Brisbane to the NT Border

30^th June – 12^th July 2016

Finally the ute is packed and we are off on our big adventure around Australia. We decided to drive the inland route via Longreach and Winton to Lawn Hill National Park and then north through Hells Gate Roadhouse to the Northern Territory border.

Gayndah Camp 

We really felt we had made it to country Queensland once we had turned west at Rockhampton and the roadside billboards were advertising breeds of cattle.

It is great seeing that a lot of the old buildings still exist in the smaller country towns, such as Gayndah, which claims to be the oldest town in Queensland.

 

Bladensburg Camp

Our first National Park camp was at Bladensburg NP, 17kms SW of Winton.  We had a great camp next to the river gums. The landscape was a contrast of floodplains, river gums and gidgee scrub – fantastic for riding the fat bikes.  

Lawn Hill Gorge

Kayaking the Gorge

We finally made it to Lawn Hill National Park, a destination that we have been wanting to visit for a long time. The Gorge was absolutely worth seeing – especially by canoe. We walked to Upper Gorge Lookout the first day, and then hired a canoe the second day and paddled to the upper end of the Gorge.

 

There was a threat of unseasonal wet weather so we decided to drive the dirt roads north of Lawn Hill just in case rain set in. We drove 520kms from Lawn Hill, via Hells Gate Roadhouse, to Borroloola, in the Northern Territory.  The whole drive was on corrugated dirt roads (even though 300kms of it was on Australia’s Number One Highway!