Leaving the Cape

OK, enough of the military style, albeit an easy style to blog in as it is far less time consuming, and one does find oneself busy when doing nothing but camping....

We got to Laura without event, and on chatting to the local store owner decided on a less arduous route out of the Cape to get us to Chillagoe.  The route was still dirt road, but through pastoral land - and very pretty it was too.  There were a few small creek crossings, plenty of cattle and horses and some pleasant looking homesteads (Fairlight and Fairview mainly) to break the monotony of the long drive.  When we reached the end of the cross country track we joined with the Savannah Way (alternate) route and headed South East to Chillagoe.  The light was fading fast at this stage so for the first time I got to use my driving lights.  Luckily no kangaroos decided to jump in front of the car lights and we made it to Chillagoe and set up camp about 7:30pm at a friendly little eco lodge, made a quick tea and a fire and crashed out ready to explore Chillagoe National Park and the township tomorrow.  Fantastic starlit cloudless sky as usual.

Chillagoe was an odd little town, but interesting nonetheless.  Being part of an old volcanic area there are all sorts of different rocks and thus all sorts of different mines and caves around.  We visited an old copper factory and smelting tower, saw lots of massive marble blocks being extracted from the ground, visited a daylight cave - which we had to register with the local info centre before visiting in case we got lost, and it was all of a 10 minute walk in daylight!

We set off again looking forward to reaching sealed roads (tarmac) in around 150 kms.  On our way out of the town we saw a beautiful (they are actually quite stunning creatures if you can appreciate them for the period of time you see them), long snake about 1.5 metres I reckon.  I think it was either a King Brown or a Taipan, both of which are amongst the deadliest in the world.  He just wanted to get out of the road and out of our way which was nice.

Once we hit the "blacktop" road it really felt like we had left the Cape and our next adventure was about to begin......