Advertisement
We awake to a flood of messages from extended family members back home. It seems someone thought it would be a good idea to set a car on fire and launch it into the front of a house back home in Melbourne. This wouldn’t normally generate too much family attention …. except the house was in our very own quiet middle-class residential suburban street. A panicked phone call to our son Scott, who’s house sitting for us while we’re away, confirms the house wasn’t ours, in fact he’s blissfully ignorant of the whole incident. That’s a relief. The residence involved is a fair way down the street, and we don’t know the occupants, which it seems is probably a very good thing. They were reportedly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, reluctant to talk to the press. One newspaper describes the targeted “gentleman” as a “luxury car swindler and former bankrupt” who “has often used “straw directors” - including his elderly mother and a former exotic dancer from Kittens Strip Club, to conceal his involvement from corporate regulators.” So there goes the neighbourhood…. That wasn’t quite the start to the day we were expecting.
We decide to skip breakfast at the Air Force
base mess hall, and instead make our way a short distance down the road to the apparently iconic Spud’s Roadhouse in the settlement of Pimba. To say that the roadhouse is in Pimba is probably doing it a bit of a disservice; from what we can see the Roadhouse IS Pimba. It gives new meaning to the word “quirky”; number plates from all corners of the globe splattered all over the corrugated iron walls, and if you get a bit bored with your meal you can always adjourn to the glass fronted room full of poker machines….
Today we’ll be continuing the long slog south-east to … well we’re not quite sure … we’ll just see where we get to. It hasn’t escaped my beloved’s attention that it’s getting a bit chilly at night as we move south. We haven’t booked anywhere to lay our heads, so I’m not sure I’m going to be overly popular if we have to sleep in the car.
I take a quick tour of Port Augusta’s excellent Wadlata Outback Centre. Its so-called “Tunnel of Time” provides a walk through of the natural and human history of the Flinders Ranges and the outback
more generally, and seems to be particularly popular with the younger generation.
The landscape changes dramatically in the few kilometres from one side of Port Augusta to the other. One minute we’re in the barren deserted outback; the next it’s all the rolling hills of the southern Flinders Ranges, continuous fences on both sides of the road, ploughed paddocks, sheep grazing under large gum trees, farm houses, power lines … and there’s even the luxury of more than one possible route to get you to your next destination.
We fix on the small township of Burra as the place to spend the night. We spy a cute collection of miners’ cottages that looks worth investigating, so in we go to the office to try to secure our spot. “We’re completely booked out” says the very grumpy lady behind the counter. Hmmm. That wasn’t very encouraging. We adjourn to the car in search of alternatives, but find ourselves back in madam grump‘s office a few minutes later. “So why does Booking.com say you’ve got rooms available”, I inquire politely. Her response: “yes, we’ve got some of their allocation, but you need to book through them”. Me: “So why didn’t
you tell me that?” Her grumpiness: “Um, I’m not allowed to”. Huh? What? The world’s clearly gone mad. Booking.com’s obviously got the global accommodation market well and truly locked away, and if we want to stay here there’s no way around them. I really don’t like Booking.com.
Anyway, the town looks nice, and we take a pleasant evening stroll down the main street past rows of cute heritage buildings.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.066s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 13; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0403s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb