As our Landcruiser hadn't cleared the docks yet, we were still wondering how we would get both camper trailers to the site which was a couple of hours away, when out of the blue St.Waz emails me offering us the use of his Delica for the weekend - a HUGE THANK YOU to Waz and Lenny for their generosity! For those that are not familiar with the Delica (not sure if it is pronounced De-leeca, or Deli-kuh...), it is a 4X4 minibus style vehicle built on the same chassis as a Mitsubishi Pajero. Here it is parked up next to my brother's GU Patrol.
To get to Gordon Country from Brisbane we drove through Cunninghams Gap which is a reasonably steep pass over the Great Dividing Range, and a major transport route. Going up the pass I may have been a little enthusiastic to start with, and about halfway up I noticed that the temp gauge on the Delica had started climbing. Not wanting to have a rather uncomfortable conversation with Waz about why I cooked his car, I pulled over at the first opportunity. It turned out that this was a small car park at the crest of the pass that is the start/finish for the Cunninghams Gap walking tracks, and also where we had planned to stop for lunch and take in the views. Once pulled over the Delica rapidly cooled down, so we set off on one of the shorter walks (with the 3 children under 4 years old) to the lookout point.
After lunch we carried on around the loop and took some pics inside a very large tree. Here is Ness posing with Jake and Alecia (our 3 year old niece).
Here is Marius noticing several very large spiders also (taking pics?) in the tree, and Alecia not needing a second look.
Then the walk went from interesting/beautiful/peaceful to... memorable. Ness was the first to notice a leach in her shoe. Yip, a leach. It took a while for everyone in our little expedition party to be convinced that there actually was a leach, but when Bridgette spotted another one in her shoe, we suddenly found ourselves deep in the jungle. While Marius and I would have continued like men (calm, but wary of danger), the girls proceeded at near-panic evacuation pace. Obviously we could not leave them alone, so we followed. On the way back to the parking lot we passed a very mystic looking Indian yogi type fellow, at the same time as we found another leach in one of the shoes. It's hard to describe how funny a panicked holy man (with small towel around his waist, long walking stick, weathered expression, the works) looks when he is miming "kill it, kill it". Back at the cars we all did a foot inspection, and both Marius and I had blood on our feet. Here is the little sucker that got me.
The bite on my heel was tiny, but with the anticoagulant that it injected into me, I bled for ages.
When we arrived at Gordon country we chose to camp in the 4WD area. The entrance was down a short steep bank and through a rocky stream that was about a foot deep and flowing gently. The camp area is beautiful and there was only one other family there, so we could pitch anywhere we wanted to.
We chose a spot on the bank of the river which flowed past about 2 meters below us.
The first job was to get a fire started, and then everyone got stuck in putting up the 2 campers for the first time (although my brother had set ours up a couple of times before we got to Australia).
We treated ourselves to a decent coffee setup, and over the course of the weekend we got to love this more and more. There is nothing like a fresh forest morning and an excellent cup of coffee.
A light drizzle blew in early that morning, and someone mentioned that the weather report was for sunshine and showers, so it should brighten up later. Actually, it didn't brighten up at all. Instead, it started raining slightly harder as the morning went on. By mid-morning we noticed that the stream had come up a bit.
Half an hour later it was looking like a river, and we were glad that we were so high up the bank. We should have paid more attention to how fast it was coming up though.
This was the only way in and out of the campsite. At this point it didn't look too deep, so my brother ferried the girls across in his Patrol for a shower on the other side.
Shortly after we saw them on the opposite bank waving at us, so we smiled and waved back. By this point the river was making enough noise that we couldn't hear what they were shouting out to us. Then we remembered the handheld radio that he had left with us. After having made it across to the other side, my brother was not at all confident that he could get back again, so we were now stuck on opposite sides of the river. On their side there was him, his wife Bridgette, his daughter Alecia, and baby Liezl. On our side was Ness, Jake, me and Liezl's baby food...
