DAY 176
12th August 2021
So our plans to get home were slightly screwed up by covid – Bourke, Walgett and other areas we were going to go through were being shut down by just one case in Walgett.
We left the billabong and instead of heading down through the national park and on to Bourke, we had to go back through Eulo again and out towards Cunnamulla and Bollon. We had lunch at Bollon, stopped at Foodworks, then crossed the NSW border by Hebel, where there were at least 6 cops waiting to check people crossing from the NSW side. Insane.
We stopped at Angledool weir and camped there for the night. It wasn’t overly nice but fine for an overnighter.
DAY 177
13th August 2021
From Angledool, which was just outside of Lightning Ridge, we drove towards Collarenebri on dirt roads. Collarenebri was actually not as bad a place as I remembered, I think I was just hungry when we went through in 2017 and there was nowhere to buy a pie. But this time as we were driving there we saw some emus and some lovely green and turquoise parrots.
We finally made it to Narrabri for lunch and went to the Woolies there to get some fresh food. I booked a campsite at Mt Kaputar National Park and we drove up the mountain. It was a sketchy dirt road up the mountain and we went all the way to the campsite at the top called Dawson’s Springs and chose a site. There were HOT showers and toilets available there so it was like heaven! We set up camp after our showers.
We made a fire and were sitting having a drink by the fire when this guy came up to talk to us. Soon we were also joined by this other guy who came and sat down and it was very clear that he was very drunk.
We managed to get rid of both of them at dinner time but the drunk guy had put on loud music and was yelling and singing loudly. He’d already tried to have a go at the other guy who had come to talk to us, now he was being a huge nuisance. After dinner, we were enjoying our tea and chocolate near the fire and more people came by. They were camped over by the drunk guy and were worried about him, asking us what we thought they should do. We had the lights on and the drunk guy must have seen it and came over. He could barely see or stand upright and was being such a huge pest. Josh and another guy managed to get him into bed and he shut up for an hour or so then at about 1am he started kicking off again. The other guy camped near us had called the cops already but they weren’t going to come up that sketchy road at night. It was a weird night and we got up early the next day to move on.