 |
| SA Outback |
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Post 12 - Greetings from the S.A. Outback - Journal
Greetings from S.A. Outback – a thoroughly weird, harsh, hot, remote and dusty place, where the flies have hit almost biblical, plague-like proportions at times and where it gets so ridiculously hot that people have to resort to living underground! This place is home to small and quirky towns where even quirkier pubs, barstaff and drinkers have kept us entertained, well fed and watered – a welcome reprieve from our constant driving towards vast and absurdly flat horizons that merely mark the beginning of where the eye no further see. Indeed, big flat horizons are just the start of what the S.A Outback likes to do “large” – it also boasts the largest salt lake in the Southern Hemisphere (400 million tones of salt!), Australia’s largest cattle station (literally the size of Belgium), the world’s largest opal mining production centre plus the world’s largest art installation. And yet on the other end of the scale, it is equally proud of some of the smallest towns I have ever seen – with populations of just 7 and 10! It’s an interesting place that’s for sure and with quite a sense of history to be seen everywhere. In fact, it’s been quite a humbling experience at times, driving on tracks littered with shredded tyres today, that were first forged by the early pioneering explorers and prospectors of the past – people who traversed this same stony and sandy desert but who faced no luxury of 4WD, no water, no shelter and no food and who had to survive the severe heat, flies and remoteness – you can’t help but feel awe for their resilience and determination. So, whilst we, replete with our huge tucker-box, freezer, fridge, and spacious tent cannot compete with those valiant pioneers who have gone before us, we do hope you enjoy reading about the adventures of these two wandering nomads!
Under a Parachilna Sunset
Our first stop after leaving the Flinders Ranges was Parachilna, 500km north of Adelaide, where the Flinders meet the desert and where the Prairie Hotel provides a welcome alcoholic oasis amongst the desolate red gibber plains! We had great expectations from this hotel, home to the total population of Parachilna (7 people!). Not only is it Australia’s 3rd hippest hotel and most awarded outback pub but it’s also famous for its F.M.G (Feral Mixed Grill – which is road-kill animals basically, and other native foods etc). Having a room there for the night with no tent zips to deal with, no ladder to get into and out of bed and an actual en-suite toilet was indeed a notable highlight, if only somewhat dampened by the news in the welcome pack laying on the bed - which proudly informed me that Parachilna was home to not only the hip hotel itself but also to a variety of reptiles, including 5 species of dangerous snake, 8 different spiders and over 25 insects excluding the vast numbers of flies!. Nervousness about this was soon overcome in the front bar however, where there were plenty of beers flowing and much chatting with all the various tourists, who formed a steady stream for most of the day. In fact it was quite surprising to learn that despite its remote location, this hotel is usually very busy during the day. What was perhaps even more surprising was witnessing how that busyness had gone through the roof while we were there, due to a lethal mix of Easter long weekend and rumours that there was water in Lake Eyre (a rare and historic event, since it has only filled up 3 times in the last 150 years!). The Prairie Hotel was so busy with people heading out to Lake Eyre that we were forced to spend an extra day there so as to delay our trip and try to miss the throngs of visitors from Adelaide. Still, we figured if you have to extend your stay at a pub for these sound reasons, then it’s no bad thing and it was quite amusing for us to while away the couple of days watching frenzied tourists come, scoff down their lunch and then plough back into their 4WD’s to race further north to “see the water”…..while we stayed sitting and smug, knowing that the true scope of the quirky and rather mad Prairie Hotel experience can only be had by staying there the night, like so many actors and movie makers have all done before us. Sure enough, later on as we watched an amber-orange sunset over the western plains, the barstaff turned on the “Sunset Song” and whacked up the volume. It was a specially recorded song with lyrics including “Under a Parachilna Sunset, no better place to end the day, Fargher lager’s at the bar, and F.M.G is on the way……”. The theater of it all and the quirky song sure made our sunsets there a pretty unique experience! Sitting down to an evening meal at Prairie is another wacky event! And yes, we ordered the F.M.G – it was good but not strong enough in the competition-stakes to rival the Feral Antipasto Platter that preceded it. The latter included some delectable morsels such as smoked roo, camel mettwurst, wild goats cheese and a sensational emu pate and by the time our F.M.G came, it was less a case of road-kill and more an issue of overkill….we were absolutely defeated by the huge portions of meat! It was therefore a welcome reprieve for all our stomachs when halfway through the main course “The Train Song” was whacked on and turned up as the bartender rushed into the dining room and announced “train’s coming!”