From volcanoes to dinosaurs

From Bedrock Village and Undara, we drove along the great expanse of nothingness to Charters Towers. The road was occasionally one lane total – which was a little unnerving when four trailer road-trains thundered toward us.  The road was so ordinary that we wondered if we had strayed onto a ‘development road’ instead of the highway for a time.  But we stopped for lunch at Oasis Roadhouse on the crossroads between nowhere and nothing and confirmed with other travellers that the road we were following was the best of a bad bunch. 

We spent much time musing on how people could possibly live out here.  The landscape is so unforgiving – dry, flat, virtually shadeless and red red red!  There are hundreds of kilometres between roadhouses, which double as grocers, pubs, post offices, Royal Flying Doctors clinics, accommodation providers and community centres.  Yet we frequently passed dirt roads leading off the highway with signs to properties that are a couple of hundred kilometres even further remote.  How do you get groceries in a place like this?  Kel strongly disputes Rich’s assertion that Coles do a delivery run!!

We survived the trip and pulled into Charters Towers, set up the van and then drove up to the town lookout at Tower Hill called ‘The World’ to see what this place was about. The town was the scene of a goldrush in the late 1800s, and still had the ‘main street’ and beautifully preserved old colonial buildings to prove it.  It also had several amazing, shady, big (empty) parks.  With a bit of imagination, you could see through the modern goings on and see ‘Deadwood’ in this place. The gold mine manager of the day even shot his CEO in the head in a drunken rage.

The rocky hilltop was also the site of an old gold processing factory and some WW2 bunkers.  Rock wallabies have also made it their home and it was a treat to see a couple bounding around.  Before heading off the next morning, we took another drive up to the lookout to check it out on foot.