Mt Surprise

Sunrise at Gilbert River

Third time lucky through the Mt Surprise free car wash

Conor and Brian the water python

Daniel and Brian

We bush camped at Gilbert River last night had another blowy night last night – we had the annex up this time but as we were finishing breakfast such a strong gust came up that it inverted one corner of the annex pole and blew the pole right up onto the roof. I’m not sure how but none of the poles were bent luckily, and luckily we were almost packed up so could just put the tent down.

We drove on through Georgetown ending up in Mt Surprise mid morning, where we checked out one of the gem fossicking places which does tours. Unfortunately we missed the tour for today so have booked in for tomorrow morning. It starts bright and early at 7.45am to drive out to their fossicking site about 40k away, and back by lunchtime. We decided that a tour would be a better idea than going it alone, which we could have done this afternoon, because we have no idea what we’re doing! Apparently there’s quite a bit of Topaz in this region, so we’ll see how we go.

So that left the afternoon to kill, and while we were getting someone to book us into the upcoming Undarra Lava Tube tour on Monday (again in the morning) we decided to camp out the back of his business – it seems similar to a lot of businesses in this small town (population 70, 9 kids at the school) in that it’s a bit of everything and anything depending on who’s interested and what they need. He was a nice guy though, handed out free cordial to the kids, booked the tour for us at no cost and then got out Brian, the water python for a viewing and told the kids all about him. In order to try and scrape out more of a living he also lets people camp out the back in a nice big grassy field which the kids had a good time riding their bikes around in the afternoon.

We had a nice relaxed lunch, Nick cleaned up all of the bikes and fixed punctures – all the dust has played absolute havoc with their gears – and I walked around the main street to have a look. The town was bigger during the gold rush, contracted, and then grew a bit again during World War 2 when there was a radar station here, plus apparently at one stage 7500 US troops were stationed here, even occasionally playing baseball in the main street. We also decided to celebrate staying in a town by having a drink in the pub before dinner which was nice – we’re both heartily sick of the case of 40 cans of XXXX Gold mid strength beer we bought (for reasons of economy) so it was nice to have something different (ie a full strength XXXX). 

One of the other things we loved about Mt Surprise was the free car wash on the way into town - it's actually designed to wash the underneath of your car so you don't transport foreign plant matter from other areas here and spread weeds, but we used it as a handy car, trailer and bike wash and drove through it three times!