Day 5 & 6

Camped on the Cooper at Innaminka

Remember that weather insurance we took out at the beginning of our trip? Well, if you've seen the grey skies in those photos on the preceding pages...you guessed it, we finally drove to the rain. Who would expect it to rain in the desert in the spring? Well the wet season was coming early in 2000, but we weren't to know this. So, on what was to be our only night at Innaminka, a rain front came through from the north west and swept through a wide front towards the east. What all this technical stuff means is that we weren't going to be going down the Strzlecki Track in the morning heading for Cameron Corner as per the original plan. The rain stayed with us for the rest of the following day and this means that all roads in & out of Innaminka were closed, as were many roads in the whole region. When we went to the camping area on our arrival we noticed that the track down to the banks was black soil and this is very fertile and when you add water things grow like blazes. Great if you want to grow something, but it also becomes grease when wet and some of the other campers with caravans were panicking about the creek flooding and washing them away. This provided a fair bit of entertainment watching a brand new Land Rover Discovery and new caravan jack knifed and sliding side ways out of control. After what seemed to be an eternity, they made it out and up to Innaminka 1 kilometre away, only to find all the roads closed and having to resume camping, but this time in the mud on the road. Oh well, we had the bush sense to stay put and just keep an eye on the creek levels from time to time and, of course we camped on a lovely patch of lush green grass when we arrived.

Well, if it had to rain, we were in the right place for it to happen. We had hot showers and the resources of the trading post and the pub. The Cooper proved to be a serene place to be and our forced stop over made us take time out and study the abundant bird life that live here. Pelicans cruised the waterhole sometimes singly and at other times they would get into formations of up to 24 and swim in a horse shoe shaped group, and then as if someone had blown a whistle, they closed the circle and dived their heads into the water to catch fish. There were eagles, herons, kites, ducks and bitterns, and over head in the river gums hundreds of corella's had made their homes.

We had no luck fishing, but a few well placed opera house traps and we had a feed of yabbies each afternoon about cocktail hour.

Rain stopped us in our tracks	Click image for full size view	Best pub in Innaminka
This is a Yabbie	When you boil them for a few minutes, it's hard to look at them for too long. Break the head off and shell the tail and eat it before someone else does. They taste a lot like crab. The sweetest meat is in the claws.	These little guys came everywhere with us, as Elizabeth took them on a world tour with her. We nicknamed them "Thargo & Mindah"

The pub at Innaminka is a gold mine of history on the region and the walls are absolutely covered with fantastic photos of the past and a few laughs from the present...well worth a look in and while you're there "Have a Coopers on the Cooper" as they say there.

On the second day there, the weather fined up for the duration of the afternoon and left us with another of those legendary sunsets. We felt we should pack up the following morning and go up to Innaminka ready to travel, as we felt the roads should be open.