Day 17, May 11, through the grasslands of Outback Queensland to Julia Creek

To admire the sunrise at the Billabong, we slept in until after 6:00. Morning exercise was finally possible again. At 7:00, first the sky, then the water in the Billabong turned blood red: A magnificent sunrise.

In fact, today was supposed to be a day with short driving times: Just over 2 hours to Mt Isa, then another 3 hours to Julia Creek, where we still didn’t arrive until around 16:30.

The reason was that I drove slowly and chewed too fast. I stopped or turned back for several roadkills, including birds like the pheasant coucal. The route alternated between forest and grass savanna. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to see, but there was one highlight: I finally spotted Red Kangaroos, a bright red male that stood up and clearly displayed its masculinity, and a gray female. Female kangaroos are often simply gray, but compared to the Grey Kangaroo, they have a different, more rectangular head shape, and broad black stripes around their eyes in their fur. I managed to photograph the animals well with my Nikon, but when I finally reached for my phone, they hopped away. Therefore, there are no pictures of the red kangaroos in the travel blog, where only cell phone photos are allowed.

Shortly after that, suddenly a dental filling came out while chewing gum. I had it replaced in Mt Isa, a mining town in the Outback, for a proud 200 euros. Let's see if the travel insurance reimburses that.

Almost 100km before Mt Isa, we passed the World Heritage site Riversleigh, where fossils from the last 30 million years have been found, including some representatives of the megafauna that became extinct 30,000 years ago, extinct koalas, and rodents that arrived in Australia 5 million years ago. A paleontological treasure! In Mt Isa, we visited a museum about it, but it was very disappointing: While it was modernly set up, it told no story, modern displays were mixed with old museum fossil presentations, and some labels were incorrect or misleading. The curator has wasted a lot of money here!

100km after Mt. Isa, we reached the tiny place Cloncurry, where we walked along a 4.5km Eco Trail alongside a dry creek bed (2.25km back). The path and the landscape were not beautiful, but there was still quite a bit to see: many rainbow lorikeets, the only bee-eater species in Australia, a snake (thin and sand-colored, I didn’t see more), agile wallabies, and splendid little parakeets, bright green with red-blue heads.

The drive further to Julia Creek was boring, and the caravan park there was ugly. There are springs here for a bath, and we had actually booked a private sundowner bath, in a bathtub with a view of the savanna, but since it was cloudy and there was no sunset to enjoy, we canceled this 70 euro pleasure. However, after two days of showering in the camper and electricity from the battery, we were glad to be able to take extravagant showers and use electricity freely.