. This was to herald another “highlight” of overnighting at the Prairie Hotel – namely, it gives you a chance to have the rather weird experience of interrupting your dinner to rush outside and watch the Leigh Creek Coal Train pass through town whilst the pub is belting out the Johnny Cash song “Folsome Prison Blues” (where the first line is “I hear the train a-comin, it’s a rollin around the bend”….except of course at Parachilna the track is one very long bloody straight line!). All I can say is, that at 161 carriages it may well be the longest front-pulled train in existence but after about the 6th carriage you are over it already! Back inside, our stomachs signaled we were very full and even the wonderfully promising-sounding and infamous Prairie Hotel “Quandong Crumble” (wild peach) was, for us foodie heroes, too much to contemplate (though we did get to it the next day!). And so it was, we went to bed with quirky songs echoing in our brains and the blood busily directed to our bellies!
Gordon the Bush Pilot
Hi Gordon here! We knew that scenic flights were available from the Prairie Hotel in Parachilna (just like everywhere else in the area!) but, despite the unique feature of being able to land on mud flats or pretty much anywhere else, we’d decided that we wouldn’t take a flight from there - we’d seen quite a lot in the Flinders Ranges and spent quite a bit of money there, as well as on-staying at the Prairie. That decision not to take a flight held firm until breakfast the next morning. Somehow the owner of the pub had found out that I’m a pilot and seemed determined that we would be going up that day. After initially sticking with our decision she brought the pilot (owner of the charter business – and her brother-in-law) over to speak with us. We explained to him our decision and all seemed OK until he mentioned that we could just go up for 20 minutes or so, and I could fly. Everything seemed to change then, and all of a sudden we were up from our breakfast table and walking across the road to go flying – I’m still not 100% sure how it all happened.
Let me describe the scene here: the Prairie Hotel is literally in the middle of nowhere. Out the front is a road which has no traffic and which goes nowhere in either direction. Across the road is an old, and now disused railway station barely bigger than a shed, then there’s the railway line which has just one empty train north per day, and one coal train south per night. And then right next to the line on the other side is a plane – a Cessna 172. Beyond the plane is the vast, flat nothingness of the South Australian outback.
After a photo or two we climb in and before I know it (i.e. before I’ve even got my seat belt done up!) we start taxiing away from the railway line into the spinifex and grass tussocks which stretch as far as the eye can see. Just 20 meters or so later we turn right parallel with the railway and Ian (the charter guy) turns to me and says ‘let’s go’. I had an initial moment of being completely stunned – “what do you mean let’s go? For a start, where’s the runway? And what about our pre-take of checks….what about getting clearances?”. “Clearances?” he said, “Who from??!!” Then I could see in front of me a narrow - and not entirely straight path where the spinifex was either missing or not as high as everywhere else. That’s when I realized - this IS the bloody runway!! In the same split second I realised I had to get this thing off the ground. OK, full throttle, feet on the pedals, steering a path through the spinifex, trying to get up to 60 knots……where’s the Air Speed Indicator!?!? It wasn’t in the normal place, so I had to try and judge the speed until I thought it was close to the required take off speed by gently pulling back on the controls to see if the plane responded by lifting off the ground – eventually it did. Once we were in the air I tried to revert back to my learned procedure to feel I was fully in control. The procedure is to maintain a take off path in line with the ‘runway’ until you are at least 500ft above ground level before making a turn. However, at about 250ft Ian turns to me and says ‘OK make a right turn here’. I was back to being stunned and thinking to myself “what do you MEAN, “turn here?”!!! This is when Ian fessed up to being what I had already concluded – a Bush Pilot. Bush pilots are a special breed. Firstly they can fly almost anything, and they can land it almost anywhere, and they seem to be able to deal with almost any situation. They operate according to a slightly different set of rules than other pilots, they fly to a set of rules which works for them in the bush and keeps them as safe as possible in some very harsh flying environments.
