One week into our winter trip and we were still not much warmer than we had been at home but we were seeing some interesting places. Mitchell was a real find, a beautiful town with a fair sized public school, swimming pool with hot spa with fantastic cafe, some nice small shops and an excellent op shop. The whole town looked like it was cared for with nice little touches like mosaics in the pavements, bins with faces and public wifi but only 18°C at midday. We were killing time in Mitchell because we could not get booked into the caravan park at Carnarvon Gorge for a few days but we could not have picked a nicer place to stop, we will definitely visit again.
The time came for us to move on to Carnarvon Gorge and we got up and discovered it was only 4°C outside, a bit of a shock so we packed up quickly and headed off. We wanted to get away early as we needed to stop in Roma for supplies part way through the 4 hour drive north. After shopping we took the Carnarvon Highway out of Roma for 3 hours which was pretty but a bit dull, however we did see a road train towing 4 petrol tankers!
We eventually reached Sandstone Park caravan park in Carnarvon Gorge, $39 a night with 360°views of the gorge and kennels to leave the dog in when visiting the national park.. The pitches were huge, no amenities blocks or showers but the site was liberally dotted with spotless portaloos. We thought it was essential to book a guided tour of the national park but the lady in the van next door told us this was not necessary and gave us some tips on which bits to visit.
Next morning we popped Harvey into the kennels, $20 a day, and drove to the visitor centre where we picked up a map and set off. We decided to take our neighbour's advice and just visit two of the points of interest so we chose The Amphitheatre and The Moss Garden. Thank goodness we didn't attempt any more because it was a long, hot challenging walk with heaps of steps and multiple river crossings using stepping stones - a real test for the balance. It was worth the effort and I would recommend Carnarvon Gorge to anyone.
The Amphitheatre was a huge rock formation entered via a staircase through a crack in the rock. Once inside we were surrounded by towering rock walls with a peep of the sky way above us, it was completely silent and cool and it was easy to see where the water had rushed through the rocks in the past to create the cavernous space we were standing in.
After the hard work reaching the Amphitheatre we thought the Moss Garden would be a doddle. How wrong we were, the route in from the main track was littered with red faced walkers gasping for air, people who had fallen off the stepping stones into the water and others squabbling about whose idea it was to do this and pointing out they never wanted to see another step again as long as they lived. We pressed on up flight after flight of steps until eventually we reached The Moss Garden. It was beautiful, huge rocks covered in mosses and ferns with cool water trickling through them but the walk in was so hard it was quite difficult to put it out of your mind and enjoy the final destination.
There was so much of the park still to see so the next day we popped Harvey in the kennels again, much to his disgust, and drove back to the park. We discovered it was possible to get a coffee in the Big 4 caravan park, which was different to where we were camped but very pleasant too. Back in the national park, we took an easy walk along the river banks and saw a platypus! My first one in the wild.
Our next planned stop was to be Emerald where we had read that we could camp in the Botanic Gardens so we headed off and stopped for a coffee in Rollaston at the community volunteer coffee van. We carried on north to Emerald only to discover it was a huge, industrial town a bit like Slough. The lovely sounding Botanic Gardens camping area was a car park beside a roundabout opposite Coles supermarket. So we pressed on to Sapphire instead which was a wonderful, quirky place mainly inhabited by people trying their luck fossicking for sapphires.
After one night in the free camp, we managed to get settled in Sapphire Caravan Park, a delightful terraced bushland park with charming stone buildings for the camp kitchen, BBQ area and amenities $37 powered, $30 unpowered. A band played every weekend and there was a fossicking area where guests had found some pretty big sapphires only recently. We set off and did some digging and came home with a bag of rocks we have convinced ourselves are riddled with sapphires and will make us our fortune when we eventually get around to cleaning them.
We were now up at the Tropic of Capricorn and were finally able to put our shorts on before we ventured into Rubyvale, 5kms up the road. There is an area outside Rubyvale taken up with sapphire mining claims, lots of plots with old sapphire washing equipment and Keep Out signs, apparently the guns laws are quite relaxed here because most of the miners have gems on site.
There was a big pub in Rubyvale but it was Drag Bingo night when we were there so we could not get a seat let alone anything to eat, I don't know where everyone came from, there certainly did not appear to be many people living around there.
All was not lost though, we bumped into some Brolgas, an Australian Bustard, a Striated Pardelote and a Grey Crowned Babbler while exploring, all firsts for me to tick off in my bird book.
