Three Blonde Nomads: Boulia – Home of the Min Min Lights.

The road from Mt Isa to Boulia is kind of scary. It is called a ‘Development Road’ which means it is a single lane of bitumen, usually with gravel on each side but sometimes with no space off the black top. The rule of Development Roads is that if you see a truck coming, get out of the way because they won’t move and they won’t stop. Towing a caravan in that kind of environment means that you need to be very alert. Your braking distance is significantly longer than if you are just a car and you also can’t just quickly pull onto gravel without risking an accident.

We’d been on the road for about 3km when our first truck approached. Yikes!

Move aside!

We passed several other trucks but luckily had space to pull over. One car whizzed past us, half on bitumen and half on the gravel and kicked up a ton of stones all over us. We are lucky that we didn’t lose the windscreen. Jenny roundly abused him over the UHF radio but unfortunately we don’t think he was listening. We also had cows.

Mooove aside!

There is also a random 'Bike Tree' in the middle of nowhere along the road.

Bike Tree.

The town of Boulia (population of around 260) is famous for a phenomenon known as ‘Min Min Lights’. The mysterious lights have been seen throughout the district since the early 1900s and have been described as floating balls of light that have been seen hovering, moving at various speeds (chasing cars and trucks at over 60kmph), moving through fences, changing shape and colour and even splitting into several independently moving objects. Nobody has ever ‘caught’ one, although some photographs have been taken since the 90s thanks to camera phones. Some people think they are ghosts, some say they are electro-magnetic radiation and others say it is alien. There is a great ‘Min Min Encounter’ show at the visitor centre that explains the history of the lights. They use animatronic actors dressed as locals and stockmen to tell their stories of seeing the lights. There are 5 rooms that you walk though, made up to look like a tavern, a farmhouse, a stockmans camp etc. It gets dark and spooky and is really well done, especially for a little country town.

About to enter the 'Min Min Encounter' in Boulia.

The Red Stump.

Boulia also has the Stonehouse Museum and Ocean Fossil Centre which we visited the next day. They have a surprisingly extensive set of displays. We really enjoyed seeing the plesiosaur fossil because the plesiosaur is referenced many times in Ben’s favourite TV show - Power Rangers. The Ichthyosaurus fossil is also awesome. Ichthyosaurus is covered in one of Ben’s sight and sound books back at home so this was a great educational experience.