0042 Daly Waters to Barkly Homestead 1st Aug

More amazingly boring roads !!  Lots of road kill, with the usual swarms of kites having a feast !  After an hour or two we came to Newcastle Waters which used to be an important stop on the route north, with water available.  Now it is totally deserted and abandoned, except for a property which is the homestead for the cattle run on the surrounding country side – And ironically we were to learn later that a friend of ours whose boyfriend is a stockman / drover comes and does contract work on this property each year ! 

For a lunch stop we could not even find a decent layby with any shade – In frustration we eventually stopped at one that had a tiny little tree and reversed as far as we could into the meagre shade it provided !  What a weird day this was turning out to be !!

We decided to try to make it to Barkly Homestead for the night, as we had heard it as a good camp site.  Before we had left, our neighbour’s daughter Sophie had been at her parent's home on the Gold Coast and told us she was working on a property in the NT, and given us a map and told us to give her a call when we were nearby.  However, somewhere in the past 10,000 kilometres, we had lost the piece of paper !  So we called Susie (her mum) and got her phone number and had been texting her for a couple of days to try to contact her. Phone and internet coverage is pretty scant out here, so we had heard nothing, and were basically resigned to not catching up with her.  Then, in the evening, as we pulled into Barkly Homestead and chatted to a truckie with a 4 trailer road train about what it was like on the road, the phone tinkled and it was a text from Sophie – And she was only 50 kms from Barkly Homestead !!  For once we had managed to meet up with someone on the trip !! (3 other people we had missed en route !!)  So we arranged to meet her the next day, and set up camp in a very nice camp site at the homestead.

 

Pics here :-  https://picasaweb.google.com/117739775480775657932/0042DalyWatersToBarklyHomestead?authkey=Gv1sRgCMzG7tqbwY3KUw#