NO ROO EXCEPT ON THE BBQ

---

After breakfast we treated Hilda to an oil and coolant change and some new spark plugs. I think she appreciated it as she started and ran like a brand new van. We set off about 1pm and made our first outback fuel stop at Spuds Roadhouse in Pimba. We had decided not to risk carrying extra fuel in the heat, instead planning to stop at every place available to fill up. There are long stretches of the Stuart Highway with nothing to look at apart from the outback, and today was going to be one of those stretches. The outback was however looking much greener than we had expected due to an unusual amount of rain in the weeks before we came. We stopped in Glendambo, with its population of 20 for the night. It was a hotel/pub/roadhouse/caravan park. Strangely as small as it was there were 2 petrol stations within a few hundred yards of each other. We had been paying between $1.17Ltfor fuel in towns and $1.30lt in villages, now the price was £1.56lt. We wondered if we would break the $2 mark during this leg of our trip.

After dinner we wandered to the pub, where we were pleasantly surprised to find a shaded decking area with grape vines growing. We were also surprised to find that the beer was reasonably priced at $6 a schooner (about 425ml). We enjoyed a few cold beers while watching another amazing sunset then wandered back to Hilda to drink our own beer.

We were woken in the morning by some guys in a nearby van playing guitar. Well one of them was playing, I would say the other was just learning. We left long before them, although later they waved at us as they drove past us at break-neck speed on the way to Coober Pedy. Today was the day that I drove for the first time. It took some getting used to. Andy warned me that the steering had some play in it but I didn’t expect it to feel like the steering wheel was attached with a few elastic bands! I drove the 254km to Coober Pedy which was the biggest town we had seen for a few days.

Coober Pedy is a dusty opal mining town. For miles around all that can be seen are huge mounds of earth and digging machinery. As we were driving through the town we saw the guitar men again and we soon realised that we would probably be bumping into them quite allot. We checked out all the campsites in town but were none of them looked particularly secure so we drove 5km out of town to Riba’s campsite. We could have stayed in an underground camping area, but a Dutch couple who had done this the night before told us that it was incredibly noisy so we decided to get a normal pitch and catch some sun. We sat with our eyes closed soaking up the glorious sunshine when we both heard a strange sound and looked up at the same time. The strange noise was the sound of a small tornado or a twister as they are commonly known here working its way round the mining hills in front of us, pulling up small plants and kicking up dust along its way. It finally fizzled out around one hundred meters away from us.

We set the alarm to wake us early the next morning as we had planned to have a long days driving. When we noticed that the guitar men were also staying at the same site we left before we could be tortured with an early morning rendition of Guns n Roses. We made a fuel stop about 230km down the road at Gedney Homestead. Waking through into their back yard to use the facilities we noticed that they had bar and a swimming pool - we drove no further! I relaxed by the pool for the afternoon while Andy was mesmerised by the pinball machine - these seem to be a regular feature in roadhouse bars, much to Andy’s delight. We had BBQ dinner while watching out for Roos, but none turned up. Maybe the fact that we were cooking Roo on the BBQ put them off a little!??

We woke up at 8am and the ground was already too hot to walk on. We were soon back on the highway and fast approaching the Northern Territory. For so long the scenery had been so flat that we could see to the horizon in every direction. We had been told by locals along the way that the scenery we were seeing hadn’t been seen for over 30 years. The red centre as its known was not red at all, it looked more like a green tropical paradise. Out of the deep red sand plants and flowers were sprouting up at an astonishing rate.

As we travelled further north we were pleased to see the landscape change to rocky hills where even the rocks were covered in greenery. We arrived at the Northern Territory Border stopping for a picture. We were please not to have any fruit to consume in a hurry or put in the bin. A while later we said goodbye to the Stuart Highway for a while, turning onto the road to Uluru. We had over 1000km to do to visit Kings Canyon, Uluru and The Olgas before following this same road back to the Highway again. It is often the case in Australia that you travel hundreds of kilometres down one road to see something, then as there are no other roads, you have to turn around and travel hundreds of kilometres back on the same road. We were undecided on whether to visit Kings Canyon or Uluru first, but knowing we wouldn’t make either today we found a campsite at Mount Ebenezer. We spent the evening chatting to Frank and Manon who were pitched opposite us and who were also undecided on which sight they were visiting first. We all decided that while it was dry and the roads were passable we should visit Kings Canyon first. As there was only one campsite at Kings Canyon we would probably see them there.

---