In the centre of Australia...

there really isn't that much, as we have ascertained, but what there is spectacular. But I will start at the beginning as to what we’ve been doing:

We went to the Barossa Valley and bought some more wine. Overall I think I prefer the MacLaren Vale region for quaintness and scenery, although Barossa is home to some amazing wineries (Kay Brothers, Henchke, Two Hands…)

We camped at Flinders Ranges National Park. This is when I really started to notice the landscape changing – instead of hills and farms we were now driving across a very flat landscape, with spare yellow grass.



We drove the Oodnadatta Track. The unsealed road is in surprisingly good condition – we were doing 80km to 100km an hour nearly all the way. The towns on the track all look the same – a petrol station, which is also a supermarket, which is also a post office, which is also a bank next to a pub which is also a hotel. The “towns” are on average 200km apart, so in the interest of conserving fuel we stitched the aircon off. Wouldn’t want to be here in the heat of summer! Meanwhile, it is rather cold at the night – I had to acquire a big green blanket from the Salvation Army to keep warm.
I am actually learning a lot along the way about Australia’s settlement history, and the people who came out here to start sheep and cattle stations. It looks like such a hard and lonely life – every day a battle to acquire the necessities of life such as water, fuel and food, in the middle of nowhere. We drove past a cattle station that is larger than Belgium and half the size of England. But I digress.
I could also dedicate a separate blog to flies, and how much I’ve come to hate them. Until the sun goes, it is impossible to start making dinner or do anything really. They is literary a swarm of them, and there is nothing worse than the feeling of them crawling on your face, into your eyes, into your lips, into your ears. The only thing to do out here is get a hat with a net and swat swat swat until sunset.








This is Tim trying to get away from the flies:



Coober Pedy
We stayed in an underground room – it’s the only way to be comfortable here. No matter the outside temperature, underground it is always a constant 24C. Cooper Pedy is different to any other small SA town we passed before – to date the towns have been part of the goldrush/mining era that have seen their glory days go by, and are now left with historical sites of interest and charming sandstone cottages. Coober Pedy sprang up relatively recently and I can tell you not much effort has gone into town planning to cleaning up of old junk. It’s haphazard, ramshackle, and without charm or grace – but it feels like it’s all happening here, people are here to make money right now.






However the Breakways Reserve around Coober Pedy was magnificent for outback scenery – Priscilla, Queen of the desert was partially filmed here.






Uluru - Need I say more?



The Olgas (next to Uluru)



From King’s canyon, rather than doubling back and taking the Stuart Highway to Alice Springs, we decided to do a loop on an unsealed road around some aboriginal land, thinking it might be interesting. Well it wasn’t – the scenery was dull, and the road the worst I’ve been on in Australia, so corrugated we were bouncing around at 20 km an hour until Tim let some air out of his tires. It helped a little, but we still had to slow down all the time, it was just unrelentingly bad.
After about 200km of this, I heard a strange noise – like a hubcap coming off, but much louder. It was the sound of our roofrack coming off the car, together with out spare wheel, radiator, solar shower, hammock, water container and 2 chairs. Later examination revealed that 3 of the plastic bits that s3cured the basket to the racks broke after 3 hrs of unrelenting jarring. Thank god there was no one behind us when it happened, and that we are carrying a spare water container. At the end of the day out losses were:
- One chair smashed beyond repair
- A cracked water container, unusable
- A hole in the solar shower
- Broken roofrack
- Crack in the canopy of the car where the impact of the roofrack was when it came off