At the same time Ness noticed that another family who had arrived that morning were packing up and getting ready to leave again. Earlier that morning, Marius and I had commented on how brave he was to take his twin axle caravan down the steep bank and through the creek. The creek that was by now a roaring river. Ness ran over and shared Marius' thoughts on the current with them, but the chap was determined to leave despite his wife's pleas to wait. To be fair he did have a pretty pimped out GQ Patrol. As expected, the current was too strong and as soon as the water hit the van, it got pulled down stream. His only option was to give it gas and he almost made it across, but then the van got stuck on some rocks on the exit side. I didn't take many pics as his wife was standing next to me crying as she watched the caravan, first getting bashed on the rocks, and then filling with water. By this point my brother had become aware of what was happening and had rushed to the top of the exit with his Patrol to try and winch him out - with the sharp turn snatching wasn't possible.
Eventually the chap did manage to winch himself and the caravan out of the river, but it was a very expensive escape. Caravan interiors are not made to get soaked, and I suspect that the caravan may have been a write-off. What must have been even more gutting, was that shortly after it stopped raining and the river started dropping again. It dropped enough for him to come back over to fetch his family, and bring Marius' family with him to the "baby food" side.
It only stopped for a short while though, and before we could make a lunch fire, the rain was back and the river started swelling again.
And again we were thankful that we had chosen a high site. Here you can see how high we were from the river at this point.
Marius was the only one who had remembered to bring his umbrella.
Ok, let's see what happened next... oh yes! It rained some more... and more... and more... and by early afternoon, our site had turned into Lake van Wyk. When the water started coming through the mesh floor under the awning and crept towards the tent, we got digging. The idea was to divert the water down the bank and into the river.
With only 1 shovel and 1 axe to dig with, we never really stood a chance against Cyclone Oswald. Sunshine and showers my arse! The decision was made to retreat to (even) higher ground. This presented us with a fresh challenge in the relentless rain - how do we get the 2 campers through the soft soaked tracks and up a slippery slope to higher ground, with the Patrol (and its mud boots) on the other side of the river. None of us thought that it was a good idea to risk getting the Delica stuck. Some boga... loud young people.. had arrived in the middle of the previous night, and we even considered asking them for help, but by the time we had packed up the first camper I decided that the Delica would be fine if we dropped the tyre pressures (I wasn't sure about this in the mud), locked the centre diff and drove up the slippery hill in low range - when I say "we would be fine", I was making the best of a grim situation. However, when the Delica did make it up, it felt like we had summit-ed Everest! We got the tent set up again quick as a flash, and left the wives and children while we went back for the second camper. The one with the beer in it. Well we deserved a beer didn't we ;)
Here is the new site. Note that even up here the water had started pooling on the flat bits (bottom left) as the ground could not absorb any more rain.
Another group of well equipped campers that must also have arrived that morning (or late the previous evening) , had come to the same decision as us and also decided to move to the spot next to us. One other family with a camper trailer was still on the lower bit, but through some very bad luck had managed to get their ute stuck in some very slippery black mud, and the river had come up while the father (Daine) was on the other side looking for someone to help. Ness checked that they were OK, and offered for us to help if they wanted it. They said that they were OK for the time being, but we were still a bit worried about them so kept an eye out for the water level where they were (we had a good view from where we were). At 6am the next morning Jackie came and asked for help as the water had pooled on the canvas roof and she could not get it off - it sounded odd, but when we got there, we saw that the sagging roof was holding enough water to fill a bath tub. Their poor family (Jackie and 2 young children) had not slept all night trying to keep the tent lashed down and the water out in the driving wind and rain. By morning their tent was also floating in a lake of water, so we decided to get their gear moved up to our spot as well. At this point Joe, Blake, Andy, Liberty and Emily (our new neighbours) mucked in as well, and we got the camper moved up in no time at all. I did feel a bit bad because you could see that the setup had been done with great care, and here we were just pulling it apart as fast as possible. It was too wet and cold to take our time though. As strange as it might sound, this was one of the highlights of the weekend, because it was great to see how everyone just did what needed to be done, completely selflessly and without complaining. Later in the day we found out that Joe and his group had also had their beds washed out and that their communal kitchen tent had collapsed during the night - the weight of the water on their kitchen tent had bent the tent poles. Seeing as we had loads of dry room in our campers/awnings, we all got together and Andy knocked up a gourmet breakfast for everyone - turns out Andy is a chef :)
This is Liberty, Joe and Andy drying out and making breakfast.
