Quilpie was where we struck our first real problem with refuellers. Despite a phone call the day before and another one before leaving Toompine with almost "to-the-minute-timings", when we arrived in Quilpie and made the third phone call to say we had arrived, we got the reply "Yeah, I'll try and find someone to come down and fill you up. It might be twenty minutes or half an hour." The half an hour turned into nearly fifty minutes. With the rain starting to get close (which would stop us refuelling at all!) one of the SMBers rephoned and said we were were waiting and needed to fuel up pretty quickly the reply was "No shit eh!" When the young guy arrived he obviously didn't care less that we had been waiting. He took his time and nearly two hours later we were ready to depart the airport. The bus driver had been very patient and apologetic but he was as much a hostage to the refueller's attitude as the rest of us.
The result was that our planned trips to the local museum/art gallery/ tourist information centres and opal shop were cut very short ( and some of the SMBers decided to forgo them altogether.) In the long run Quilpie businesses lost out on a significant slice of money because of the refuellers attitude. At this stage in ten years of flying round the Australian outback SMB has never come across a less helpful refueller. Quilpie wins an award! There are refuellers in most of the bigger towns in the region so we can only recommend other groups go elsewhere unless a new refueller comes to town. Which is a pity because the rest of the town was very nice and the hotel owner could not have been more helpful.
The night we were in Quilpie was where we hit the most rain. In fact we thought we were going to be stranded there for the following day. It might have be a problem for us but the locals were grinning from ear to ear. Like Thargomindah and Toompine they had not seen rain for more than a year. This of course generated another poem! Click here for the musings of a warped mind!
