28/03/26 Barmera to Moorook

Morning plovers at Lake Bonney.

I was worried about navigating the bridge where the Sturt Highway crossed the Murray a few kms from town. Putting off the moment, I wandered up the main street of Barmera on the way out of town. Barmera had all the shops a lakeside play town needed, plus a surprising art installation or two and a beautiful art deco movie theatre that was now a gallery.

As it turned out the Sturt Highway was easily avoided. I trundled down narrow roads cloistered with grape vines, along tracks of bright red hard-packed sand, and found myself at Cobdogla where all sorts of attractions waited to be discovered.

From Cobdogla a little gravel road escorted me along the Kaiser Spit, part of the Cobdogla game reserve. Sweet little waterside camp grounds came and went, each with their own fire pit. Birds sang and burbled in the trees and every so often a fisherman puttered by in a businesslike tinnie. I'd reached a quiet corner of the Murray, all wetlands and lagoons, submerged forests, slow sweeping meanders and curling corners of water. All the high energy water players skipped across from Waikerie to Renmark and this tear-drop loop of river was left to us quieter, slower folk. Apart from the Stuart Highway, of course.

In the end even the bridge wasn't that hard.  I popped out onto the bridge approach and walked 100m on the generous shoulder to reach the safety of the protected pedestrian lane, where I could ignore the traffic and focus instead on the river and the cliffs while being careful not to step on dead pigeons.

From there it was a quick run down to Kingston on Murray, with a beautiful picnic area for lunch and nothing else there at all other than shuttered houses and a few moored houseboats.  Google Maps insisted there was a caravan park and Post Office just up the road, but I never checked if that was true or not.

South I went on Kingston Road, the river hidden by vineyards and farmland on the left until I reached Moorook, when a plethora of camping reserves presented themselves for selection.  I chose the one directly opposite the General Store and Club, and spent quite a bit of time dithering on how to enter my vehicle registration in the automatic camping register machine.  In the end I settled on 'bicycle' and both the machine and I were happy.

Just down the reserve a group of men demonstrated commendable focus on fishing, attracting a lot of attention from the pelicans.  Without mobile coverage I was truly untethered from the wider world.  I read my book, watched fish jump and swirl in the river, watched the fisher boats going home for the day, went for a walk around Moorook, and popped into the General Store where I bought a paddle pop because I felt sorry for the owner.  "You have to stay open all day," I said. "You're tied to the shop on a beautiful day and there's no customers."

He shrugged.  "Sometimes it's busy, maybe two days a week.  But then the weaather changes, or it's a drought, or now... the fuel prices."  He was very philosophical about the whole thing.

The possibilites of Moorook were exhausted in short order.  I rang Roger on the free public phone to let him know I was alive, but he didn't answer.  Then he rang back 15 minutes later but by then I was back on my riverside spot, cooking my dinner and tucking myself into my tent before any errant mosquitoes could find me. The river sang me to sleep with a lullaby of wood ducks and water as it slid by on its long journey to the sea.