Here is Jackie (I hope I am spelling this correctly), with Levi and Zoe, trying to dry out under the awning.
For the next 2 days it rained and rained and rained, and I thought that I would christen our camper Et's Ark as we all took shelter in it. By this time we were starting to get a little bit worried by 2 things. Firstly, as we had only planned to camp for 4 days we did not have enough food, baby formula and baby/toddler bum kit. And secondly, with the strong winds several large trees had been blown over that could easily have flattened the camper. When the bigger ones snapped it sounded a bit like a small cannon going off. A lot of branches were also falling, and even though they might not bury the camper, they could seriously injure someone. The camp site care taker was getting in touch twice a day via HF radio to make sure that we were OK, and warned us that we should expect some very strong winds overnight. Although we tried to prepare for this (I swapped all my regular pegs for the much longer sand pegs), everyone was a little nervous as Joe's Troopie had already suffered a direct hit on the cab roof. That night the winds apparently got up to 120kph - it certainly sounded like it from inside the tent.
When we got up there was a break in the wind and rain, so we all went out to inspect the river level and took a walk down to our abandoned sites. The river was even higher and we could see by the debris that it had come up and flooded our first pitches. We we were VERY glad that we had done the sensible thing and moved to higher ground. There were also lots of fallen branches all over the place.
The sign asks visitors not to damage the grass.
Eventually the sun did come out though, and we had the whole place to ourselves. The river started dropping and Daine managed to get back over and was reunited with his family. The bog... other young campers who had only brought beer and no food, were in a big hurry to get out of there, but we figured we may as well stay another few days and enjoy the beautiful campsite, and some wildlife.
Now we were at least able to go back and forth across the creek to the toilets and showers, but we were still cut-off from getting home as some of the roads back to Brisbane had been damaged. We did have access to the nearest town (Allora) though, so we were able to re-supply with nappies and beer. And food.
Our new friends had jobs to get back to so we said farewell. We will definitely be looking them up again when we set off on our trip.
We also managed to get Daine's ute pulled out with the Patrol, which incidentally had a fridge full of cold beer on it - what we would have given for that bit of info just 24 hours before!
Eventually we headed home too (back to my brother's place), just in time for my 40th birthday. Funny how 40 doesn't seem that old when you are 40.
What a week! This "shakedown" trip has certainly set the bar very high in the excitement stakes, and if this is anything to go by we are in for an awesome adventure this year.
After lunch we carried on around the loop and took some pics inside a very large tree. Here is Ness posing with Jake and Alecia (our 3 year old niece).
Here is Marius noticing several very large spiders also (taking pics?) in the tree, and Alecia not needing a second look.
Then the walk went from interesting/beautiful/peaceful to... memorable. Ness was the first to notice a leach in her shoe. Yip, a leach. It took a while for everyone in our little expedition party to be convinced that there actually was a leach, but when Bridgette spotted another one in her shoe, we suddenly found ourselves deep in the jungle. While Marius and I would have continued like men (calm, but wary of danger), the girls proceeded at near-panic evacuation pace. Obviously we could not leave them alone, so we followed. On the way back to the parking lot we passed a very mystic looking Indian yogi type fellow, at the same time as we found another leach in one of the shoes. It's hard to describe how funny a panicked holy man (with small towel around his waist, long walking stick, weathered expression, the works) looks when he is miming "kill it, kill it". Back at the cars we all did a foot inspection, and both Marius and I had blood on our feet. Here is the little sucker that got me.
The bite on my heel was tiny, but with the anticoagulant that it injected into me, I bled for ages.
When we arrived at Gordon country we chose to camp in the 4WD area. The entrance was down a short steep bank and through a rocky stream that was about a foot deep and flowing gently. The camp area is beautiful and there was only one other family there, so we could pitch anywhere we wanted to.
We chose a spot on the bank of the river which flowed past about 2 meters below us.
The first job was to get a fire started, and then everyone got stuck in putting up the 2 campers for the first time (although my brother had set ours up a couple of times before we got to Australia).
I was very impressed with how quickly it all went up - maybe an hour and a half including the awning. With a bit of practice I think we will be able to do this in half that time, and even less (maybe 20 minutes) if we don't put up the awning on short stops.
With the campers setup, it was time to make our first POTJIE (little pot in Afrikaans). Life was good!