Once we were up there however, the flying was normal and it was great to see the Flinders Ranges and the outback from the air. We did a big circuit over the ranges, and down through a gap and headed back towards Parachilna. As we got closer I was straining to see where our ‘runway’ was, and even flying parallel to it on then downwind leg of the approach I still couldn’t see. Then the realization again – it didn’t bloody exist!! It was just an area next to the railway which was flat and firm enough to land on. Late on final approach I could make out the tyre-marks from a previous landing and headed for them, putting us down pretty much on them with a nice smooth landing.
So does all that make me a Bush Pilot? Not quite, but I loved playing at being one for a day and would love to do some more bush flying. As Ian noted – that was a good landing – and a good landing is one which you can walk away from!
Man’s mad race……..to see a bloody bit of water!
As I have intimated already, when we were back in the Flinders Ranges we had congratulated ourselves on our cunning itinerary-planning, which ensured we would be far away from caravan parks over Easter and out on the remote Oodnadatta track and on Lake Eyre. We had received early reports even back then, that water from the Queensland floods had finally found its way into Lake Eyre and we were naturally pleased to now have a worthy comeback-reply to the large amounts of teasing we have had over the past two months about having kayaks on our roof in a drought-ridden South Australia - and so we proudly informed everyone we were going to kayak on Lake Eyre! What we didn’t quite anticipate at that stage though, was just how much the imaginations of half the population of a frenzied Adelaide would be equally as captured by this rare event as us – or that these people love to come and “do the Oodnadatta” at Easter because the weather is cooler and they have the long weekend to do it!. Jeeeez! By the time we had arrived in Parachilna we realized the extent of our naivety in thinking we could have the Oodnadatta track and Lake Eyre to ourselves and that, in short, we were buggered….by man’s race to see a bit of bloody water! But it wasn’t until we arrived further north in the town of Maree - gateway to the Oodnadata and Lake Eyre - that our noses were really rubbed in it. We were quickly informed by 4WD people making their way back that, “you cant see it unless you take a flight”. This was accompanied by remarks such as “hey, nice kayaks, where were you thinking of using them then?! You can’t get to the water!” followed by heaps of guffaws! Even the Lake Eyre Yacht Club wasn’t sailing (and how funny that there IS a Lake Eyre Yacht Club given that there has only been water on it 3 times in the past 150 years!).
There was however a bit of an upside to all of this though, as Maree itself - practically a ghost town since the Old Ghan Railway was re-routed away from there in the 1980’s – had indeed sprang to life with “there’s-water-in-Lake-Eyre!” fever. Whilst scenic flights could be heard landing or taking off for the rest of the day, a most amusing afternoon was spent in the front bar of the Maree Hotel, watching the madness unfold and the barman/owner (a worn out, old, gruff and abrupt Aussie-Outback version of Basil Fawlty) trying to cope with the sudden influx (10 or so) of bar customers! He had us in quiet stitches as he complained about the fully booked-out status of his hotel - “I was up cooking 42 bacon and eggs this morning while they were all still in bed scratching their arses and I’ve got 80 to do tomorrow” he grumbled and then, with the straightest, most miserable face you’ve ever seen, concluded: “It’s madness down here. I haven’t stopped. I’ve even got two planes coming in from Sydney. Thank God for me knee replacements. Now what do you want?” and took our order, shuffling away only to return a minute or so later and shove it unceremoniously towards us! He served one or two more people in the same way, before returning to his own seat and beer, wiping his forehead as he drank and ignoring the fact that there were more people wanting to be served! His hilarious Basil Fawlty lack-of-etiquette kept coming forth all afternoon, with comments to one man from Queensland such as “Where are you from then that you don’t like any of the beers here then?” and, to a woman who wanted to know when would be the best time to book for dinner that night “You cant book. If it’s full you’ll just have to wait…..it’s not a bloody race is it?”!!!!! Just as hilarious was the city couple who had ordered a steak sandwich but received sweet and sour pork – “Well…that’s what’s come out of the kitchen” he said with as much consideration as he could muster, plonked it down in front of them……and they ate it without a word! Priceless! And the backdrop to all of this were the people coming in and out, who were waiting for flights or just come off of a flight, with the most bandied about question of the day coming off everyone’s lips and driving us insane by the end of the afternoon - “Did you go up and see the water yet?”. Jeeeez!
