On Tow And On The Go…Again

We made the most of our last few days here. We had our last morning coffees on the beach, our last camp cooks and our last kayaking expeditions and we continued to soak up the serenity. There are a lot more birds here now, and more seemed to be arriving each day. We had another visit from Stumpy, the Shingleback lizard. He just wandered through camp and took a few sultanas from me, the went on his way, and, we had an echidna in camp. He was very shy though, hid himself under a bush so we left him in peace. As much as I love to photograph our wildlife, I really don’t like to stress them out unnecessarily.

Menindee itself seems to be a friendly town. I say “seems”, because thanks to the lockdown, we only met the postmaster and his wife, the grocer, and the policeman, but it has certainly come alive since the lockdown ended. On the first day of freedom, we literally saw more cars, both travellers and locals, on the road than we had seen in the nine weeks we had been here.

I was disappointed in the lack of accessibility to the lakes. Even without the Covid restrictions, and with Kinchega National Park being closed, there are limited access points to the many lakes in the area. There are six lakes, Menindee, Pamamaroo, Tandure, Cawndilla, Emu, Wetherell and Bijijije. Now don’t quote me on this, as I said it was hard to move around with the restrictions, but from our little forays, we found that the only access points to Menindee Lake seemed to be via the two caravan parks and Sunset strip, and that was a bit of a stretch. We couldn’t get to Emu Lake as it was in the national park and that was closed, and I’m not sure about the other lakes. We had intended to visit Emu Lake after the lockdown was lifted, but…the park was still closed. Saying all of that, Pamamraoo itself was most definitely not a disappointment, and it would have been hard to find a better place for us to have spent the last nine weeks.

So, where to next? Well, our hope is to get into South Australia, but we don’t think that they’ll let us in from NSW. That’s why we are heading north, back to QLD. We will apply for our border crossing permit once we get to Tibooburra, just south of the QLD border, and hope that they will let us in. If that works, we’ll hang around outback QLD for a couple of weeks, in effect self-isolating, then apply for a SA permit. Fingers crossed.

In the meantime we have many happy memories of our stay at Lake Pamamaroo.

See you out there somewhere

On tow and on the go!