July 20th

 A day of travelling sand dunes and currugations. Lovely country with various bushes and trees but hardly

 any of them in flower. John has now had the experience of sitting in the passenger seat while the driver

is learning to negotiate sand dunes. I remember being very scared the first trip up the Canning Stock Route

with 1000 dunes to go over.  'Earthy' seems to love to fly over sand dunes so that makes driving easier!

We think that Eucalpyptus Youngiana/Ooldea Mallee maybe in this area as well as Kings Mill Mallee. They are very similar but we have understood that Youngiana has bigger buds and hence bigger nuts. Both have huge flowers.

We think we have identified two new acacia trees today. The Horse Mulga/Acacia Ramulosa which has soft grey  foliage and the Christmas Tree Mulga/ Acacia Aneura Conifera. This tree also has soft grey foliage but 
is cone shaped as a Christmas Tree. 

 After not seeing a vehicle for over 70 hours we arrived Ilkurlka Roadhouse, which is in Spinifex Country on the Anne Beadell Highway, provided us with water,fuel and Interent contact. It was good to be able to post 10 blogs. The roadhouse has been funded by the Tjuntjuntjara Community and has been open since July 2003. Ilkurlka is named after a major desert rockhole...Ilkurlka Rockhole


We are headed off along the road to Tjuntjuntjara, called 'Juntjunt' for convenience, and camped at the 2nd tank shed along this road. Again we found both tanks without water.

The buds of Eucalyptus Youngiana