So I left Mildura again and headed off back to Renmark, ditching my fruit and veg on the way, to keep the fruit fly police happy.
Renmark wasnt as good as I expected it to be, not a great deal there at all really but I did manage to get some admin done and stock up for another month with meds. The campsite was good though and the weather wasnt stupid hot (more on that later on), and I was right by the river, the good old Murray again, I get the feeling that we should have been on first name terms the amount of time I’ve spent looking at it this trip. But again nice to see a decent amount of water flowing along it.
Well I got a bit of a surprise through the post, there was I thinking I had officially become an old aged pensioner when I hit 65 November, but no , the UK civil service said you are still a spring chicken young man, you have another year to go before we give you your pension. Yes dear folks as you are all no doubt well aware the pension age has gone up to 66 and is heading further North to 67 in the not too distant future. Probably during my lifetime it will hit 70. Happily however, the Hampshire Constabulary said otherwise and decided to award me my pension, so swings and roundabouts I think.
From Renmark I headed further West aiming for Port Augusta which is to the North of Adelaide. It wasnt til I stopped on the way to give the dogs a stretch and a drink and was looking at the map for a free camping place to stay that I noticed that the road I was on took me back through Clare (another case of deja vu all over again), so I decided to stop there for the night and venture off in the morning. It was a handy place to stop as it was only 3 to 4 hours drive from there the next day to Port Augusta
It was a good drive West and went through some really lovely old and small townships, even managed to pull over for a coffee at Wirrabara and have a look at some more Silo Artwork, this one I thought was particularly striking. It did cross my mind how some of these places manage to survive, as not a lot appears to happen in them if you do manage to see any people. But I guess as the populace gets older eventually the towns will die as very little new blood is attracted to these places., sad in a way but
So onwards to Port Augusta where I found a nice Caravan park for a couple of nights right beside where the road splits, right to Coober Pedy (my next destination) Darwin and the Northern Territory or straight on to Perth. So even for me it was very hard to go the wrong way and have to backtrack. When I arrived at Port Augusta the outside temperature was 42c (apart from the USA does anyone else still use Fahrenheit?), the wa\ter coming out of the stand pipe to go into the caravan was hot enough to shower in, and too hot to put in the dog bowls, so they got spoilt by having bottled water during the day then piped water at night. They will be wanting jacuzzis and towelling robes next.
Port Augusta is a strange place, very spread out and very industrial once outside the CBD lots of freight yards and huge trains, some look as if they are 3kms long or more. The actual CBD is very small, you could walk around it and see everything in about 30mins or so. There are some lovely old building and a really nice boardwalk by the sea, and was a great place to give the dogs a step out. As an added bonus and a really nice food truck selling burritos and a good strong coffee. Of course one just had to taste the local fare .
Whilst at the van park I noticed something weird going on, there were only about five or six of us parked up in a park which probably holds up to 50 powered sites, but every time someone new came in they kept clumping everyone together. One person was designated to come in next to me even though there were 8 empty spaces to the left of me, which would have meant me bringing in the dog fence and putting away my awning, so when the chap saw this he rang the reception and explained this and asked to go to another site and they said yeah no problem, why not just do that in the first places rather than crowding people in and causing and inconvenience. Most odd. Now what would one of my blogs be like without a quick moan or two within it.
So onwards from here to Coober Pedy, which is the Opal capital of Australia, Opals are also mined in Queensland and Lightning Ridge in NSW but for sheer quantity this place is it. The weather was really starting to warm up so it was hourly stops on the way for the dogs to make sure they got water and some fresh air (well fresh as it could be in the heat). Stopped at Spuds Roadhouse about 180kms North of Port Augusta to top up with fuel (179.9 per litre instead of 149.9 in the Port) and also fuel for me and the dogs, coffee for me and a sausage roll (jumbo size) split 3 ways. Nice little roadhouse and saw my first proper road train here, possibly 60mtrs long and well into the 100ton vicinity. Now some of you may have seen Outback Truckers on you TV sets, but let me tell you until you see one for real you have no idea just how big they are, and when the come thundering past you going 110kph or more its quite a scary sight. When you see one of those in you rear view mirror you just slow down pull over and let them go. These chaps do not slow down or stop for anything, hence the multitude of dead kangaroos and emus on the side of the road, The carrion birds must be the best fed in all the world.
