Arkaroola to Beresford Siding, South Australia
Our first major mechanical failure causes brief woes as we head northwest from the chilly north Flinders Ranges. We take the Oodnadatta Track past Lake Eyre and bush camp at the abandoned Beresford siding on the old Ghan railway line.
And we have one of the best meals I've had here: kangaroo shavings on foccacia with quandong sauce.
I also wonder why Australians take so much crap with them on camping vacations... and why all these supposedly lonely Outback roads are wall to wall with people.
We didn't go bushwalking today. The mountain ranges are OK, but we think we'll do better in springtime, and at this time of year there isn't much blooming or happening. It's as dry as a bone.
Or maybe, we admit, we're wusses. It's the dead of winter, and it got very cold last night--somewhere below freezing, but not too much. The lack of daylight this far south in winter is bothering us some too. The sun rises around 7:30 and sets at 5:30, which means about 9 hours of daylight to do stuff once we've eaten and possibly broken camp... and 14 hours of sleeping and reading in the tent. While the LED headlamps are great for reading, after 10 hours sleeping I just want to get up and do something.
Evenings are the worst. We don't build huge bonfires like all (and I mean all) the other campers do (the National Parks folks have signed the roads with 'No Chainsaws Allowed' around the parks--for hundreds of meters around the campgrounds there is not a speck of firewood). We don't blast the rest of the campground by placing two or three LP gas lanterns around our campsite. We don't get out the triple burner stove and cook a fabulous gourmet bush dinner and wash it down with stubbies, or more likely, Chateau Cardboard. We just make a small no-cook meal, like cheese and crackers or sandwiches, read a bit, and go to bed. It's hard for me to turn in, though, when it isn't even 7:30.
So we weren't going to bushwalk, and even though we've already paid for two nights here at the Arkaroola campground, we feel like we've had enough of 'winter' camping. So we leave.
Or try to. Chris makes an incredibly trivial fix to the car--fixes the right squirter on the driver's side windscreen washer, which is clogged with dust--and fires up the engine to make sure it works. I'm at the back, packing the last bits of gear, standing right above the exhaust, and get a faceful of diesel soot. Blech! 'Hey, cut it out!' His fix worked, but the engine turned over slowly. Is it the cold?
Nope. When we're all packed, we turn on the engine, and a slow chug-chug-----chug tells us that something, probably the battery, is now dead. It was acting up a bit in Innamincka, we'd planned to have it looked at in Alice Springs, but no, it's gone, and now. Fuck. But, conveniently, we have installed a second battery for the fridge! I'll just swap the two, and we can be on our way! So I spend twenty minutes with some crappy tools... pull out the old main battery, put in the second battery, and find out that it this trick isn't going to work. The polarity on the two batteries is different. The terminals on both batteries are near the back, and the cables won't stretch far enough, even if I mount the battery backwards. Grrr. So I reverse my steps, and we're back to the dud battery.
And we don't have jumper cables. Doh! All we have to do is just jump the old battery off the second one, and we're on our way. So I ask a fellow camper. Nope, she doesn't have any. We flag down a campsite maintenance truck! Yay! He has some in the workshop; we get them, do a quick self-jump, and we're on our way to Leigh Creek, 130 kilometers away.
The road through the north Flinders ranges was great--it looped and curved through gorges and steep mountains before coming out into the broad valley where Leigh Creek sits, which to my eyes bears a very strong resemblance to the north Mojave Desert scrubby blue bushes on pale orange sands, with desert mountain ranges on either side.
Leigh Creek is a very strange looking town, and being a planned town my interested was sparked. It was built in the late 1970's as a company town to support the coal mining a few miles up the road--the old town of Leigh Creek is no more as it was right on top of the coal seam they were mining! Leigh Creek is very interesting as a planned town; while it has some suburban elements, like curved streets, it also packs the housing and retail and schools in very close proximity to each other, with walkways linking the neighborhoods. Also, the landscaping is entirely native plants of the area, with stone mulching! The plants grow better, and the stones conserve moisture and prevent evaporation loss. Lastly, the architecture is of a certain late-1970's look, with low square buildings with wide verandahs and slats. It looks like any number of California community colleges of that era!
From Leigh Creek, we drove north a bit to Copley, and stopped at the Bush Bakery and Quandong Cafe. We've heard this place was a treat, but weren't expecting what we got: we both ordered foccacia with kangaroo and quandong sauce. The kangaroo meat was shaved thinly, into 1mm slices, and cooked just right. It tastes like venison to me, which I love. Quandong is a peach like fruit that grows here; it's the fruit of a tree in the sandalwood family and tastes somewhat like rhubarb. Mmmm. It was great.
