The Savannah Way spans Australia from Cairns in the East to Broome in the West, a distance of some 3,700 kilometres. It passes through three States, crosses the base of the Cape York Peninsular, skirts south of the Gulf of Carpentaria, edges northward to Katherine, then southward and west to finish at Broome on the West Coast.
Having returned to Cairns, we started out at the beginning of the Savannah Way, making a brief stop at Ravenshoe. It was here you may recall that tragically two people
died not many weeks ago when a truck ran into a gas cylinder at the back of a cafe creating an explosion and fireball. The place had a sad feeling, emphasised by notices appealing for any information about the loss of wedding rings. By comparison our overnight stop at Undara was a delight. A camp fire in the bush, fantastic sunset and ‘bush television’ for entertainment.
Up early Wednesday morning (8 July if you must) we joined the tour to visit the lava tubes. Now Australia isn’t the first place that comes to mind for volcanoes but these are of a slightly different variety. We didn’t know there were different varieties either! Not mountains but more like very large pimples on the landscape, the area surrounding Undara is peppered with small craters. We walked around the rim of the Kalkani Crater, about 2.5 kilometres, with every step offering distant views over the bush landscape.
The Undara volcano lava tubes are not quite unique, but they are the largest in the world being some 75 metres in diameter. The tubes were formed about 190,000 years ago by lava flowing at a certain speed, not too fast and not too slow. The relatively flat landscape created conditions ideal for this. The top layer cooled because it was exposed to air allowing the molten lava to flow underneath. Eventually the lava stopped flowing through which created the tube. Thousands of years of erosion created some openings and that’s how we got in.
Westward again on tarmac for a change passing through the old gold mining towns of Georgetown, Croydon and Normanton. Our overnight stop again produced an amazing sunset and it was free camping behind a small stand of eucalypts set back about 50 metres from the main highway. Seven vehicles passed by during the night. it’s a pretty quiet main highway!
Breakfast of egg on toast was not entirely successful when one of the eggs declined to cooperate and broke in the back of Vin Rouge, by which time we’d cleaned it up the other egg was, shall we say, well cooked! But a second cuppa, some toast and ginger marmalade set us up for the road. At Black Bull Siding (don’t look for it on your map!) we came across The Gulflander. This train’s claim to fame is that it goes from nowhere to nowhere, (Croydon to Normanton actually) taking two days to do the journey we completed in a few hours.
On again to Normanton where at almost nine metres long and weighing virtually 2 tons, the largest crocodile ever known was shot by Krystina Pawlowski in 1957. There’s a replica outside the Shire Council Offices and that’s quite scary enough.
Our final stop for the day is Karumba, a small coastal town where barramundi and chips for two set us back $20 and there was so much we couldn’t finish the meal. Replete and lazy we watched the birds. Dozens of black kites circling in the thermals, pelicans and a brolga in the sea, corellas and other parrots squawking in the trees and on the ground. We were also buzzed by a plague of locusts (is that the correct term?) around the camp. The things look like giant grasshoppers but have wings and fly quickly in every unexpected direction. Their navigation isn’t too good as they seemed to have a preference for flying into Kim.
Yet again a magnificent sunset. This time we viewed it over the rim of a glass looking out to the seascape of the Gulf of Carpentaria.
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