Anyway I got to a place called Lake Hart, well what used to be Lake Hart, its now just a salt pan, and as the outside temp was hitting 45c I decided to call it a day and stop for the night. Of course not having mains power I couldn’t have the zircon on in the caravan, so my poor 12v fan did the best it could in very trying conditions. Man that was a very warm and sticky night, I think the temp only got down to about 37c or so. None of us got much sleep, so well left just after 5:30 the next morning just as the sky was getting light, thought I would get a good way up the road before the sun did its worst. I decided against my original plan of stopping for a second night on the way, and thought going straight through to Coober Pedy and onto power was a better idea. Again hourly stops for the dogs so arrived in Coober Pedy about 1100, and booked myself into the Oasis caravan park. The drive up was really uneventful but in some places really quite scenic if you like the outback look. I must admit I do like the outback but sometimes it looks even better when you are in a car with zircon on a bit of music, and away from the heat and the flies.
I was a bit disappointed with Coober Pedy, not because of the town but it was so hot there you couldn’t really walk around to look at things, every day I was there it was in the high 40’s probably averaging 47c. But on the Thursday 19th it excelled itself, it got to 51.9c (125.4f), which managed to go into my record book as the hottest day Ive experienced, beating my previous best of 51.1 (123.9f) from out in the Middle East in 1988, at least in this instance I didnt have to wear full anti flash clothing and a gas mask. So unfortunately due to the heat I didnt get to see as much as I hoped or would have liked, but thankfully the Oasis park had a lovely undercover unheated pool which was an absolute god send. I was in and out like a fiddlers elbow on the Thursday. And one other thing certainly for my UK bretheren, beat this if you can. I washed two t shirts and a pair of shorts on the very hot Thursday, hung them out to dry in the high heat and the very hot wind, just over fifteen minutes later they were being put back in the cupboard nice and dry. It was just like putting them in the oven.
Coober Pedy is certainly far from the most scenic place in Australia there are very few trees and even less grass, but there is plenty of sand and dust. Quite a few of the shops and the houses are actually underground to get away from the summer heat and due to the nature of the rock they get a year round temperature of between 21c and 25c, thus doing away with the need for heating and cooling.
every other shop in Coober Pedy is an opal specialist and some of them would not be out of place in the back streets of a major city, real Honest John type of places, but I must say the people are all pretty friendly and make time to have a chat.
When going up and back down again on the Sturt Highway between Port Augusta and Coober Pedy, every so often you go over a cattle grid, and just after the grid you see a sign saying unfenced road look out for livestock and the name of the station (farm not railway) whose land you are crossing. Well on the way up one of these signs took my attention as shortly after it there was another sign pointing down a gravel road to where the actual Station was, and I thought I had read it wrong so I checked again on the way back down on Saturday. The sign said that the road was going through Mount Eba station then the road sign a couple of kms further on pointed to the right saying Mount Eba Station so I guess technically this was the start of their driveway from the highway. But what grabbed my attention ,and this will give you some idea as to how big Australia is, was that the sign said it was 41kms (25miles). That is some driveway. Ive looked up Mount Eba station on the inter web, and currently it covers 1305 square miles and believe me this is far from being one of the big stations.
I stopped at Woomera on the way back down, this town is owned by the Military and used to be the base for all the personnel who were involved in rocket, missile and bomb testing mainly through the 50s 60s and into the 70s. It only has 146 inhabitants now mainly people who maintain the facilities or work at the observatory. I drove around on Saturday and Sunday and only saw 3 people, and that was over both days, and one of these was the young girl in the shop. Lots of empty houses but as they are all owned by the Military you are unable to buy them, and none of them are for sale, seems such a waste to me when there are so many people who would love a roof over their heads. The only problem with this thought is that there is no work there unless you are a technical whizz, and the nearest town is 110miles away, so a bit of a commute. Anyway it was well worth a look around, so after two night there Im back in Port Augusta again (deja vu again) and will be staying here til Boxing Day.
Not much in the way of good photos this time, but will post what I have
Geoff1511 Travels 