Burke &Wills country - Boulia Mt Isa

After unloading a fistful of dollars to view all the museums & sights of Longreach - oops blew the budget, we left the thriving metropolis of Ilfracombe & headed through to Boulia. I will say that we enjoyed the Qantas museum and particularly the guided tour of the Boeing 707 which had an interesting history. Born in the 1960s, it flew the Queen, the Beatles to Australia and belonged to the Sultan of Arabia before ending up in a scrap yard in the north of England. It was rescued and restored at some ginormous cost to Qantas and the Australian Government and returned as a museum piece. It is still in working order but I think they're running out of pilots qualified to fly it!! We were not allowed to take photos of the inside because no infidel is permitted to view where the Arab leader was seated....!? Imagine Vinnie's response to that!! I did take a photo of him waving where the Beatles stood.

We thought it was a reasonably easy drive through to Boulia & we took our time to view the (free) sights of Winton & have lunch before driving to Boulia, imagine our surprise when we discovered it was 360km to Boulia not 160 like Vinnie had thought! Lucky we had booked the last motel room at the caravan park so we didn't have to worry about setting up for an overnight camp. The road to Boulia was interesting with the landscape constantly changing and we were glad to have taken the road less travelled. We passed little traffic, luckily as it was a single track bitumen road. We did pass a hardy cyclist though, riding a single speed bike heading to Alice. He would have ridden 160km to Middleton that day with only peanuts to eat!!

The Middleton Pub was a classic, the lounge really was the lounge of the people living there!! The publican had a whinge about the multi bucks caravans pulling in to camp over the road & not bothering to have a beer at the pub. Vinnie reckons he needed a marketing manager, beer on tap and I would add a cleaner to that list!! Worth the stop. Yes he was a friendly chap!

Boulia was a village with one pub and an expansive caravan park with a neat but tiny motel room. Vinnie cooked up a tasty steak on the camp stove & we then headed into town to the pub to chat with some locals (it was Saturday night after all!).

Vinnie has been reading the book "Dig", which is the story of Burke & Wills and he has really enjoyed pointing out places of interest and rivers that they named on their travels. He says I have to read the book before we follow their trail from the other end near Innamincka. This tree (not the DigTree) is a waddi tree and was a corroboree tree for the local pitta pitta tribe.

We only had a 300km trip to the Isa so it was an easy day & we set up with little fuss, pulled the bikes off the roof & pedalled in to have a look around town.