It's All About The Water....but what's in a name

So Melrose where we lay our head is almost right on the Goyder Line (look it up) so as we headed south this morning we got into agricultural country again with lovely golden wheat fields. Somewhere along the road, Marjan saw some budgies again, she has now seen so many, she almost ran the next one over.......bad karma.......bad enough smuggling them.....

It was too early to have a coffee, but we took several photos at a town called Laura.....one of many interestingly named towns in the area...Maude, Stuart, Julia, Mt Mary, Clare, Alma, Owen.......and a rose that smells as sweet yet to come.

When we started cutting west, we still had lovely golden wheat fields, but we also noticed the dual water pipeline running through the valley over the range of hills we crossed. 

Marjan warned me about boring you all more than is absolutely necessary, so the following information I picked up whilst having second breakfast at Burra can be skipped.........not really it is fascinating. 

NERD ALERT

I knew Adelaide used Murray River water, and I suppose would guess that any town near enough would also do so. What I did not know is that SA is almost totally dependant on Murray River water. The pipeline we had been tracking was moving water from the Murray at Morgan (yes I know) to Whyallah. On the way places like Burra, Port Augusta etc also use it. So even the industry on the other side of the Spencer Gulf uses it.

There is even a pipeline that feed water into the Barossa.

So SA agriculture is fed by water falling in Lake Eildon! Awesome.

Apparently 83% of SA receives less than 250mm. To put that in context Mildura gets 290mm.

END NERD ALERT

We kept loving the names around here. After Burra we were tempted by the highway. Or at least I was tempted. Marjan just said "Not another #%^&ing Gorge!"

So..... we decided to keep heading for Morgan, where the water from Whyallah is pumped. Not far from the Worlds End Highway the land became drier again. No wheat, just salt-bush. It picked up a little as we approached Morgan. Nice little town with a busy ferry chugging back and forth across the Murray.

 Pretty uneventful drive across the SA Riverlands and we finally got back into Victoria and your time zone. The one exciting thing is that we saw the fruit police stopping people coming into SA. We have been shamelessly smuggling fruit across all sorts of borders. This time we got nervous and dumped our last apples in SA. Just in case.......



We have hunkered down and having a rest for the next and last drive......  into Melbourne.

Butterflies in Alligator Gorge

So our last day of having a look around, started with a short drive to Mt Remarkable National Park. To get there we had to cross the southern Flinders Ranges via Horrocks Pass, and given we were there we went off-road for the last time to have a look out of the look-out. Quite a bumpy road with some wicked little dips at the bottom of gullies. Marjan was busy looking at the road so she missed some wild budgies......yes, she had been yearning for budgies and when they presented themselves she was looking at the dirt. Life, don't talk to me about life!

Anyway, we stopped at Wilmington for a coffee. One of the strangest little coffee places. Half re-built, half falling apart, an op-shop through the wall, but the coffee was fresh and strong.

We had changed drivers at Wilmington and hallelujah....Marjan saw budgies! I would probably have never heard the end of the failure to see budgies, so I was most grateful. We also of course saw emus, and euros......the local roos.

Not far into the national park. The signs stressed the need to pay the fees, so we stopped at a lookout to use our phones to do so. Not sure why they do not have an honesty box. What if people did not have a smart phone, or God forbid were on Optus, they head back out and don't visit? I have no problem supporting national parks, but on-line only? Really !!

The road in had signs advising not to tow anything in, and we saw why. It was up and down like a yo-yo, narrow and very, very steep.

This is a very different place to the northern ranges, looks a lot wetter, and the trees and plants are a lot thicker. River Reds, Blue Gums, Sugar Gums and lots of native pine, a few wild-flowers......very pretty.

We did one of the shorter walks a two hour one along Alligator Gorge. It was a really lovely walk, surrounded by butterflies, lovely trees, red cliffs, the tinkle of the creek, the sound of birds, fossils of waves on the shore...... even lots of tadpoles in the water, and one tiny little frog.

The Gorge got really narrow at one point and the creek seemed to disappear underground, it reappeared about 100 metres later. The walk was quite short, but given how up and down and rocky it was, it took us the best part of the allocated two hours. No problems, though Marjan was tired out by the last bit of uphill.

No shade where we had parked, so we drove in a bit further and found a shadier spot.....mostly shaded by the clouds coming in...... for a picnic. A few very short walks after lunch to help get the pate down, and we headed back out.

We had booked our accommodation in Melrose, the oldest town in the Flinders. We had a little look around, found our digs and settled in.