It’s fair to say then, that by the time we had left Parachilna and Maree, we were well and truly passed caring about seeing the salt in Lake Eyre, let alone the bloody water – a thing can be talked about just too much I guess! Besides, we had already elected to save our flying money for other treasures over in W.A later on in the trip. And so we set off on the iconic Oodnadatta track, waving farewell to a gone-mad Maree and looking forward to an iconic outback trail. Now, I’d love to tell you that the Oodnadatta was a great experience but, on what was an incredibly hot day and with a shredded tyre happening to us just 40km out of Maree, then a limp back to the town to get the spare tyre fixed with a new one, only to sustain a stone chip to the front windscreen 70km back out of Maree again (thanks to a careless and mad city 4WD driving too fast the other way), I must confess to having had a rather large sense of humour failure….which may well account for the lack of documentary photographs about all this in the blog!!!! Hmmm, some things in life just don’t always turn out how you imagine them to, eh?!!!!
Coober Pedy – another outback town gone mad!
We have decided to let most of the photos in the blog do the talking about this rather insane outback town that is on one hand uniquely Australian, but on the other looks like a war-torn Beirut and furthermore has a higher percentage of Europeans living there than any other culture!! It’s a “Wild-West” kind of town full of paradoxes, “characters”, history, underground living, and where the 4-5million mine holes within the 40km radius of the town look like they have been dug by huge moles on acid! This is the place where a restaurant and the Magistrates Court House have both been blown up – testament to the lethal cocktail in Coober Pedy of very hot climate, hot-headed and flared Mediterranean tempers and a knowledge of explosives that comes from the town being a mining town! It’s where pieces of moviemaker-sets have been just abandoned on the street, along with old, rusted out buses and cars. Indeed, the whole place looks like the set of Mad Max III (this was actually filmed here so we are guessing they did not have to use too many props!). Alternatively you could also describe it as a moonscape or looking like the “end of the world”. But we actually had fun here and enjoyed the town for what it was, so we will let our photos explain the rest and hope you enjoy them!
Until next time – safe armchair traveling to you all (at least you don’t have to deal with shredded tyres and stonechips to your windscreens!