We treated ourselves to a decent coffee setup, and over the course of the weekend we got to love this more and more. There is nothing like a fresh forest morning and an excellent cup of coffee.
A light drizzle blew in early that morning, and someone mentioned that the weather report was for sunshine and showers, so it should brighten up later. Actually, it didn't brighten up at all. Instead, it started raining slightly harder as the morning went on. By mid-morning we noticed that the stream had come up a bit.
Half an hour later it was looking like a river, and we were glad that we were so high up the bank. We should have paid more attention to how fast it was coming up though.
This was the only way in and out of the campsite. At this point it didn't look too deep, so my brother ferried the girls across in his Patrol for a shower on the other side.
Shortly after we saw them on the opposite bank waving at us, so we smiled and waved back. By this point the river was making enough noise that we couldn't hear what they were shouting out to us. Then we remembered the handheld radio that he had left with us. After having made it across to the other side, my brother was not at all confident that he could get back again, so we were now stuck on opposite sides of the river. On their side there was him, his wife Bridgette, his daughter Alecia, and baby Liezl. On our side was Ness, Jake, me and Liezl's baby food...
At the same time Ness noticed that another family who had arrived that morning were packing up and getting ready to leave again. Earlier that morning, Marius and I had commented on how brave he was to take his twin axle caravan down the steep bank and through the creek. The creek that was by now a roaring river. Ness ran over and shared Marius' thoughts on the current with them, but the chap was determined to leave despite his wife's pleas to wait. To be fair he did have a pretty pimped out GQ Patrol. As expected, the current was too strong and as soon as the water hit the van, it got pulled down stream. His only option was to give it gas and he almost made it across, but then the van got stuck on some rocks on the exit side. I didn't take many pics as his wife was standing next to me crying as she watched the caravan, first getting bashed on the rocks, and then filling with water. By this point my brother had become aware of what was happening and had rushed to the top of the exit with his Patrol to try and winch him out - with the sharp turn snatching wasn't possible.
Eventually the chap did manage to winch himself and the caravan out of the river, but it was a very expensive escape. Caravan interiors are not made to get soaked, and I suspect that the caravan may have been a write-off. What must have been even more gutting, was that shortly after it stopped raining and the river started dropping again. It dropped enough for him to come back over to fetch his family, and bring Marius' family with him to the "baby food" side.
It only stopped for a short while though, and before we could make a lunch fire, the rain was back and the river started swelling again.
And again we were thankful that we had chosen a high site. Here you can see how high we were from the river at this point.
Marius was the only one who had remembered to bring his umbrella.
Ok, let's see what happened next... oh yes! It rained some more... and more... and more... and by early afternoon, our site had turned into Lake van Wyk. When the water started coming through the mesh floor under the awning and crept towards the tent, we got digging. The idea was to divert the water down the bank and into the river.
With only 1 shovel and 1 axe to dig with, we never really stood a chance against Cyclone Oswald. Sunshine and showers my arse! The decision was made to retreat to (even) higher ground. This presented us with a fresh challenge in the relentless rain - how do we get the 2 campers through the soft soaked tracks and up a slippery slope to higher ground, with the Patrol (and its mud boots) on the other side of the river. None of us thought that it was a good idea to risk getting the Delica stuck. Some boga... loud young people.. had arrived in the middle of the previous night, and we even considered asking them for help, but by the time we had packed up the first camper I decided that the Delica would be fine if we dropped the tyre pressures (I wasn't sure about this in the mud), locked the centre diff and drove up the slippery hill in low range - when I say "we would be fine", I was making the best of a grim situation. However, when the Delica did make it up, it felt like we had summit-ed Everest! We got the tent set up again quick as a flash, and left the wives and children while we went back for the second camper. The one with the beer in it. Well we deserved a beer didn't we ;)
Here is the new site. Note that even up here the water had started pooling on the flat bits (bottom left) as the ground could not absorb any more rain.
