Day 4 - The Red Centre - Marree to Oodnadatta

Oceania
May 22nd 2017

Published: May 23rd 2017

Edit Blog Post

TYandTI

Starting the Oodnadatta Trak

Checking out the sign confirming that the road is open. This road is closed even after a small amount of rain. Lucky the road is open.

Day 4 The Red Centre - Travel from Marree to Oodnadatta
Hi all, today we drove from Marree to the town of Oodnadatta. Again it was not a rushed morning. We left Marree at about 9am after buying some freshly baked rolls from the Marree roadhouse. The Hema 4x4 GPS told us we had just over 400 km to go and it was going to take us about 8 hours. We took off to the west with the road being in reasonable condition and the surrounding landscape was continuing to be desert boring. The one thing that we noticed is that there was a proliferation of bores and springs. It is interesting to understand what this meant. Even though the landscape looked normal and dry there were an untold number of bores and natural springs. We found out that these springs come naturally from The Great Artesian Basin which is a natural underwater storage system that spreads from the top of Cape York to New South Wales and Northern Territory. The Great Artesian Basin basically covers a third of Australia. The water that is surfacing in this area apparently has taken 2 million years to find its way from Queensland.

Road sign close up

This is unbelievable. Our first stop in this dry land was when we found a bunch of metal sculptures in a paddock on the side of the Oodnadatta Trak. Well this was exciting for the children. There were planes, bombs, robots, chimes and lots of other bizarre contraptions. They were all made from scrap metal. We finally got the children away from this enormous playground ( it went on for about a kilometre) and headed off to see Lake Eyre South. This lake sits in the middle of Australia Which is Australia's largest lake and is the worlds 13 th largest salt lake. Well salty and big. The edges of the lake are white with salt. We collected some pure salt to take back home. We then went looking for an a nice spring to swim in. We found one at a place called Coward Springs. This was a private operation and they have a campground, a natural spring that you could swim in and also a Ghan railway museum. The kids and Paul had a swim in the water which was naturally warm. Apparently the water comes up from over 3000metres below ground and is warm given it was

Sculptures in the middle of the desert

coming from so far underground. The museum was an old railway building used as a rail siding when the Ghan railway came through here. We also had lunch here which consisted of cheeses, bread, tomatoes etc. After all of this we continued on to the next town of Williams Creek. Now this is a tiny town, if you could call it that. The population is 6. There is one pub, one house and a caravan park run by the publican. That is it. We went into the pub which looks like a tin shed from the outside. Inside the pub is covered in business cards and Identification cards. When I say covered, I mean every single space on walls and ceiling are pinned with these cards. I got a headache just trying to see who has visited this pub. We all had an apple cider to celebrate our arrival. Now this was to be our last stop before Oodnadatta. We had 200 km to go and the Hema GPS was still saying it was going to take 4 hours. Off we went. During this leg so far we had not seen any road kill and we did not see any

No more bombs

Maralinga was used for nuclear testing in the 1950's and this is a reminder of those dark days.

for the rest of this leg of the trip. What we did encounter are corrugated roads. Now let me explain corrugated roads to those who have not experienced these roads. When you drive over a corrugated road it feels like as if the road wants to shake the crap out of you and every single bolt in your car. If you have a loose bolt or one that has not been tightened then you are going to lose it. Xavier lost the bolt holding down one of his driving lights. He ended up having to take the driving light off. We laughed about this as we have been able to blame his son Adrian for tightening this one. Xavier also had some crackling in his CB radio and we were also able to isolate this electrical problem to Adrian. It will make for good solid stirring of Adrian when we get home. Anyhow we did about 100km of corrugations. It got tiring after a while as I felt like a milk shake at the end. Our last stop before we arrived at Oodnadatta was an old rail bridge, again a left over from the Ghan railway days. This bridge is

Chimes made out of metal junk

quite tall and spans a small body of water. We had 40kms to go to get to Oodnadatta. Now you might not believe this but in Oodnadatta we stayed in the Pink Roadhouse. This town consists of a number of houses with 277 occupants and nearly 50% are Aboriginal. It also has this Pink Roadhouse. It is a bright pink everywhere. Inside and out. Can't miss it. Dinner was at the roadhouse. Food was good but I think The Marree pub was hard to beat.

Additional photos below

Photos: 26, Displayed: 25