After 8 days in a small town, living on Mi Goreng and steak burgers from the local cafe (if you could call it that) we were hanging for a real meal at McDonalds! So after a few interruptions from some various dragons on the Morney Plain, we headed for Mt. Isa! We drove as far as we could in about 15 hours, which brought us to Dajarra. A great place for stunning Common Death Adders and Black Headed Pythons. Unfortunately we didn’t arrive to this area until around midnight when things obviously weren’t so active, as we didn’t see anything around Dajarra, but did find a Curl Snake (damn it!) and a Moon Snake further south near Boulia much earlier in the night. No photos were taken of the Curl Snake for obvious reasons.

During the day near Bedourie we came across this monster!

Yellow Spotted Monitor – Varanus panoptes

Moon Snake – Furina ornata

The next day we were in no major rush to get out of Dajarra, Macca’s don’t stop serving their crappy breakfast menu until 10am.
After searching through the rubbish dump, flipping bits of tin and other various items with producing very little other than a few common gecko and skink species, we continued on to Mt. Isa.
There was some nice scenery to be seen in the area.

On the way to Mt. Isa, we didn’t see a great deal of live reptiles. But we did however see a few road kill animals we were keen to see alive.

Gravid Black Headed Python – Aspidites melanocephalus

Spencers Monitor – Varanus spenceri

Finally after 9 days in pretty much no-where, we arrived at Mt. Isa! The capital of outback Queensland! I had been through here twice before, so I new exactly where I was going! Straight to 16-20 Simpson St, yeah you guessed it, McDonalds!
It was probably the best Grand Angus burger I have ever had. The fries were fresh, hot and crispy, and the coke washed it all down like magic! We spent a good hour or so in there, making the most of the air conditioning (unlike SW Qld, it was actually hot here!) and making the most of the free internet. We stuffed around doing various things you do in towns to kill time while waiting for it to get dark.
Once the sun had set, we finally made our way out of town in search of Common Death Adders! We had never seen any sort of Death Adder in the wild before, and we were very keen to do so.

We were amazed to come across the first adder only just out of the city, right after sun set. We had been looking for them for about 30 seconds when we saw that beautiful slug sitting in the middle of the road. To say a little bit of yahooing went on would be an understatement! Look at this stunning creature!

Acanthophis antarcticusAfter driving another few minutes, we came across another Adder! This one was even better looking than the last, with almost no black on it, and in the middle of taking a dump! He or she had its tail up in the air, backing one out. At first this gave me a fright as a car had just been past, and I thought it had been hit. The Adder was ok, but another car was coming behind us, so we didn’t get pictures of this one.

Despite the night kicking off with a bang, that was all we found apart from the token Northern Spiny-tailed Geckos.
We came through Mt. Isa a second time on our way to North Queensland, so I though rather than have a whole other chapter for it, I would include it in this post.

The second time we came through, it was much hotter, and there were a few thunderstorms lingering around. We decided to spice things up, so while we were waiting for it to get dark we stuffed our faces with pizza at Eagle Boys. Once the last of the light had finally left the sky, we headed back to where we found the Death Adders a few weeks before.
We didn’t find any more Adders, but a few other elapid species. We only photographed one as the others we had already photographed in the Northern Territory. The one we did photograph was something we were hoping to see in this area, it was a new species for us.

Pygmy Mulga Snake – Pseudechis sp.

We then headed to Cloncurry, about 100km east of Mt. Isa. On the way we found a few more snakes.

Near patternless Children’s Python – Antaresia childreni

It was nearing midnight when we found this normally diurnal species. High temperatures sometimes cause them to come out at night when it’s cooler.

Northern Brown Snake – Pseudechis nuchalis

We arrived in Cloncurry late at night, went straight to a caravan park to set up our tents to get a few hours sleep before heading to Normanton in the Gulf of Carpentaria the next day in search of Olive Pythons. But that’s a much later post, as there is still all of Northern Territory to go! After the 1st night in Isa, we drove to Camooweal and spent the night there before heading across the Barkley Tablelands early in the morning in search of Speckled Browns – Pseudonaja guttata after failing in Windorah.