Kink in the road

Just settling down at a very mellow campground in Charleville - I've concluded that camping is far preferable to the traditional outback hotel. Last night was spent in a hotel in Longreach - I don't mind tatty, but I woke up in the night with that unmistakeable itching/burning feeling - bedbugs! To avoid libel, I won't mention the name of the hotel - but I doubt the proprieters of the Lyceum will ever see this blog...

Total independence!

On to the kink in the road... It turns out that Queensland is experiencing its biggest floods in 25 years, which have swept away one of only two sealed roads that lead to Darwin from the East. Here's a link... Having covered over 4,000km already and got to within 2,000km, it looks like I may have to make a 2,500km detour via Adelaide, which will certainly mean missing the 16 Jan ship to Singapore.

Now the first rule of outback travel is to always check the road conditions ahead. But I had been tipped off at the start of the week that there was some fairly major flooding in Queensland, so I stopped in at every Tourist Misinformation office over the past few days to ask if the road from Mount Isa to Darwin was open, and every time I was told "She'll be right. Check in at the next town". Eventually I saw a 3 day old newspaper headline announcing that the road has been completely washed away. What's frustrating is that I'm sure that most people in Melbourne and Sydney are aware of this - but news travels slow in the outback...

To add insult to injury, the old boy in the Tourist Misinformation office in Emerald spent 15 minutes telling me a story that was clearly not true about how as a lad he had crashed his mate's BSA into a chicken coop at 100mph. After paying for the damage - here's the punchline - he had to compensate the farmer because the chickens stopped laying! Boom boom. Nice one old fellow, but the Thunderbird was actually a Triumph, I very much doubt you would have walked away from a spill like that, and I'm sure you stole the plot from a Norman Wisdom film... Now, about that bloody highway...

The smug policewoman in Longreach told me the highway would be closed for 3 weeks, so I have started making my way back to Adelaide. But I heard today it may only be a week, so the best course of action may be to stay put and amuse myself for a day or two in Charleville (pop. 3,000) to find out what's really going on.