This water tastes salty!

Yep, that’s right we made it to Burke and Will’s final Camp 119, west of Normanton. Here is a photo to prove it, with Jack and I celebrating with a glass of port (Thank’s Georgie), although I must say that port is probably not the drink of choice here as it’s quite warm (35 degrees) and humid.

 

We made it!

So, after 5113km (From memory B&W  covered 3700km, we had a few detours), we were at camp 119. B&W left Gray and King here and went north looking for the ocean, they became bogged down although they found the Little Bynoe River, which was salty and had a tidal fall of 8 inches, pretty anticlimactic if they expected to be running hand in hand along a northern beach at the end of their trek.

I suppose it was a little bit anticlimactic for Jack and me too. We looked around camp 119, with its B&W blazed trees, and said “What do we do now?’ Thinking about it though, it was more the journey than the destination for us, where as this was reversed for B&W.

Anyway, the 4 of them headed back down in late Feb, and the monsoon season really hit, somedays only making a couple of miles. They had run out of food and had to live off the land which further slowed them down. They took 2 months to reach the top from Cooper ck and 2 and one half months to get back, missing Brahe who left, by 9 hrs, and that was that.

What good came out of the expedition? A lot of places were named by B&W up here, but they would have been found and named by some one else pretty soon, they same can be said for the land they covered. It did define a time in Australia’s history, when money  could finance an adventure for Queen and Country, such as this.I suppose the main thing is that it’s a good story, that most of us have run into at some point or another, and I particularly like the Becker sidelight and his paintings that exist in the National library of Victoria.

What are we going to do now?

We think we will travel to Cairn’s tomorrow, set up camp there or Port Douglas and go snorkelling on the Great Barrier reef, take our time going down the Qld coast, visit friends in Brisbane, and then straight home.

Thanks for reading the blog, I will probably only update it now if something interesting happen on the trip south, but I will still access it every night to read any comments. We have really appreciated these on the trip.

See ya.

 

 

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