So I headed off from Adelaide to Cooktown, Queensland, after getting that last rabies shot in my arm, intending to camp for the night in the Mount Crawford Forest Reserve, just about an hour outside of town. Well, so much for that plan! I arrived to find a big sign reading “No Camping Between 1 December…” and another autumn date. Australia takes bushfires very seriously, and every state seems to handle their response differently, but it appeared as though South Australia just shut down its campsites. Western Australia would have simply banned campfires. Oh well, I decided to keep heading out towards the east as I was planning to do the next day and hone in on the region I was planning to travel through the next day.
Lucky for me, I stumbled across a really nice little place along the banks of the Murray River. For those of us living in Western Australia, we get a little tired of endless news stories about the Murray and Darling Rivers, but they are two of Australia’s largest rivers and valuable sources of water for a large sector of the country’s population in the east. The camp I found was actually a sister camp to Adelaide Shores (part of a franchise), but it had far more natural features and was right along the river. Just across the river was Murray River National Park, though the current was a bit too swift to even think about swimming across. Although the temperature was hovering around 40ºC (104ºF), I was able to immerse myself underwater along a sandbank until my core temperature dropped low enough to doze off in my tent after sunset. Very nice!
