Our Outback Experience

We really felt we were getting into the outback when we arrived at the small town called Miles 340km west of Brisbane. The earth had become an intense red colour and we were stopped in our tracks when we spotted emus in a field. The roads seemed to never end with very little traffic passing us and no mobile coverage this was when we started monitoring our fuel gauge very closely.

Arriving in Mitchell (population 1000) we came across trees we have never seen before called Queensland Bottle Trees their name deriving from their shape. The swelling is due to water held in the trunk making them ideally suited to the outback climate. This town is famous for its artesian spa pools which are pumped up hot from the Great Artesian Basin - David gave them a try. The same source provides the water supply for the town and consequently the cold taps in our motel produced hotter water than the hot.

Our furtherest inland destination was an outback town called Charleville, 638km from Brisbane, we were interested in visiting their state of the art observatory which proved to be an amazing experience.

Its not until you get into the outback that you realise how tough the farmers must have had it in recent years battling the drought. This year they had a different problem to deal with as they have just had major floods throughout the area. The water has subsided in the towns and a huge recovery program is underway as they try and get back to business as usual.

Charlesville is the biggest town in this area and home to a flying doctor base. This base services approximately 622000 sq km of southwest Qld - an area almost the size of the UK (unreal!) and we took a tour around the centre.

There is also a weather station where the lone resident meteorologist gives free 'tours' as he goes through the morning routine of taking and reporting various measurements. The measurements are used by the pilots coming and going from Charlesville and are also fed into the models used for the national forecasts. The finale of the tour was to watch the weather balloon being launched into the atmosphere as shown in the picture: this happens automatically each day at exactly 9:15am. The balloon takes measurements every two seconds until it reaches high in the upper atmosphere and bursts - the balloon plus instruments including GPS is lost each time.

Currently heading back to the coast and stopped in Toowoomba which is a very pleasant town and seems very civilised after the outback. Picture shows Table-top mountain at Toowoomba.

Tomorrow night we will be back on the boat. Will we head north to the Whitsundays or will we head south to Sydney???


Find out next blog :)