After Copley, we headed north to Mare. The nice sealed road changed to dirt north of Lynhurst... and man was it busy. A good dozen cars passed us in the hour it took to Marree! Lynhurst is the start of the Oodnadatta track. This is one of the Outback's legendary tracks, following the Old Ghan railway line from Adelaide and Port Augusta to Alice Springs, past various springs and the huge (and dry) Lake Eyre The Old Ghan doesn't run anymore. It last ran in 1982, when they relocated the line to the west because of flooding and frequent washouts.
In Marree, there wasn't much but an old hotel, some old Ghan engines, and a store with a crappy souvenir collection. They could really make some tourist money by making an official Ghan museum or somesuch, but they haven't. All the trains are rusting. They did restore the mosque though, which is interesting. The Ghan train takes its name from the Afghan cameleers who managed the thousand or so camels in Marree before road transport became feasible. They'd take freight and mail up the Oodnadatta and Birdsville Tracks, long before road transport was feasible. The old mosque, nothing much more than a open air shed that could hold maybe twenty people, was their place of worship. It was neat.
After Marree, we headed northwest on the Oodnadatta Track, and we passed more cars. Geez, what is this? This is supposed to be the remote Outback, and we're seeing more cars than we'd see on a typical paved state highway in remote California! I counted 17 cars in 45 minutes. That's a lot. And almost every one is carrying loads of crap... which deserves a discussion.
The typical Australian in his four wheel drive vehicle, you might think, is a hardboiled character, interested in roughing it in the bush and camping in his swag under the stars. Hah! That's not the case at all! Chris and I are by far the most lightly loaded campers we've seen... the only things we have outside the car proper are our two spare tires and two 25 liter water jugs on our roof rack. Almost all the other campers are carrying a small sized trailer maybe 3 feet high loaded with stuff: kids bicycles, canoes, portable shower enclosures, portable kitchens, tarps, more tarps, axes, shovels, jerry cans of fuel, huge jugs of water, you name it. Sometimes it's not a small trailer, but a full-sized sleep-in trailer (called a caravan here), which is often taken way off road! But more often than not, the tent is a canvas pyramid tent that folds into an odd sack on the roof, where it's thrown along with all sorts of stuff. Yesterday we saw a Landcruiser like ours with two long handled shovels proudly tied to the front bull bar (they apparently don't know that you can just deflate your tires to get more traction, but then again they probably don't have an air compressor to reinflate them). And up on Cape York, we saw more than one car with a small upside down metal dingy lashed to the roof--and the outboard motor tied to the front bull bar as well!
I'm just amazed at all this stuff. I should take some pictures--and I will once I get my camera back. For now, Chris and I will keep it simple, though we will buy an LP gas tank and stove in Alice Springs. Our cheapo butane stove just isn't cutting it on these colder mornings. I don't like waiting 40 minutes for two cups of water to boil for my morning tea!
So.. after Marree, we stop briefly at an overlook at Lake Eyre South. Cool. It's all dry white salt to the horizon. Doesn't fill up but every dozen or so years. We head on to Coward Springs. They have a nice campground there, so the Lonely Planet book says, with a hot spring fed pool for soaking! Sounds great! But... as we get there just after sunset... there's a sign that says "Sorry, Campground Full". What the hell? Grrrr.... so we have a spat. Chris wants to ask the owner if they can squeeze us in. I say, no--why would they put up the sign? Chris says maybe they're full up with powered or caravan sites. No--I'd rather bush camp. So we drive across the road into the bush. Mind you, the bush is basically waist-high. There are no trees. We drive to a little clump, find a few old graves from the 1890's, I say camp, but Chris says 'no, the ground is too soft.' It does have a weird crust on it. Chris insists we drive to William Creek, 70km away. In the dark. I don't like this idea. There's no wildlife to speak of, and the road is fast and wide, but if we get stuck we'll be pitching our tent in the dark--and we can't see to find a good bush camp that's away from the road anyway.
So we drive. Chris is regretting not asking about space at the full campground. I'm pissed that he didn't pull off a few minutes north onto some tracks leading onto some hills. Grrr. Grrr. We keep driving. Some minutes later, with still a bit of twilight left, we spot a turnoff to one of the old sidings on the railway, Beresford. Hmm... could be good. And we find a decent camp next to the old water tank that used to fill the steam trains. Hooray! We set up the camp in the near darkness, have some dinner, and read a bit. And I type out this log before turning in.
Oh, and I do have to say: for the third day in a row, I've seen someone get absolutely giddy at the mention of a cappuccino. This was in Copley at the cafe.
Weird Wildlife Sighting
Nothing much. More emus in the middle of nowhere.