WE’VE hit three deserts in three days, and the tip of the furthermost desert, the Murray-Sunset National Park, stops just short of Mildura, a country city on the Vic/NSW border.
Mildura’s a hell of a weird place. It’s an agricultural epicentre, a fruit pickin’ town, but American in design: wide highways, numbered streets on a grid, outskirts that stretch on into oblivion with the biggest Bunnings I’ve ever seen, endless motels, three drive-thru McDonalds within five minutes… all lined with palm trees. The larger district’s known as Sunraysia – so named when the ‘prince of ballyhoo’, local entrepreneur Jack De Garis, launched a competition to name the area’s dried fruits in 1919. Thrashes ‘Orange County’, I reckon.
The town centre itself is nearly swallowed whole, but eventually we find it – a mall and a strip of souvlaki joints jumbled up with fancy restaurants.
We’re here to see the Murray River, though, which doesn’t disappoint. We follow it out of town, as the bush pirate’s cortisol levels are going through the roof here, and hook up with it again the other side of Robinvale.
The Murray River acts as the NSW/Victoria border, so by jumping in I’ll be crossing into my third state in three days. There’s a beautiful sunset going on, which makes whizzing off down the river in a rip at least very scenic. Eventually I manage to engage some kind of a front crawl and get back to the bank. Stunning.
Keeper? Would definitely do that again.
Hey man, now you're really living 
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