Day 332 | Georgina River again: feet up day
rest day
The campsite is on a plain, perched adjacent the edge of the river in the shade of the Coolibah trees.
The river is in fact a murky pool or two, not of the flowing variety, well at least since the last flood pushed its way down from the Wet Season up north, where it eventually, if it makes it that far, can get all the way to Lake Eyre in South Australia.
There’s steep sided banks, 5 or 6 metres down, you have to be almost on top of it to know it’s there.
Later this arvo I thought it was time to explore the other track leading off up the river, maybe a better campsite, so I marched off in the heat, 34ºC, for 45 minutes or so, still no closer to the river an indistinct track veered off, I plodded down that a while. When it started to veer away I was close enough to crash off through the dried grass to where the river was, I thought, a few hundred metres away.
Suddenly the bank appeared a 6m drop to an elongated stretch of water, a shag diving for fish, 2 straggly pelicans in the distance, maybe wondering what that straggly looking guy was doing, and some massive, I mean real massive tea trees dead square in the middle of the channel.
One of the biggest shocks of my trip, that is fantastic.
Obviously a great idea to just follow the river downstream to the campsite, there’s an elevated causeway to stop progress to oblivion if I fail to spot the campsite. I get a series of fabulous views with the magnificent trees and their roots, imagining what it would be like with an 8m floor ripping along.
Not quite the easy task, the bank gets progressively more greasy near the water, steeper away from it.
I take a dry channel, peaking over every now and again, then it joins back and I’ve managed to miss the difficult task of negotiating another waterhole. Try another dry branch and this time it turns out to be a tributary and I’m up on the plain.
Let’s say close to being bamboozled.
At least I know there’s a track somewhere on the left, the river over on the right, I head straight ahead where there is a thick line of shrubbery about 400 m away, crash through the undergrowth and am relieved to find I’m high on a bank overlooking a dry channel.
Hooray.
Somehow I’m not so sure how I’d cut it as an early explorer of these parts, but that mud must be sublime for the skin.