The Road North

Wednesday morning, I looked for breakfast at the restaurant, but it was closed. I asked the desk clerk where 'brekky' was, and she gave me a wan smile of the sort usually reserved for the slow, and said, "brekky is in the hatch!" I asked, "where is the hatch?" (hutch?) She said next to the door of my room. Oh! They deliver breakfast here! How nice!

I drove from Roma north towards Injune, sharing the bumpy, narrow road with the enormous semi-trucks they call road trains. A passing vehicle from the other way came close to forcing me off the road - they shouldn't pass on curves!

The land was dominated by a very arid-looking deciduous forest, obviously suffering through drought. After the last, destructive El Nino in 2002, there were no good years of rainfall at all, and now there is a new El Nino this year. Even though the rainy season is supposed to be starting now, the climatologists are saying it may be delayed, or maybe never occur at all this year, so people are very concerned whether the vegetation here can possibly hang on much longer.

Analogous to the western U.S., stockmen have cleared forest to promote grass growth. In other places, the forest looked like it was dying. In yet other places, both processes seemed to be occurring.

Just south of Injune, the ground began to look a touch greener, as if some rain had fallen here not that long ago, or maybe the elevation was slightly higher here. A sign announced the central highlands of Queensland, and a new plant appeared: the low-lying cabbage palm.

I stopped to look at the Dawson River, which the road crossed several times. The river was a series of isolated, discontinuous pools - bad, considering the Dawson is a major Queensland river:

And the story you told,
about a river that flowed,
made me sad to think it was dead.

Soon, some better-tended grazing fields appeared - a surprise, actually, considering the terrain - and then there appeared the road west to Carnarvon Gorge National Park.

The road was nice at first, but then turned to dirt. Cattle wandered all over the road. Since I went slowly, so as not to damage Andrew's vehicle, it seemed nearly-forever before I reached the Aboriginal Cultural Trail parking lot, the first sight at Carnarvon Gorge.