Pimba to Marla

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At 5am I went for a walk outside to, um, stretch the legs and the sky was bursting with stars, the Milky Way was magnificent as always. I eagerly awaited sunrise and was not disappointed as it was reasonably good and I snapped a few shots.

While in Adelaide I had purchased two little gadgets in a disposal shop for $4.95 that are meant to frighten wildlife away not a big risk if they did not work I thought, they function by emitting a high pitched noise that can’t be heard by humans. Well I decided to fit them this morning before we left, they certainly were not going to work if they’d stayed in the glove box. They are easy to install using trusty double sided tape and simply pushing them onto the bull bar, operation completed in under 2 minutes. Now I can’t say for certain if in fact they perform as claimed but during the course of the day on two occasions we approached emus on the side of the road, now these critters are even less intelligent than ‘roos. While kangaroos jump in front of vehicles the poor old emu will often crash into the side of vehicles – what the hell are they thinking? Anyway both times they darted off away from the road as though something had given them a fright. Crows also behaved a little differently as normally they would casually hop to the edge of the road but today they actually took flight and were keen to put some space between themselves and our vehicle.

However I found the opposite occurred with some wedge tailed eagles that were feasting on some road kill, my experience with them in the past is they are eager to fly off before you get too close to them. This has been quite frustrating as I would love to snap some really good eagle shots but alas today was different in fact almost too different. As we approached these eagles sitting atop a dead ‘roo in the middle of the road, Liz camera in hand pointing out the windscreen, me reducing our speed from 80 kmh to about 60 and rapidly bearing down on these birds who seemed reluctant to get out of our way. I knew no one was behind us so I started to apply the brakes, it was like they were oblivious to the fact that 3500 kg of metal was about to send them into another world, with just a couple of metres between us and them they started to take off. Eagles are big birds and like the lift off of the space shuttle the initial launch seems to happen in slow motion. Well one poor bloke was a tad slow and I grimaced as I waited for the splat of bird on windscreen we missed him by centimetres but I thought for sure he would not clear the van, fortunately for all of us he did!

Bottom line is I think the animal shewerofferers work except maybe on eagles, they are yet to be put to the test by a kangaroo.

Last year we had a very quick drive around/through Coober Pedy so I wanted to have a better look this time. We visited a nice underground Church which was very interesting and cool compared with the heat outside and we called in to an underground café/souvenir place, I will just say that Liz bought her most expensive and worst coffee ever at the same time though it was the hottest ever – 2 out of 3 ain’t good. $7.50 for a take away coffee yep that is not a typo, 7 bloody dollars and 50 cents. He claimed to have the cheapest opals in town but we were too afraid to ask. Scared but still with our adventurous spirit intact we decided on a pub lunch and got some $10 lunch specials, yoohoo we were both very impressed.

Again we were followed by threatening clouds with scattered rain falling in the distance but as luck would have it we missed the lot. After eight and a half hours on the road we called Marla home for the night it was nice knowing that the trucks would not interfere with our sleep. On the down side for me at least was we did have power for the night so yep you guessed it the aircon stayed on the entire time, I think it was Confucius who once said “a happy marriage is about compromise”. Mmmmm onya Conny.

We cooked dinner and nicked in to the Bar to check things out, you know those old Western movies when a stranger walks into the saloon and everyone stops to look at them? That does exist in real life.

It was not a bad sunset so I took a couple of snaps and that was pretty much it for the night, tomorrow well who knows.

Travel safe take care and Remember it’s nice to be important but it’s important to be nice.

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