A lovely little place, full of character, and in the shadow of Mt Remarkable. Not sure why but they have some huge trees. They look like river red gums, but old and huge. One even has the road going around it. Now we will head out for a second look around and to drop into the pub, for a beer with the locals and a counter meal.

Lovely last day of meandering! We have just over 1,000k to cover over the next couple of days.

Not a gum tree in sight

A travel day today, that is what is mostly left.

We traveled out of Coober Pedy in cloudy, cool (17C) conditions. Not a tree to be seen. We occasionally noted bushes that rose as high as the wing mirrors on the card. Even salt-bush was hard to find. Almost totally barren. Of course this was because we were running along the top of the Stuart Range. This has to be the most tired, dispirited, worn out mountain range ever. Essentially the only reason you know you are on it is that there is a bit of a slope off either side of you. It is a bit steeper around Coober Pedy and The Breakaways, but not much. Over 50km before we saw a sort of tree thing. Then it was essentially salt bush with the odd acacia/mulga and eventually into a mulga forest. Quite pretty.

I do not have any photos, I was not prepared to stop on the Stuart Highway with Road Trains zipping past, potentially whacking the car on the side. The wayside stops where it was safe, never seemed to be in places where the light, or view allowed for a good mulga forest shot.

No stopping, but I did manage to pass a couple of road trains. They just go on for ever. We also passed the 6666km mark on the holiday. Thought you would want to know that!

Eventually we got to some salt lakes. Lake Hart looked huge and like ice. When I looked it up it was not much smaller than Lake Corangamite in Western Victoria. It is one of the smaller lakes around here. From here the ground rose towards Pimba and it was as if someone said "No more trees". Suddenly like a moor, small bits grass and rock sloping valley views of other salt lake beds. Some salt lakes had little islands in them. Again no place to stop without risking a road train swipe. Weird place.

We came back down from moor and cossed another salt lake and the last 120-150k into Port Augusta was gorgeous mulga forest again. Straight road, and mulga forest....really straight, long, boring stretches of road, with mulga trees and a few other acacia varieties above mostly saltbush, but the odd bit of spinifex and other grasses. No eucalypts....... not few, not sparsely located, I mean NO eucalypts.

I had been looking for gum trees as I don't think there are many at all between Coober Pedy and Port Augusta. Apart from a few at the road houses, that are obviously planted. I think there may have been a couple of possibilities. A couple of what may have been mallees in some sand dune country and one possibility by the side of the road. In 500k two possible gum tree sightings. But from the time I started looking hard, absolutely none. Extraordinary.

We got to Port Augusta and decided to have a picnic by the water, with the Flinders in the background.  We did, but it was windy and chilly......awesome.....Marjan even wore a windcheater..... A lovely spot on the old wharves with nicely done up benches and grass etc......and behind us the loading bays for the supermarkets and stores. Apparently the council wants to keep the main street alive and hence has the stores facing it and its back turned to the nice parky waterfront. Everything in arid places is weird.

After checking in, we did a walk around, some nice spots, and some nice old buildings. It is only a wayside stop for us as we head into the southern Flinders for our last real sightseeing day tomorrow. After that two travel days to get back home; a cross-land trip to Mildura, and then the run back to Melbourne from there.

Dusty and Hot.......

That is Coober Pedy. Apparently the name comes from the aboriginal term kupa piti meaning white man's hole............. hmm were the aborigines having a leg pull ........ is it a little like moomba....... at any rate it is a hole, and mostly manned by white men, so I suppose it is apt. If, however they had named it the dusty hole, I would not have been surprised. As I write this it is 41.5C and 4% humidity. You shrivel into a dust covered old person merely by opening the door of the dug-out........so we have not done so since lunch time.

We went out yesterday afternoon to check out the Breakaways..... even nicer in the afternoon light than the morning......really nice. Excuse the overdose of photos.

and finally the moon over Moon Plain.

Apparently they shot a bit of one of the Mad Max movies out here. If you want post apocalyptic then this is the place. You could just as easily do any street in Coober Pedy.

Our digs (appropriate word) are in the left of the hill, behind the three tress growing on the mid-level.

Anyway, we did actually get out this morning to check out some views: and to do a little bit of an educational survey.

They rubbed out the graffiti, but did not correct the spelling

The well to do have their dug-outs away from the hurly burly on the hills north of town.

A close up....really typical. Inside it is probably beautiful

We then headed off to Crocodile Harry's an (in)famous dug-out. It was an opal mine, but when it was worked out Harry converted it into his home. Harry apparently is a weird local legend. Weird being the operative word. Imagine the William Rickets Sanctuary done as a Coober Pedy dug-out and dedicated to girls knickers and bras rather than aborigines and armageddon. Yep! Hard to shake it off really.

