Breaking news! - Horse injured and coast reached but more to go...

------------------An email from Mum 2 days ago-----------------

We are in Normanton on a day off. We trucked to Karumba on the gulf to give the horses a few days off and the boys went fishing catching 20 king salmon -good to eat. Anita, Danielle and i toured up the Normanton river and saw crocks and mud crabs and lots of birds (jabarus, brolgas etc).

Unfortunately pig shooters at 4.30am startled the horses and Bambi went through a barb wire fence breaking a steel dropper off and hitting the next fence breaking a post. Bambi took a 3inch square of skin off her knee exposing muscle and has lots of deep but smaller cut on all legs. She has 3 wire marks across her neck i am surprised she is alive but she is acting like nothing hurts -one tough pony. We are floating her with Monny who hit her nose and shoulder and front legs but they are minor injuries and should be right in a week

We are now on the way down -200 km to ride to burke and wills roadhouse then truck to marion downs and ride the 300km to Birdsville that we skipped at the start. We have ridden 709kms and apart from the above all is good

For Grahams birthday we had 2kg of prawns and chocolate cake.

hope all is going ok mum

in Mt Isa in 9 days will send again xxx

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Somewhere north of Cloncurry...

I'm writing this from Cambodia and have no idea where my parents have got to now..

The last times i heard from them they were restocking in Mt Isa and and then were just north of Cloncurry. That was about 12 days ago. I'm not worried though as i don't expect them to have internet contact until Normanton. My best guess is that they are now somewhere between the 83 and the 1 north of cloncurry..

Here's an except from what my dad wrote to me on 11th July:

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To morrow heading off towards to Duchess then on to Cloncurry - doing
about 20KM per day this will increase as we all get fitter.

Weather fantastic during the day, but chills right down at night.

Horses doing well so far apart from the usual antics.

Country and scenery wonderful, as are the outback people.

Camp fires every night and a sit down to relax, the days are full and
quite draining so we feel entitled to the good bits.

Dogs all enjoying it so far, we are getting them to do the ride with us
to get them fit, now we are in Dingo country will have to muzzle them as
the stations do a lot of baiting.

There has been no rain in this region for a long time, the stock pull
the branches down from he trees to eat foliage thus doing harm to
natives.

At Bedourie we went to a cattle cutting competition, the riders were
stunning with their horse skills and horses incredible to.

We need to pick up about a tonne of water every three days most of this
is for horses.

Oh well I had better go collect fire wood - life is not all fun !

Bacon's / Pratts.

-----------------------------

Mum also said that she met a lady (Barb) who she knew from 30 years ago, nursing in tenant creek. Her husband we the horse manager for McLeod's Daughters for a few years and they were on their way to the cattle cutting competition.




They sent a CD with more pictures on it from Cloncurry but unfortunately i left it in Australia. There has been so much going on with the Carpets for Communities project that i have hardly had time to scratch myself. Mum suggested that i put a couple of updates here so some of the recent highlights are:

We won a Global online competition for projects working on ending child trafficking and child labour and slavery in general. There were 236 entries worldwide and we were judged into the final 15 and then after 2 weeks of popular voting we were voted equal top three to win the award! See: www.votechildren.org for details!

We also have been shortlisted for a further 10-15,000 in funding from another organisation and Indira Naidoo (ex SBS news presenter) has become our unofficial patron and is organising celebrities to help promote the project, is going to ask some friends in South East Asia to help with doing a tv doco and is going to recruit some well known designers to design some rugs to auction off.

Now i'm in Cambodia and hiring new staff so that we can open a head office in Siem Reap (a much bigger town)

More from the parents as soon as i hear anything..