Starlight Lookout.
Once you get out into the outback, just like any other remote area, you have no ambient light and millions of stars come into view, the milky way looks milky and the sky is beautiful. We imagined the starry night that follows the sunset here at this spot must be quite spectacular. There are a quite few pictures of this place on the internet. Just google “Starlight Lookout, Longreach” for a peak.
That evening we had dinner in a different tavern … and before you all think we are drunks and live in taverns, that’s what they have in most towns to eat at … Taverns. Most of them have a bar, a bistro or restaurant, and the pokies. (Pokies are the room where they have all the slot machines that you “Poke” money into). This tavern had a dining room they called the Captain Starlight room. We thought it might have something to do with the spot we tried to get to that day so we read about it. It turns out that Captain Starlight was a cattle rustler named Henry Readford who stole about a thousand cattle near Longreach and drove them south nearly two thousand kilometers to South Australia where he sold them. He avoided detection and capture by driving the cattle at night using the stars for direction … a skill he had learned form local Aboriginals. The story can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Readford The men who accompanied him were so impressed he could navigate by night that they named him … “Captain Starlight”! Just like our western lore, there are thousands of stories of life in the outback. Anyhow, we enjoyed a nice dinner and returned to camp to get some rest before starting our trip back home.
We planned to use a different route going south from Emerald to a town named Rolleston, then catching Highway 60, or the Dawson Highway, east to Biloela and home. Our plan was to spend the night in Rolleston which was about half way. We got a couple coffees to go at the local bakery after we packed up the caravan and headed east to Emerald. It was a nice day and everything was going well and we made good time. We made a couple pit stops and a couple for gas and soon we were headed south out of Emerald towards Rolleston, our destination. I started raining … it was till early … I asked Nancy how she felt about spending the night in a damp campground listening to the rain on the caravan roof … we started coming across areas that had flooded and looked like they were about to be flooded again … once an area floods, all you can do is stay where where you are at until the waters recede … we put “home” in the GPS and saw we could be home by seven that evening … we decided to go for it and pressed on. We made one last stop for fuel in Banana and were home just after seven. The rain had continued most of the way. We went directly to “our” local tavern, parked on the grass across the street, and had dinner there. We were home a little before nine and slept in our own beds that night and after the 980 kilometer dash home, we were ready for a good nights sleep.
That was out rip to Longreach and the outback. It was a fun getaway and we will do many more like that now that it has started to cool off a bit. Stay tuned.
OMG !!!!! I almost forgot!!! After we got back from our trip out to Starlight Lookout (almost) we drove around Longreach a little just soaking up the local flavor. If it wasn’t so far from anywhere I would move there. As they say, “It’s not in the middle of nowhere, but you can see nowhere from there!”. Anyhow, one of the things we checked out was a little museum at the airport. We didn’t actually go into the museum (if you read my intro, we are not museum people) but I did take a couple of pictures. Few people know that Longreach, little ole Longreach way out in the outback, is the birthplace of Australia’s biggest airline, Quantas. Yup …. you can look it up right here: https://www.qantas.com/au/en/about-us/our-company/our-history/early-years-1918-1938.html
Here are a couple pictures I took. I took them only because there was a Boeing Aircraft there … my favorite aircraft maker (despite recent problems.
Okay … that is it. No more Alibis.
