Travelling North May-July 2010 Longreach - Winton Part 2

 While we were at Winton we took the time to look around the town at the lovely old houses. It is a town that welcomes tourists and even has a shaded area to park caravans with a new dump point  at the side.

Long waterhole sunset

We really enjoyed camping out at the long waterhole and watching the birdlife and  a partial eclipse occurred on the Saturday night. We also had nice sunsets to the west. The only drawback with  the waterhole area is that it is inaccessible after rain and if it rains while you are there you need to move quickly.

Truck MuseumPart of musical fence

During one of our looks around town we came across the  truck museum and at the back of there was the musical fence.

Lynn" playing the drums"

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part of musical fence

 This set up was accessible to all and had a variety of hanging and fixed objects

- all junk that people could strike etc with a variety of sticks to make whatever music appealed to you at the time. the fence itself was connected to sound boxes so when the strands of wire were plucked or struck they also made more sounds and the different wires all had different sounds. We both had a lot of fun playing the musical fence.


 From Winton we drove north to a small rest area where we had planned to stop he night but found it was going to be too difficult for our big van to access so we just had M/T there and continued north to Stampforth where we thought we might stop but as we approached the tiny town we came across lots of roadworks and when we got there we found there was a large camp for the roadworkers that had virtually taken over the whole area so again we moved on.

Cool water pond

A little further on we came across a bore ( Warianna) just of the road and with some hardstand along side the road and a turning area it made an ideal lunch stop.

Hot artesian bore

  The bore can be seen through the reeds and had very hot water flowing out of it  but the water then made it's way down to the above pond where we saw lots of ducks enjoying the water .  There was also troughs for the cattle to drink from which is why we didn;t camp in the area but moved on to Hughenden.

 From Hughenden we went north again to Porcupine Gorge as we had information that the road was quite good with only a small amount of dirt left. The maps showed that only half the road was sealed. On our arrival there we nearly got caught out by the E- boooking system where you can  pre book a site and the site we initially pulled into was one of them. However a site became vacant just afterwards so we moved onto  that for the next couple of days. We had lovely weather and just took some time to relax and enjoy along with a few short walks to view the gorge. We didn't walk down into the Gorge as Lynn wasn't up to it.

Relaxing  in the shade

Porcupine gorge

more views of the gorge

 Pyramid Rock 

The campground we stayed at was named after this formation.Storyboard at lookout

 Bottle tree at Lookout

  On our way to the Gorge we noted that there were a number of signs indicating historical and geographical features of the area so on the way back to Hughenden we stopped at a few of them . The walk to the Lookout was fairly  short but up a steepish incline so I went on my own and was rewarded with great views right out over the plains to Mt Walker where we had been on previous occassions to view the sunset.

 Black rock gorge