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Published: November 28th 2012
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After Coober Pedy, we headed to the small town of Woomera which used to be the main site for experimental British rocket and nuclear tests. We explored the outdoor missile park and Dean visited the rocket range museum. Woomera is still an active Department of Defence test site but it feels slightly eerie and artificial. There’s a really nice outdoor swimming pool though! After a lovely swim, we had lots of fun on the diving board. Sadly, I doubt we’ll ever see the day when I manage to do a proper dive instead of a belly flop!
That night we stayed at a roadside rest stop with the most stunning view of the surrounding lakes and lagoons. Our neighbour for the night was a somewhat intoxicated old chap who made good company for the evening. His obsessively loving fox terrier Emma was my favourite!
Port Augusta, our next stop, is a really cute country town. It’s very low key so there’s not that much to do. Instead, it’s the perfect place to grab a coffee and watch the world go by. Port Augusta calls itself the ‘crossroads of Australia’ and I can see why: it’s
the junction from which you travel west to WA, east to Sydney, north to Darwin and south to Adelaide.
Our route was going to be south to Adelaide, but not before stopping at the lovely seaside town of Port Germein. Its wooden jetty is one of the longest we’ve ever walked. It just kept going on and on! The area gets what South Australians call a ‘dodge tide’ which means that there is minimal rise and fall over the course of a day or two, making fishing quite unproductive during that time. This was the case when we were there, but that didn’t stop people catching a few blue crabs. It felt so refreshing to be back at the coast and we even spotted a large stingray in the water.
We have travelled through so many different landscapes in the last week or so, and it really feels as though we are getting closer to home. For one, it is getting cooler! If I had to sum up the characteristics of the various states of Australia from what we have seen, I would say that South Australia is demure, the Northern Territory is earthy,
Queensland as tropical, New South Wales is modern, the Australian Capital Territory is governmental, Tasmania is beautiful, and Victoria is continental. Western Australia is, of course, yet to come! It seems a bit ironic that we haven’t managed to see the one part of Australia that we were both most excited about, but we will get there after a year’s break in Melbourne. Our van’s odometer has rolled over 22,000 km since the beginning of our trip. So I guess we somewhat miscalculated that 24,000 km would cover the whole of Australia! It will take us another fortnight or so to get back to Melbourne, but it’s funny to think that if we drove all day, we could be in Melbs by nightfall!
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