Another group of well equipped campers that must also have arrived that morning (or late the previous evening) , had come to the same decision as us and also decided to move to the spot next to us. One other family with a camper trailer was still on the lower bit, but through some very bad luck had managed to get their ute stuck in some very slippery black mud, and the river had come up while the father (Daine) was on the other side looking for someone to help. Ness checked that they were OK, and offered for us to help if they wanted it. They said that they were OK for the time being, but we were still a bit worried about them so kept an eye out for the water level where they were (we had a good view from where we were). At 6am the next morning Jackie came and asked for help as the water had pooled on the canvas roof and she could not get it off - it sounded odd, but when we got there, we saw that the sagging roof was holding enough water to fill a bath tub. Their poor family (Jackie and 2 young children) had not slept all night trying to keep the tent lashed down and the water out in the driving wind and rain. By morning their tent was also floating in a lake of water, so we decided to get their gear moved up to our spot as well. At this point Joe, Blake, Andy, Liberty and Emily (our new neighbours) mucked in as well, and we got the camper moved up in no time at all. I did feel a bit bad because you could see that the setup had been done with great care, and here we were just pulling it apart as fast as possible. It was too wet and cold to take our time though. As strange as it might sound, this was one of the highlights of the weekend, because it was great to see how everyone just did what needed to be done, completely selflessly and without complaining. Later in the day we found out that Joe and his group had also had their beds washed out and that their communal kitchen tent had collapsed during the night - the weight of the water on their kitchen tent had bent the tent poles. Seeing as we had loads of dry room in our campers/awnings, we all got together and Andy knocked up a gourmet breakfast for everyone - turns out Andy is a chef :)
This is Liberty, Joe and Andy drying out and making breakfast.
Here is Jackie (I hope I am spelling this correctly), with Levi and Zoe, trying to dry out under the awning.
For the next 2 days it rained and rained and rained, and I thought that I would christen our camper Et's Ark as we all took shelter in it. By this time we were starting to get a little bit worried by 2 things. Firstly, as we had only planned to camp for 4 days we did not have enough food, baby formula and baby/toddler bum kit. And secondly, with the strong winds several large trees had been blown over that could easily have flattened the camper. When the bigger ones snapped it sounded a bit like a small cannon going off. A lot of branches were also falling, and even though they might not bury the camper, they could seriously injure someone. The camp site care taker was getting in touch twice a day via HF radio to make sure that we were OK, and warned us that we should expect some very strong winds overnight. Although we tried to prepare for this (I swapped all my regular pegs for the much longer sand pegs), everyone was a little nervous as Joe's Troopie had already suffered a direct hit on the cab roof. That night the winds apparently got up to 120kph - it certainly sounded like it from inside the tent.
When we got up there was a break in the wind and rain, so we all went out to inspect the river level and took a walk down to our abandoned sites. The river was even higher and we could see by the debris that it had come up and flooded our first pitches. We we were VERY glad that we had done the sensible thing and moved to higher ground. There were also lots of fallen branches all over the place.
The sign asks visitors not to damage the grass.
Eventually the sun did come out though, and we had the whole place to ourselves. The river started dropping and Daine managed to get back over and was reunited with his family. The bog... other young campers who had only brought beer and no food, were in a big hurry to get out of there, but we figured we may as well stay another few days and enjoy the beautiful campsite, and some wildlife.
Now we were at least able to go back and forth across the creek to the toilets and showers, but we were still cut-off from getting home as some of the roads back to Brisbane had been damaged. We did have access to the nearest town (Allora) though, so we were able to re-supply with nappies and beer. And food.
Our new friends had jobs to get back to so we said farewell. We will definitely be looking them up again when we set off on our trip.
We also managed to get Daine's ute pulled out with the Patrol, which incidentally had a fridge full of cold beer on it - what we would have given for that bit of info just 24 hours before!
Eventually we headed home too (back to my brother's place), just in time for my 40th birthday. Funny how 40 doesn't seem that old when you are 40.
What a week! This "shakedown" trip has certainly set the bar very high in the excitement stakes, and if this is anything to go by we are in for an awesome adventure this year.
3 comments:
Thats an exciting first outing for you guys, glad everything turned out ok for all the campers there. Its great to see everyone pulling together to help their neighbours out, you will see that time and time again on your trip.
Cheers, Lyndon (1 Year Off)
Excitement plus there guys.
We've stayed at Black Cockatoo camp ourselves and it was incredible to see Dalrymple Creek in flood ... thanks!
Hope to see you out there one day!
Tracey
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