As mentioned at the end of yesterday's blog post, today the plan was to go to Sundown National Park. Given it's a 1.5 hour drive away from camp, you'd think we'd be up early to get on the road at a reasonable hour and avoid the middle of the day for walking. You'd think wrong though, because it was cold and getting out of bed took a while. Breakfast was nice warm porrige again (with nuts, apricots and dates) and I did my usual bird walk around the camp. I met another camper who was looking for the tawny frogmouths they saw yesterday (they'd moved on) and we chatted about birds for a bit, and on the way back to the van I came across a flock of Double-barred Finches.
We eventually got on the road and despite seeing a lot of dead roos along the way (roadkill), it was a pretty uneventful journey. There was only one couple camping at the campground (we met them later, they're from Tasmania), so we pretty much had the place to ourselves. The first walk we decided to do was out to the Permanent Pool. A roughly 2km return walk along the banks of the River Severn. Although, it was more a dry riverbed this time.
However, the Permanent Pool lived up to its name, as there was indeed water there, just not as much as normal (you can see the water level on the rocks, and it should have been 2m higher). There was very little bird life evident, which may have been partially due to the drought conditions and partly because it was 11am and thus late in the day. We did briefly see a large roo up the hill from us, bounding away.
We ate our sandwiches and cake when we got back to the car, as it was close enough to lunchtime, and then set out along the Western Loop walk. This walk is 4.5km long, and has about 113m of elevation gain along the way before coming back down to the river level - although we didn't realise that before setting out.
Once again, for the first part of the walk, there was little evidence of birds. The occasional chirp, or one flit past, but none that were photographable. That is until halfway up the hill I heard thornbills and we stopped for a while to try to photograph them. I managed to get one decent shot of this Yellow Thornbill.
Further still up the hill, we came across a small clearing, in the centre of which was this quite large dead tree. It was worth a photo at least.
Then near the top of the hill we found this view over the park, with just enough white puffy clouds to be visually interesting.
Halfway down the hill we disturbed a fairly large Wallaroo, which bounded down the hill and hid behind a bush. The only photo I got was pretty bad, so I'll spare you that one. But along the bottom part of the track we found a couple of mobs of Eastern Grey Kangaroos, a couple of Swamp Wallabies and a Red-necked Wallaby.
This is the path we took. All 4.5km of it, which took us 1.5 hours (we weren't rushing).
The trip back to went back along the same way we came (Stanthorpe-Texas Rd for most of it) and we saw more Eastern Grey Kangaroos, Red-necked Wallabies, Swamp Wallabies, and a pair of quite small Rock Wallabies of some sort (all alive).
Since it was about 3pm, we didn't go back to camp, but instead popped down the road to the Jamworks, for a spot of afternoon tea. Lea had savoury scones (they were heart-shaped!) and tea, and I had an individual Apple Pie (with ice-cream) and iced-coffee. We then bought some jams, a bottle of raspberry coulis, a bottle of caramelised garlic balsamic vinegar, some chilli beer-sticks and some garlic crackers, the latter two featured in yet another slack dinner, with some cheese from the other day, and the remains of the Rose Moscato. We even got some pink clouds over the camp.
Attached to the Jamworks is a shed built from wood slabs and ironwork. The owner and his wife sell their hand made goods and other knick-knacks in there. Peter, saw us spying a metal gate next to the shed and struck up a conversation. He does metal art blacksmithing, but was in for a good chat. From his time working with the Concorde, to how he built the shed, the history of parts of the gate, the cattle operation across the highway, etc. Nice bloke, clearly needed a good chat though.
Tomorrow we head home. Checkout is 10am, and I suspect it'll be close to that before we actually pull out.