Spent the night before in a packed caravan park at Port Augusta - we felt like sardines we were so packed in. There was a mass exodus the following morning, & we continued on the appropriately named Stuart Highway we seemed part of a line of white ants all heading in the same direction. It wasn't long before we began to meet the 'road trains', luckily heading in the opposite direction. It is still very cloudy & gradually we lost sight of the hills, then the trees & were left with scrubby growth for most of the day. Passed through the township of Woomera which was a rocket & space research centre set up after World War II. It was used for several atomic tests & firing of space satellites & guided missiles & was very much a secure area. The town today is still in existence & was a very sterile sort of place obviously built to plan, but what goes on there these days we don't know. It was eerily quiet & the only people about seemed to be tourists like us. Stuart took some photos of rockets etc (didn't interest me).Continuing on we saw huge flat table top mountains in the distance & large flat spaces between. We were amazed at the number of dead cattle on the side of the road - must be expensive for the cattle farmers who don't bother to fence their land & very dangerous for the motorists. About half way to Coober Pedy the sun came out at last, & we passed by several salt lakes, . We found an overnight rest area about 3.00pm so that we could sit in the sun for a change & only one other van to share with so we had a good chatter to the couple who gave us lots of travel tips & information. There were numerous road trains through the night but they didn't disturb us much.
On the road early (8am) next morning to another roadside rest area at the end of the day, quite busy this time. Another sit in the sun & time for a read for a change though I had to chase the tiny flies which were very persistant. I resolved to buy a fly net for over my hat at the next available place. There were quite a lot of birds around & while we were sitting outside, a delightful little honey-eater came & sat himself on Stuart's knee & just gazed up at him longingly - for food I suspect. Aint love grand? Unfortunately I didn't have the camera on hand, so that was a great shot lost.
Cold night & morning with an early start again to reach Coober Pedy today, but at least it was sunny. At one part of the road we realised we were on the Royal Flying Doctor emergency 'air strip' for the area - just a section of the highway made a little wider than usual. There are lots of luxurient golden grasses on the roadside now & it reminds us of Waiuru & the desert road & similarly it is defense land owned by the Commonwealth of Australia.
We have definitely acquired the Australian wave but not for flies. All the caravans & motorhome drivers give each other a wave & as there are so many of them it's probably a good idea if someone invents an automatic hand before they all get RSI.
Our first impressions of Coober Pedy before we actually reached the town was not a favourable one. Coming along the highway all we could see were mounds of crushed rock as far as the eye could see, interspersed with many wrecked bits of machinery & vehicles. We were later to find out that the 'mounds' were called 'potch' & is the residue from the diggings. It is possible to get a permit to go 'noodling' - i.e. to sift through these mounds in case there has been some opal missed. Fat chance! We of course had better things to do. Inspection of the town did nothing to improve our impressions - most of it is Opal shops & it all looks grubby & rundown.
The services are there if you can find them, but everything is very disorganised. There is a very nice visitors centre & several upmarket resorts & caravan parks, but we opted for something very different called 'Reba's Underground Camping & Caravan Park' - curious? Well yes, there is underground camping, but not for the caravans. The gentleman who owns it owned his own little mine & did do quite well financially, so rather than go on mining forever, got this great idea to make an underground camping area from the empty caverns. Sounds weird, but in this town it is quite normal, as 85% of the population live underground. So backpackers can actually pitch their small tents down there or he also has rooms available. The caravans parked as normal though some of us had a drive through site with a roof & walls of shade cloth for the summer heat. One other amusing building was an outside flush toilet called 'the thunder box'. Made from a corrugated tank on it's side with a flush toilet inside, it would certainly 'thunder' under the right circumstances. Luckily it was only necessary to use it when the normal ablution blocks were being cleaned. The whole place is surrounded with the mounds of potch, but I have to say their area had been landscaped with cactus gardens & dry stone walls, so was a big improvement to most of the landscape. That evening we were given a tour of the now unused mine & learned a great deal about how to go about it all if you want to find opals. We decided to give that a miss too. It took us some time to realise that there were houses in many of the hillsides, which could only be identified by the air vents poking out from the ground. We actually went into one of the earliest built by a woman on her own & it was very liveable & they all maintain a steady temperature of between 21-25deg summer & winter. Some of the recently built ones do have a house frontage but the rest of the house is underground, sometimes in two stories or split level. A few looked really lovely. It really is amazing & not a bit claustrophobic. We also visited a couple of lovely underground churches. The best part of the visit was to an area called 'The Breakaways', which at first looks like massive mounds of 'potch' but are in fact natural features which have broken away from the Stuart Ranges. They are all shapes & sizes, most very large hills of lovely shades of red, gold, pink & white & have been used in many films like 'Mad Max', 'Beyond the Thunderdome', & 'Ground Zero'. Very photographic & we managed to get the afternoon sunshine but a sunset would have been better. Another feature in the area was part of the 2m high 5,300km dog fence, which extends over three states to protect the sheep country in the south from the native dingo.
No comments:
Post a Comment