Bourke is a new town for our business.
With a population of 3,500 and a shop that sells computers (in a back corner, behind the TVs and fridges) it is not a place we would normally stop.
The fact that every shop (including the police station) has every window shuttered and/or barred is another reason we would not normally stop.
It is only the fact that our friends Chris and Kristie are here that make us willing to set aside our standard practices.
When we first set out on this adventure, Chris offered one important piece of travel advice, gleaned from his years of camel trekking. "You can drink water from anywhere if it has enough cordial or coffee in it." As we have traveled about, we have found this tip to be both true and useful. The town water in Bourke has a distinctive taste, but it is drinkable.
After spending the last six months in familiar locations, we are once again exploring new territory (albeit with a couple of familiar faces). To go along with the new territory, we decided to try a new marketing strategy, placing advertisments on the local radio station. It generated three responses, but two of them were over 250 km away and that's just a bit too far. We will try it again sometime, and hopefully we'll learn from our mistakes.
Chris and Kristie have started a new venture, the Gidgee Guest House. The main building is the old London Bank. It's in pretty poor shape (with cracks in the wall you can put your hand in), and they must restore it to heritage specifications. It's a lot of work, but they'll get it sorted. Eventually. The courtyard is a very private oasis in the heart of town.
When we arrived, the place was overrun with a film crew and every room was full. Not wanting to turn us away, Chris offered us a swag on the upstairs balcony. Bonzo the dog seemed to take pleasure in waking Helen up with his tounge. On the second night a massive dust storm blew through town, and of course our swag. After a couple of days the film crew moved on, and we traded the swag for a real bed.
We managed to drum up a little work around town, and made a trip north to Enngonia for a few jobs there.
We stayed a night on a remote station, where Helen indulged herself in the hot bore bath.
The remote station work also provided us with our first experience with personal satellite broadband access.
It's a vast improvement over the 9.6k "land" lines (restricted by an intermediate radio link).
The drought is apparent everywhere, and the rich red earth is dry and bare. The larger trees are still green, but there is no ground cover and the smaller shrubs are starting to yield to the unending heat. Some farmers are knocking down the mulga (lower shrubs) to feed what little stock remains.
We had a bit of fun in a training class. Our classes are always interactive, especially the email class in which we use a laptop as a mail server. In addition to the usual activities, this time we sent a "virus" to the students to demonstrate how the antivirus software works. It worked well.
Bourke's social problems are pretty obvious too. Kids roam the streets at night, mostly under 14 and mostly aboriginal. Every piece of open land is covered in broken glass. Rocks regularly rain down on homes, cars, and businesses in the middle of the night. It's a shame to see a town with so much potential, held to ransom by a small group of thugs.
In between jobs we have managed to do a few fun things.
The kayaks have allowed us to explore the Darling river, and bikes have let us explore the town.
We've even scaled Mt Oxley and explored the aboriginal rock art at Gundabooka National Park.
The local council has been entertaining us with a game Chris calls "Guess what new noisy machine we have today". (He has endured many more noises than we have.) The street sweeper is a regular 7:30 wake up call, six days a week. One day they woke us up with chainsaws, and followed them up with a branch muncher. On a Sunday morning at 7:00 am the decided they need a compressor to do some painting. What new noise extravaganza will tomorrow bring?
Summer in Bourke is HOT. 31 degrees (C) at 8:00 am, and over 40 by lunch time. (Actually, the mornings are lovely, it's just the afternoons that melt you.) Living here for a while in the heat, plus of course the delays that always seem to plague our journey, have made us change our plans. It's just too HOT to head for Alice Springs right now, so once again we are going to head south (and west) instead. The new plan is Streaky Bay for the eclipse, and Perth by Christmas.
A route for our departure was determined by a couple of training classes we scheduled in nearby towns.
Wanaaring claims to be the most remote town in NSW, and had the last manual telephone exchange in Australia.
The class there lead to a few jobs, and gave us some more remote station work (and more satellite related work).
A particularly troublesome job ran us out of time, and we were forced to head off without achieving all that we might otherwise have done.
Louth is possibly one of the smallest towns we've worked in. We were only planning to spend a day, but as often happens we stayed a lot longer. We enjoyed the luxury of a new B&B, and another chance to get the kayaks & bikes off (in the cool of the morning, of course).
The drought is getting progressively worse. The "smell of death" is in the air in many places, the animals that have succumb. The Darling River has stopped flowing. We had another huge dust storm one night in Wanaaring. (Fortunately we were in a house, not the tent!) One day as we kayaked upstream from Louth, kangaroos were hopping across the river in front of us. Fortunately the rest of the river was slightly deeper than that.