Redhatter’s Web Blog

Note: This story has been unwittingly picked up by John Edwards’ Election Blog. Please note the individual I speak of in this post is another chap entirely, and just happens to have the same name, as the US election candidate.

Well, this last few days, I’ve been camping once again. This time, at Basket Swamp National Park, which is about 20km northeast of Tenterfield, NSW. We left Brisbane early in the afternoon. On route to our destination, we happened to stop at a service station outside Warwick — whilst getting some ice for our water cooler, I happened to look around, and see this vehicle:

My father said “Go on, take a photo, you won’t see that vehicle again for a long time.” Not being quite the geek I’m made out to be, I said “No, you like it so much… you go take it.” and handed him the camera. He shot the photos you see above (click to enlarge). Well, it wasn’t the last time we saw it… we saw it parked right beside us when we stopped for dinner in Stanthorpe, parked in the campsite the following morning, and again parked in a carpark at the start of the walk to Wellington Rock. Apparently Linus has seen it, and was quite impressed at the time.
We had some fun finding the actual entrance to the national park… the GPS unit in our car had no idea about the roads inside the national park (funnily enough, it did know the roads at Gibraltar… ahh well), thus it directed us to go travel cross-country through the scrub. Some distance down the road, we found the true entrance, which had suffered some erosion during the recent storms in the area. We set up camp around 9:00PM that evening (Queensland time… we don’t pay attention to that DST nonsense).

Day One saw us walking down to the Basket Swamp Falls, which were flowing rather spectacularly after the recent rain. On route, we saw some trees with an odd foreign growth on the top — the photos below show what I mean:

As for the falls… well… the photos speak for themselves… the creek was flowing well…

On Day two much of the group climbed up to Wellington Rock. John & Di Edwards were doing some exploration elsewhere, but we had amateur radio contact. In fact, my first ever successful amateur radio contact, was with John this weekend — apparently his set would only transmit at 0.5W, but despite this, I received a very strong clear signal (S8~9/5) about 1~2km through the scrub. Some of the adventurous ones in the group actually climbed on top of Wellington Rock, which apparently offered some stunning views. I stayed put, capturing some shots of the group that stayed behind:

Kym Schluter happened to notice that Little Wellington Rock was nearby on the map… and in his words, “had to be walked to.” So after some bush bashing, we arrived at the aforementioned rock. I managed to get an almost 180-degree panorama — which I’ll put up once I’ve constructed it. In the meantime, the pieces are here:

My father managed to get a bit further along the rock, and caught these snapshots:

Later that afternoon, we drove up to Timbarra Lookout. Sadly the ladder up to the top of the actual lookout was locked, thus we couldn’t see any of the really stunning views from the top. However, I did manage to get this panorama… which again is in pieces for now.

Last trip I went on, we complained about leeches… well… it seems trip leader, Brian Reid, scored the ultimate prize in leech collection… taking off his gators, he watched this whopper roll out onto the ground. Beside is a 1920 six-pence coin as a size reference… the leech is so fat it can’t move, it just squirms on the spot.

The weather had been pretty good so far. I had the “dodgy dipole” 40m-band antenna (made from 15m of speaker wire — a knot tied at 10m and the pairs split out) and figured I’d go and see what I could hear on the shortwave bands. Well, in the distance we saw the thunderstorms roll in. It at first got windy… then it started to spit… then it poured… then… hale!

Some of the tent sites got a little damp after that… being mostly decomposed granite (similar to Gibraltar) much of the water drained away, however there were still some significant puddles left in certain spots around the camp.

Day three most of us packed up. The weather was glorious as we pulled down our tents, which was great — on the Gibraltar camp, it poured with rain on the last day, thus we had to spend a good week drying out the tent. A few of the group planned to stay until tomorrow, but for the rest of us, the trip out was uneventful.