As we are always on the quest to do something different and Mungalla station was certainly a change from the idyllic campgrounds by the beaches. It is an aboriginal owned and run cattle station near Ingham and they allow camping on their property. We didn’t really have much more info than this but it was just down the road and we thought worth a go.
There was no one around on arrival just a sign with a box stating that we should put our $15 in the box and camp anywhere next to the fence. Easy. It wasn’t long before we were set up overlooking a beautiful stretch of wetlands and we sat back and enjoyed watching the birds remarking as to what a great spot we had found.
As we walked around the property we met a few of the locals and they all told us that we should catch sight of a resident crocodile!! We were a little sceptical as the fence dividing us and the river seemed to be anything but crocodile proof but nevertheless sat down for the afternoon “croc watching.” By this stage other travellers had arrived and set up and one of them came over to have a chat and one of the first things he said was “wasn’t the croc amazing?” It turns out we had been staring at it for about 3hrs without being able to see it!!
We had a superb 3 or 4 days at the station and while the wetlands of Nth Qld aren’t exactly the same as the savanna of South Africa we felt a little like we were on safari. We enjoyed lots of walks around the property and once the initial bad weather cleared we were able to enjoy watching the stars at night.
Full moon and long exposures 
The beauty of spots like this are their remoteness and tranquility. The drawback is that they often come without power and facilities. We have set ourselves up to be pretty self sufficient (toilet and shower working well!!) but until now all our research on how to keep battery systems charged had been done without practical application. The mathematics of maintaining our batteries’ power with solar and driving hadn’t accounted for 3 consecutive cloudy days. We had anticipated needing to make tweaks to our set up and after the 100th time one of us worryingly checked our battery levels we decided to venture out and buy a generator.
Turns out we were not alone!! Eventually though we got our hands on a fantastic one and just as we loaded it into the Ute to drive back the clouds parted and the sun came out!! Typical. T
Am so enjoying your Blog (and learning too) never knew we had a town/settlement named after us 🙄 good to see you on video last week. We had a great lazy week at Ste Max’.
Glad you are enjoying it Mike! It’s equally as fun writing. Long lost relatives maybe? 😁