Road on Repeat

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It’s Mother’s Day, when our offspring get to shower my beloved with love and affection, and gifts … or at least they would if they were here. As I think I noted previously I thought it was Mother’s Day last Sunday, so I dutifully went out and bought my beloved a box of chocolates before I realised my mistake. Perhaps unsurprisingly they’ve all been eaten, so now it’s off to the shop at the Desert Oaks Resort here in the thriving metropolis of Erldunda, population 25, in search of another suitable offering. I’m not sure packets of chips or spare parts for caravans are quite going to cut it, but all good, my beloved insists that it’s the thought that counts. I hope she means it.

Today we continue our long journey home, 500 odd kilometres south into South Australia and on back down to Coober Pedy. There’s only one road, and it doesn’t look too much different to when we came up here a week and a half ago …. except we’re going in the opposite direction … so interested readers should probably just read the entry from 1st May backwards … well not literally backwards … that wouldn’t make sense … maybe just read the paragraphs in reverse order. As you’ve probably worked out by now it’s been a long and uneventful day.

We see a large lizard in the middle of the bitumen. I think we’ve run over its tail, but as I look in the rear vision mirror I can see it scurrying off into the scrub. That was close. It’s only about the third native animal we’ve seen in the wild since we arrived in the outback, so we’re starting to think they’re all endangered. We still haven’t seen a single live kangaroo since we left home, so they must be virtually extinct. I blame the motor car, which evidence suggests is their main predator. At least the dead kangaroo parts on the bitumen give us a chance to observe some of the local avian scavengers close up. One of them looks suspiciously like a large eagle, very impressive too, and I duck instinctively as it looks like it’s about to crash into the windscreen. That was close. You can stop giggling now Isabelle.

Our lodging in Coober Pedy is called the Mud Hut Motel, and it’s made of …. well that would be mud bricks. And unusually for Coober Pedy, it’s above ground, so our room even has a window. The mud bricks look fairly substantial; there could be a rock concert in the next room and we probably wouldn’t hear it. That’s in stark contrast to the paper thin walls at the Desert Oaks last night. We’re really glad there weren’t any honeymooners in the next room, or worse still someone who’d eaten a dodgy steak.

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