Leaving Kutini Payamu

Our drive out was nerve racking at first until we had made it across the one crossing I was very anxious about. Coming in we had stayed to the left and avoid 2 BIG holes on the right. I was worried that we may not be able to avoid the big holes again. I made Russ get out and have a look and he decided to go through the 2 big holes. He suggested I get out and take photos which I readily agreed to do. I just wanted this to be over and distracted myself with photo taking. As usual Russ drove very slowly and made it through without any problems. I breathed again once we were into the water – strangely enough the actual water is the easy part – it’s often the approaches to the water that are the problem. Now I could enjoy the drive. On the way in, there was a lot of traffic particularly towards the end so I couldn’t get out to take photos of the creeks but this time it was early and not much traffic so I got to photograph a few beautiful creeks.

This NP is incredibly diverse in terms of everything including geography and vegetation – it has coastal heath, rainforest, savannah and a big mountain range. The road quality is very diverse too – ranging from perfect bitumen roads with big swale drains on the side, neatly covered in 100mm granite rocks to washed out approaches to creeks and km of corrugations. One section near the PDR was being worked on and the guys had overwatered it. We were sliding in the mud on the steep approach to a creek and desperately hoped that the big machinery on each side of the road wouldn’t decide to move into the middle of the road as we were descending the approach, or we would have been forced to brake and would have slipped badly.

We came across a couple whose caravan U bolt had come out and the axel had twisted around. We stopped to see if we could help but they said they were going to jack up the van, untwist the axel, then go to Weipa (240km each way) to get a new U bolt and there was nothing we could help with. They asked if we would let their friends in a Tracks Van know what had happened. We eventually found them pulled up at the T intersection onto the main PDR and let them know that their friends were stuck about 40km in.

We stopped at Archer River Roadhouse for the obligatory Archer Burger – birthday lunch for Russ. We met the young couple we’d previously met at Scrubby Creek Crossing on the OTT and chatted to them about their work flipping burgers here – they said they needed money and they’d probably never get as well paid for flipping burgers as they were here.

Some of the road south has been graded and we were immensely thankful as it had been very rough corrugations on the trip north. We came across a machine that delivered a damp mix of sand, concrete and gravel, smoothed it and compacted it and left a very neat edge – very impressive. Usually its annoyed to see roadworks but I’ve changed my perspective on that now – they are a god send if it means we don’t have to travel at 10km/hour for hours.

 

Beautiful creeks that we crossed on our way out

This is the hairy crossing. Its worse than it looks in the photo.

This is the right side of the road that Russ thought was harder than the left route that he chose.

Making his way down the approach to the creek.

The hole was about 800mm deep and there were holes everywhere.

My life began again here.

Same beautiful creek crossing that I took photos of on the way in

The amazing combination of a tip truck and the road maker that delivers a lovely smooth hard surface