Wednesday, September 25, 2013
We travelled a short distance along the “famed” Gibb River Road to the “famed” El Questro resort. The section of the Gibb River Road was sealed, so it really does not count. The resort is a nice campground and we decided to park ourselves for the afternoon, chill out and do some much needed clothes washing. We spent time reading and listening to the squawks of cockatoos and other noisy aussie birds. Extremely pretty birds but unfortunately with no beautiful accompanying bird-song.
Stephen went for a drive to Chamberlain Gorge and explored briefly up the road to Explosion Gorge. While the gorge was nice, it was hard to enjoy it in the oppresive heat. So a hasty retreat back to the campground was made.
To quote our guide book, “The days are warming up in September, but maximum temperatures are still reasonably comfortable”. Well, today it hit 43C (that is 109F for the Americans). As the sun sets it was a reasonable 34C (93F).
This morning we woke up to find our fridge was not holding it’s 4C temperature setting. The assumption was that is working hard to stay cool in these hot conditions and merely draining the auxiliary battery in the process. After the drive to El Questro, all was good again. With some luck, nothing is actually broken, just the setup can’t handle the conditions. However, I suspected that the problem is a little more complicated with a partial failure of our split charging unit. Further investigation is required in the next few days. For the meantime, we might need to face the possibility of no fridge until we can work out the problem. More to come in a future post.
