Day 354 | Travellers Rest CP: that's Mt Garnet

109 km | zzOz total: 9,788 km

Finally crossed the Great Dividing Range, it’s pretty close to the coast, so it’s gotta be all downhill from here to Cairns.

As I was packing up this morning I realised I was being watched and not only by those raucous galahs, gee, the pink and grey on those birds is vivid here, there was something else.

Dingo.

Must have been a young one, quite curious, it was upwind and hung out for a few minutes, almost friendly, but how do you work that out, they don’t know how to do the standard canine tail wagging.

I’ve been asked a few times if they’ve bothered me but my usual answer is they aren’t much bigger than your average Corgi, then again they are a different profile, sleek, muscular, no excess fat, actually no fat, unlike the usual suburban dog.

The wild dingos are curious but timid, I’ve often heard them singing, howling, at night but they rarely stick around for long once they notice a human presence. The only incident I can recall was the luncheon stealing episode at Kings Canyon where they are used to people, more feisty, the tourists can’t resist feeding them, whether deliberately or inadvertently.

That great divide was more apparent when I hit the Savannah Way, the road I’ll be taking in a couple of months which heads out west across the plains to Normanton, etc, suddenly my back country road is called the Kennedy Highway, it’s had a few previous monikers: Min Min Highway leaving Boulia and Hann Highway leaving Hughenden, and there’s a tenfold increase in traffic.

OK, it might not be downhill all the way but I’m certainly encroaching on Civilisation and all its contingent absurdities.