No snakes overnight despite camping on deeply cracked grey soils on a shrubby creek bank! No rain either so all good.

A quick first 20 km on good road with a tailwind past the Davenport house to the boundary of the Diamantina National Park.

The road had deteriorated on transiting from the Barcoo Shire to the Diamantina Shire but then it went to badly corrugated crud once in the national park. Seems as the NP doesn’t pay shire rates the shire doesn’t see why they should be obligated to grade the (shire) roads inside the NP. Don’t get upset, the shire doesn’t work on a lot of roads where the rates payments are small relative to the long length of roads to outlying properties.

Halfway to the ranger office a grader appeared towing it’s camp. At last some chance of improved road conditions. Not so. Sarah, a ringer at Davenport Downs, was bringing the station grader back to base after working on private roads inside the Davenport outstation boundary.

After a very slow, bumpy ride into the rising northerly headwind made it to the ranger station.

Chris the ranger decided that having a solo, worn out cyclist camped by a billabong 20 km downstream with a big rain event forecast was not a safe option so let me camp at the ranger station. This was great, thanks National Parks.

Spent the rest of the day cleaning up, eating the curry left over by the road contractors and chatting to a vegetation survey crew from the Australian Wildlife Conservancy (?).