I already had my holidays booked to go o the salt, "Hers" did too.......by lunchtime Sunday she'd found a web-site that handled "return rentals"....We'd found a 4 bed campervan that had to be returned to Alice Springs in central Australia, we'd have to pay all but $210 of the fuel bill and pay $5 perday , we took an extra day at $75.... It would be just the thing to get the driving bug out of the sytem, see Uluru(Ayres Rock) and The Alice which neither of us had done....
We left on the Thursday and headed for Port Wakefield ,it was an awful day with strong winds and driving rain. We had a "counter meal"( that's what we call a pub meal here) at Tailem Bend and then continued on for another two hours to Port Wakefield where we stopped in a truck bay for the night with a little over 500miles behind us... We were driving a brand new 4 bed on the back of a Fiat Ducato diesel with the most annoying servo operated manual transmission you could imagine...a brilliant piece of engineering that seemed to incorporate the worst aspects of auto's and manual's and none of the good points of either, but having said that , it did make an incredibly annoying beep everytime you started it to say that the stick wasn't in the right position....There were six pages about it in the manual, she asked me several times whether I had read the manual.
Why would I do that?.....
Day two was the haul from Port Wakefield to Coober Pedy passing on the way through Port Augusta which is the last town before you head to the salt...We got the few things we'd forgotten food wise and headed off. We came to the crossroads where you have a choice..."A1 Perth 1484 miles or A87 Alice Spring 762 miles"..... we turned north for the Alice it was spitting, but most notably it was green, as far as the eye could see. This is usually very harsh , dry, red country.....
We stopped at the first lookout....and looked back toward Port Augusta , it's old country and everything is on a scale that says billions of years, we had a long way to go....we got truckin.
We stopped at Spud's roadhouse on the road into Woomera. (
http://www.landracing.com/forum/index.php/topic,862.465.html )....filled the tank and I had a shower.... She was elsewhere when I got back to the camper...I opened the side door and it swung all the way open and a gas strut was hanging from the bottom of it, I noticed that the cups on either end were plastic and that there was nothing to limit the door.....well , gee that was gonna last forever...it became on ongoing theme.....
"who thought that up?, gee how come that hasn't broken already?......why is that there? .....gee that looks flimsy......hey nice glass top on the cooker , who ever thought we'd need one of them in a mobile campervan?"
We stopped at The next viewing area which looks over Island Lagoon a big salt lake at the nth eastern corner of Lake Gairdner. The Woomera area is the edge of a large escarpment which delineates a huge flat plain from the slighty lower area that is the Gairdner/Port Augusta area to the south ......I was "making my way back tomy seat as She began driving ouit of the car-park, the soooooper-dooooooper transmission went through one of it's painfully drawn out gear shifts , I lurched forward and smacked my head for the third time of the day, but this time straining my neck......an old whiplash injury I got years back running out of the workshop with a welding helmet flipped up which caught the door.I was grumpy and sat in the passenger seat, It was OK that my neck was stiff as the scenery is pretty much the same in every direction...we were in the desert, the only wildlife werethe ever present Peregrine falcons, the odd crow and finches...we'd seen a bit of roadkill but nothing warm blooded that didn't have wings...we made it to Coober Pedy moments before nightfall. Coober Pedy is an outpost that began when opals were discovered....for a long time everybody lived in converted mines and the place had a reputation for lawlessness. Some people live above ground now.
The outstanding point about Coober Pedy was that the whole area was like a bowling green.......generally it is a moonscape, red dirt and thousands and thousands of pointy mullock heaps..... the only relief being broken and rusty jerry-built mining equipment.
We went and had a beer at one of the pubs, it was Friday night and there was a DJ in the lounge, the boys stood at the bar while girls danced around their handbags ....then a couple of blackfellas turned up, one of them laid on some breakdancing, every bit as good as we'd seen the previous weekend, the girls all knew him and gave him all the room he needed and a rousing round of applause as he went back to his table, they'd been tossing coins at his feet which he didn't pick up so one of them followed him and put them on the table, he pushed them over to his friends..... It was the only pub in town, one of the girls told "Hers" that everywhere was closing at sunset because of the cost of electricity which was set to double.......
We walked back to the camper park under the brilliant desert sky ......the next morning the prop of the camper park said he hadn't seen "it 'round here like this ever and I've been here nearly thirty years"... he had hands that you could have used to grind metal and was like many names in the area from the Baltic states.
We went to the supermarket and then visited the underground Catholic church.........then we hit the road , we had eight hours of driving to get to Uluru and this ain't no country for night driving.....
Topic: Australian Belly Tank (Read 3198722 times)