Mt Barnett and Manning Gorge

Tuesday 9 July 2013

Mt Barnett/Manning Gorge

Slept in until 6am at Silent Grove with a good sleep had by all. No issues with sustained snoring although Paul is the one who is the loudest by far. We just start speaking and that seems to shut up the offender. Nobody has moved out or even threatened to, so that says something. A very hot night although it did cool off by midnight. We had a light breakfast and packed up. We had another issue with the earth wire from the trailer as no charge was being received from the vehicle. Paul being his usual creative self rigged up a temporary earth wire using the Honda 12v charge wires. It did the trick!

We then filled up the water tank in the trailer given that the water on site was excellent in taste and was fed from a spring. We departed at 9am with only a short 27km trip to Imintji Roadhouse. We filled up the Nissan with 54 litres of fuel at $2.29 litre for $123.65. Paul and Rob went into the roadhouse while I filled up the vehicle. They purchased 4xmince packs, bread rolls, bread, fruit and 3 made-up lunch rolls for a total of $75. Rob purchased a $20 Telstra phonecard & phoned Lee from the public phone on the store verandah.

We departed Imintji and headed for the turnoff to Mornington Wildlife Sanctuary a distance of only 25km. Just past the turnoff we found a radio hut where we were required to call through to check on vacancies in the campground. The distance in was around 90km on a pretty rough track so it was a good move – we were informed that the camp ground was full and invited to come back on Thursday morning when they expected vacancies. We declined and drove back to the intersection where we found a windmill and some vacant space to pull over and have a cup of tea and decide what to do next. We had planned to stay at Mornington for 2 nights and had not expected it to be full.

We decided to drive onto Mt Barnett roadhouse which was only 70 km down the road. We found that they had vacancies at the Manning Gorge campground. It was located 7km off the Gibb and we paid $20pp ($60 total) for one night. The campsite was more basic that the DEC campsites we had stayed at. It had limited showers and toilets, no drinking water and very limited times to run the generator.  Times were 6.30am to 10am and again from 4pm to 7pm. We set up camp including the annex for the first time as we liked what we saw and decided to stay for a couple more nights. The annex went up very quickly with 3 of us – Rob and I were familiar with the set up and Paul picked it up quickly as it was the first time he had seen it being erected.

We relaxed in the afternoon and decided to go for a swim later in the day in the Manning River which adjoined the campground. It was very hot with no breeze and temps in the mid 30s. The river was too deep to walk across so somebody had set up a rope and pulley system with a small tinnie so that you could pull yourself across without getting wet. You needed to cross the river to reach Manning Gorge. Quite a few of the campers were swimming so we took advantage of this and found it to be very refreshing. No freshwater crocs.

We decided to have steak for dinner – both the boys had been fretting about the cryo pack and were concerned that the meat would be tainted given that our power supply to the fridge had been unreliable. Anyway their concerns proved fruitless – Rob did the honors of slicing the meat into fillets and he cooked up the lot. That night we dined on steak, mashed potatoes, tomatoes and peas. We were pretty much in bed very early given that we could not run the generator past 7pm.