18 June 2026 – 0 kms – Kinchega National Park
Barkindji Country
It’s a long process, and in the end, it doesn’t really get me anywhere.
I thought I’d have a go since we aren’t going anywhere anyway.
It started raining last night around 10pm. It’s 8am now, and it shows no signs of abating.
I’ve come over to the kitchen building to treat some water while we wait for the rain to stop. I first put water from the tap in the electric kettle. I get it boiling in there to give it a headstart. Then I transfer it to a large cooking pot and bring it to a boil on the stove and let it commence a rolling boil for five minutes.
Then I transfer the boiling water to a variety of smaller pots and containers and put these in the freezer to cool. After that happens, I transfer that water to my plastic bladder that attaches to my water filter, one litre at a time. I run the water through the filter and into another one of my bladders. That water then goes in the fridge (because crappy water tastes less crappy if it’s cold).
It takes me about 2 hours to boil, cool and filter five litres. And it still has a stomach-churning taste at the end of that. It doesn’t smell bad like some bore water I’ve consumed, but the taste is still enough to make you have to concentrate on swallowing so you don’t immediately retch it back up.
I find the solution though. I double dose it with my Gut-R powder. This is a drink mix that is basically glutamine and zinc with a citrus flavour that is helpful in maintaining gut barrier integrity. It disguises the taste of the water enough to get it down. The extra dosage just means I’m super maxxing the gut healing drink. You’ve heard of fibre-maxxing and protein-maxxing and whatever else on social media….
The rain stops around 11am. It is gluggy out there and I have to hop from brick paved area to brick paved area to get from the kitchen building to my room. The forecast was for 4-7mm, but I imagine they got a fair bit more than that given the strength and duration of it (they end up getting about 11mm which is half the monthly average).
Later in the afternoon, after the sun has been out and the wind has been blowing hard for awhile, I go for a walk to see just how boggy it is. Some bits are just soft but not gluggy, and other bits are very gluggy. I manage to nearly bog myself in my flip flops at one point.
I can see that the rangers have been in and out of the park depot area down the road a bit. Their tyre tracks don’t give me confidence that it’s going to dry too quickly.
But…. there have been waaaaaaay too many people on this trip. I love the high country trips because sometimes I don’t see people for several days and I can camp off in the forest alone most nights. This trip has been almost all paid accommodation around other people after interacting with people through the day each day.
So I am very, very, very happy to have 36 hours completely to myself. The park, and all of its roads, are closed. I am incredibly grateful for a bit of solitude on what’s been a pretty disappointing ride, other than the Cadell Fault stuff and Lake Mungo, so far.
I listen to the birds, to the door that bangs on the distant woolshed and the bore pump extracting groundwater every now and again. I listen to the hiss of the wind through the eucalypt leaves and go for a walk down the long-closed Emu Lake Drive. It is soft and sandy but not boggy.
I enjoy the sunset that puts on an evolving show for 45 minutes with colours lighting up the skies in 360 degrees around me.
I revel in the aloneness and the lack of any cognitive demand. On this trip I’m constantly having to figure out logistics of some sort or another, and after all the water treatment this morning, it’s nice to just ‘be’ for a little bit.
Oh yeah, I’ve boiled and then filtered water in the past. Fine for cooking, but for drinking the taste can be pretty awful. (Give me a couple cans of warm beer over that stuff any day.) Cool emu, red headed mouse spider and sunset pictures.
I’ve been able to double-treat water before to make it more palatable. It must have to do with particle size that causes the bad taste and whether that can get through the filter or not? I’ve NEVER been able to make stinky water taste good though. My guts absolutely don’t do high sulphur content water due to one of the types of bacteria I have in my gut that likes to overgrow. When I visit my parents, who have a well in a very volcanic area, I have to get gallon jugs and fill them up with treated water from town (which sources from the river instead). And yeah, warm beer would just make me more thirsty!