#2: [07-Dec-03]

23-Feb-2002 -- Oxley, NSW. Continued from 33S 144E

Once we were back on the Ivanhoe-Balranald Road, we continued south for a while and then turned left on the Clare-Oxley Road. My pre-planning had suggested that a farm track off the Clare-Oxley Road would appear on my right about 12 kilometres from the confluence - roughly perpendicular to the road.

As we got closer to where the track was meant to be, the problem was there were farm tracks every few hundred metres and it wasn't clear which one to take. The track that was on my map was supposed to lead to a water tank about 2 kilometres from the confluence that could be walked or driven depending on the terrain.

In failing light, we decided it was safest to take a track that ran along a fence coming off a cattle grid. This looked promising for a while but it eventually ended with no water tank in sight and still about 5 kilometres short of the confluence. We drove cross-country for a few minutes straight towards the confluence, but there was a little bit too much vegetation on the ground and so at 7:50 p.m. we called it quits with 4.42 kilometres to go.

I'll probably have another go at this one sometime this year, but will try to locate the owner or manager of the station beforehand to get some advice on how to get there. Unfortunately neither my map nor anything along the Clare-Oxley Road shed any light on the name of station to which the confluence belongs - so I have my work cut out to achieve that.

It took another couple of hours to get back to our motel in Hay, and we missed our dinner reservation at the motel restaurant whose chef had already gone home by the time we arrived. Luckily there was a take-away Chinese restaurant in town, which did a nice beef in blackbean sauce and combination noodles for us.

Three out of four ain't bad?

The end.