Days 2 and 3

The start on Day 2 - notice in the background the terrific job the organisers do with the toilet logistics; they manage to get 3-4 portables in to every checkpoint and believe me some of the roads in are not hospitable. (Admittedly, city boy with very small 4WD perspective - they all drive super-monsters down here, probably think the roads are flat). Another river feature (sorry about the picture quality, I have no idea what's going on here) is the amount of trees near the surface of the river - it's incredibly shallow.

It's also not very straight - nowhere more poignantly illustrated than checkpoint D on Day 2, where you can see the boats coming downstream, then walk 30 metres through some bush to wait for them at the checkpoint, which for them is still 2km away. Day 2 is a long day; in neither 2009 nor 2012 did my paddlers get to the end.

This is a popular checkpoint with tourists/visitors - I guess it's advertised somewhere. You can get an idea that not all the checkpoints have ready access to the boats - these little cliffs make it tricky to get in and out of the boat, and also to get in and out of the river to hold the boat, and plenty of checkpoints have much higher banks than these.

Liz managed 28 km on day 2, and in fact hit her peak speed of over 8 kph trying to escape the 'grim reaper'. The wind probably costs 1-2 kph because the canoe has a.) no keel nor skeg to help it maintain a line and b.) high sides which make a big target and c.) an open top (unlike the kayaks here) which means the wind not only pushes on the outside of the windward side of the boat but also the inside of the "downwind" side. The Murray is both windy and unpredictable, in that the wind is affected by the dramatic variation in the density of the bankside bushland.

The two smaller pictures illustrate the main riverbank landscape, I'm thinking this purple thing is not indigenous. Hard to imagine a better place to encapsulate a lot of stereotypical images of, say, Lawson's kind of Australia (even though his bit was generally further north, and bits of that that I've seen are substantially more bleak than even the human impacted landscapes here)