Day 106

14/10/2009

Still heading east across Queensland and will be for another day to reach the coast. Stopped in Mount Isa, a mining town to buy food and fuel. There's certainly nothing resembling a mountain here any more. Also passed through Cloncurry where the flying doctor service started, and where Qantas airline was conceived.

Got a text from Simon and Pat to say the Land Rover had passed the quarantine inspection at the first attempt and they were going to the vehicle testing centre for the equivaent of an MOT test. They must have done an amazing cleaning job in the 26 hours they had available. Gives me some regrets not attempting to bring the van here, but a 20 year old T3 has lots more debris and nooks and crannies than a 5 year old Land Rover, so maybe it was the right decision.

The roads so far are very quiet, long and straight which means we can average a good speed, quite a contrast to Indonesia. The lorries too are a contrast - not the small lorries for twisty roads, but road trains. The Americans talk about 18 wheelers, here they have 18 axles, 70 wheels.
That's a tractor unit, pulling 3 trailors with a total length of 53 metres and weighing maybe 70 tonnes.

We were overtaken by one today, and videoed it. Will try and post it on the blog soon.

Lat 20 39.07 S
Long 141 44.41 E
Distance +2327km
Town Julia Creek