Coonabarabran to Warrumbungle NP

June 9th: Day 34 – Coonabarabran to Warrumbungle NP

The neck and back are much better this morning after Raman clicked my back gently with my direction last night.

The Warrumbungle National Park has been burnt out recently. One can easily see the form of the land through the burnt trunks.

View South East from Siding Spring Observatory

Although this is sad in a way, it also has its beauty and certainly offers a unique opportunity to see the landscape naked. Understanding the hydrodynamics of a landscape is much easier when you can see its actual form. Speaking of Hydrodynamics, the erosion is pretty nasty! Coming in late I didn’t get many photographs but I would like to spend a bit of time hear, weather permitting. Its been a little sunny today but the clouds keep returning to threaten rain.

Coonabarabran is the self proclaimed “Australian Capital of Astronomy”. There are little domes housing telescopes everywhere and only a little way into the Warrumbungle NP there is a huge dome, visible for more than 15km away. The Siding Spring Observatory is enormous and the telescopes and facilities housed within are impressive to say the least.

Thanks for the recommendation Mairwen!

The main observatory dome at Siding Spring.

260 tons of telescope! The biggest in the southern hemisphere. What a place.

Volcanic plug, from about 17 million years ago, that are more resistant to erosion than the surrounding landscape

An alternate route down from Siding Spring Observatory brought us to another serious bit of equipment

The clunking noise on my bike at low speed under acceleration got worse today and again I looked at the cosh drive but this time I am pretty certain that this is the cause. The chain was very loose too and I had only tightened it recently. Pulled the back wheel out this evening and found the rubbers to be in better condition than I expected.

Inspecting the coshdrive

Never the less they need replacing asap. I will try to order them tomorrow if I can. I activated my telstra pre-paid data SIM this morning to update the blog. There was a telstra tower in Bylong but it must have been one of the ones that I am not allowed to access on Kogan. Kogan “use part of the telstra 3G network”. Kogan only has access to 97% of Australia’s population, just the same as the Optus network claims. The full Telstra network offers 99.5% coverage of the population. Not a lot more as a percentage but as area I believe it is a lot more. Anyway, I was only getting 4kb/s upload in Coonabarabran with almost full bars so I decided to activate the Telstra SIM. I got a message saying it would be ready within 4 hours. It’s still not work this evening and once again we are in an area where Kogan is not covered.

I will have to ride out tomorrow to make a called on Kogan to get the Telstra one working so I can order the parts. Frustrating.

Split Rock from our camp illuminated by the setting sun.