The golf course is awesome....fourth tee and third 'green'

We then did a bit of an Opal shop crawl. Lots of pretty stones, but the ones worth owning require a mortgage. We did enjoy chatting to a young man in his seventies at one of the shops. He had been taking care of his mother and when she died he decided he had better get out and see the Kimberleys as he did not fancy doing them with a walking stick in his 80s. So he packed up the caravan and the dogs and headed off from Thornbury. Apparently he was getting petrol at Coober Pedy when he got chatting to this bloke. Well before you know it he is apprenticed to the bloke, is the 11th actual opal miner in town, and runs the shop in the mornings. Been doing it three years....figures he isn't in his eighties yet. Interestingly he yearns for the old days, even though he wasn't here, but apparently people didn't bug you so much with questions when you wanted a bit of dynamite, and things were solved between men......one of them finding himself down one of the 5 million holes in the area....google maps actually shows some of the holes...... can't see any bodies though.

To back his story up a bit, the local IGA carries a gun safe as one of its stocked items. See, namby pamby stuff. Gun safe indeed!

11 miners, but every second door is an opal shop, or an underground back-packers or something to do with tourism. They even keep old movie props around, like this spaceship from Pitch Black. Just looks like any other piece of junk on the streets. So they want to do tourism, but the place is a junk heap......nothing wrong with keeping the space ship, but it is just rotting in the motel/opal shop car park.

We are staying indoors. Not so much the due to the weirdos.....I fit right in. But the dust and heat and dust and humidity and dust. We will come out for dinner and try to shoot some more stars from the motel roof before heading down to Port Augusta. Apparently it will be 22C and they have sea !!!

In Which Marjan Goes Noodling

This has to be the butt ugliest town on earth! I mean seriously ugly. It is also weird, they have public, coin operated water bowsers and a public noodling area. They have wrecked cars, old tyres and dust....dust.....dust everywhere, At one point Marjan said it looked like an extended tip. Not far wrong, but let's get things in order.

We headed off early in the morning, about 6:15am, to catch the early light on The Breakaways, a line of eroded hills about 20k out of town. Along the way we drove along the dog fence. Over 5,000k of wire fencing to keep the dingoes north and the sheep safe. And on the other side moon plain, nothing but rocks and wisps of grass as far as the eye can see. The Breakaways were stunning, unfortunately I had the camera on night settings so I will have to go back tomorrow. On our way back, we got held up by some people who were doing a photo shoot. Looked like a good eating ad fopr school kids. There was a bunch of young kids at a picnic table, with the backdrop of the first photo below, and a bunch of nice fruit in their bowls. We will have to eat healthy!

Yes our shadow from the top of the adjacent hill

We came back and did an early morning shop and had second breakfast. Then, because we had found God, we hit the local Anglican Church. The minister there was really friendly and pushed us around for his view on the best photo poses. The church has a mulga cross and a miner's rig for an altar. Of course it is underground.

The air vents above the altar

After that we went to Tom's mine, for a wander around the underground tunnels. Interesting to see the shafts, ladders and chairs they used to get in. We were on our own in the tunnels, checking out the equipment and the diggings....some more recent.  So this is where Marjan went noodling, which is kinda like amateur mining, just fart-arseing around diggings looking for bits of opal. Marjan seemed to really get into the spirit and it was hard to pull her away from her bits of noodling. We did actually find some of the opal material, but without colour, which makes it worthless 'potch' rather than valuable opal. Marjan is convinced she sees some colour in a couple of the pieces we are bringing back in a zip-lock bag. Do not burst her noodling bubble!

Marjan divining for opal

Luckily they had easier exits

We then did a bit of a look at a little museum/opal shop. Interesting examples of plesiasaurus bones, and opalised shells etc.

By then it was warmish so we headed back to our room, got underground and had something to eat and a nap.

In the afternoon we checked out a couple of other churches. The Serbian Orthodox is quite impressive with the ceiling carved in the shape of many orthodox churches and the carvings of saints in the walls. Of course we visited the Catholic church.......Catholics are best, burn all the rest!........ it fell somewhere between the Serbian grandeur and the Anglican folksy!

Then back out on the road to look at the diggings. The photos do not really explain the ugliness. These go on forever into the distance. Also the place is full of holes and there has never been a requirement to fill in the holes. So kilometer after kilometer of test holes and their mounds. Amazing.

We are now having another rest, having fled the heat, and dust.....have I meantioned the dust......


Oh by the way...I have worked out the price of gypsum....if I can get a cubic kilometer back to Melbourne, I can afford to shout you all dinner........I wish I had a tow ball!