Under a Parachilna Sunset
Our first stop after leaving the Flinders Ranges was Parachilna, 500km north of Adelaide, where the Flinders meet the desert and where the Prairie Hotel provides a welcome alcoholic oasis amongst the desolate red gibber plains! We had great expectations from this hotel, home to the total population of Parachilna (7 people!). Not only is it Australia’s 3rd hippest hotel and most awarded outback pub but it’s also famous for its F.M.G (Feral Mixed Grill – which is road-kill animals basically, and other native foods etc). Having a room there for the night with no tent zips to deal with, no ladder to get into and out of bed and an actual en-suite toilet was indeed a notable highlight, if only somewhat dampened by the news in the welcome pack laying on the bed - which proudly informed me that Parachilna was home to not only the hip hotel itself but also to a variety of reptiles, including 5 species of dangerous snake, 8 different spiders and over 25 insects excluding the vast numbers of flies!. Nervousness about this was soon overcome in the front bar however, where there were plenty of beers flowing and much chatting with all the various tourists, who formed a steady stream for most of the day. In fact it was quite surprising to learn that despite its remote location, this hotel is usually very busy during the day. What was perhaps even more surprising was witnessing how that busyness had gone through the roof while we were there, due to a lethal mix of Easter long weekend and rumours that there was water in Lake Eyre (a rare and historic event, since it has only filled up 3 times in the last 150 years!). The Prairie Hotel was so busy with people heading out to Lake Eyre that we were forced to spend an extra day there so as to delay our trip and try to miss the throngs of visitors from Adelaide. Still, we figured if you have to extend your stay at a pub for these sound reasons, then it’s no bad thing and it was quite amusing for us to while away the couple of days watching frenzied tourists come, scoff down their lunch and then plough back into their 4WD’s to race further north to “see the water”…..while we stayed sitting and smug, knowing that the true scope of the quirky and rather mad Prairie Hotel experience can only be had by staying there the night, like so many actors and movie makers have all done before us. Sure enough, later on as we watched an amber-orange sunset over the western plains, the barstaff turned on the “Sunset Song” and whacked up the volume. It was a specially recorded song with lyrics including “Under a Parachilna Sunset, no better place to end the day, Fargher lager’s at the bar, and F.M.G is on the way……”. The theater of it all and the quirky song sure made our sunsets there a pretty unique experience! Sitting down to an evening meal at Prairie is another wacky event! And yes, we ordered the F.M.G – it was good but not strong enough in the competition-stakes to rival the Feral Antipasto Platter that preceded it. The latter included some delectable morsels such as smoked roo, camel mettwurst, wild goats cheese and a sensational emu pate and by the time our F.M.G came, it was less a case of road-kill and more an issue of overkill….we were absolutely defeated by the huge portions of meat! It was therefore a welcome reprieve for all our stomachs when halfway through the main course “The Train Song” was whacked on and turned up as the bartender rushed into the dining room and announced “train’s coming!”. This was to herald another “highlight” of overnighting at the Prairie Hotel – namely, it gives you a chance to have the rather weird experience of interrupting your dinner to rush outside and watch the Leigh Creek Coal Train pass through town whilst the pub is belting out the Johnny Cash song “Folsome Prison Blues” (where the first line is “I hear the train a-comin, it’s a rollin around the bend”….except of course at Parachilna the track is one very long bloody straight line!). All I can say is, that at 161 carriages it may well be the longest front-pulled train in existence but after about the 6th carriage you are over it already! Back inside, our stomachs signaled we were very full and even the wonderfully promising-sounding and infamous Prairie Hotel “Quandong Crumble” (wild peach) was, for us foodie heroes, too much to contemplate (though we did get to it the next day!). And so it was, we went to bed with quirky songs echoing in our brains and the blood busily directed to our bellies!
Gordon the Bush Pilot
Hi Gordon here! We knew that scenic flights were available from the Prairie Hotel in Parachilna (just like everywhere else in the area!) but, despite the unique feature of being able to land on mud flats or pretty much anywhere else, we’d decided that we wouldn’t take a flight from there - we’d seen quite a lot in the Flinders Ranges and spent quite a bit of money there, as well as on-staying at the Prairie. That decision not to take a flight held firm until breakfast the next morning. Somehow the owner of the pub had found out that I’m a pilot and seemed determined that we would be going up that day. After initially sticking with our decision she brought the pilot (owner of the charter business – and her brother-in-law) over to speak with us. We explained to him our decision and all seemed OK until he mentioned that we could just go up for 20 minutes or so, and I could fly. Everything seemed to change then, and all of a sudden we were up from our breakfast table and walking across the road to go flying – I’m still not 100% sure how it all happened.
Let me describe the scene here: the Prairie Hotel is literally in the middle of nowhere. Out the front is a road which has no traffic and which goes nowhere in either direction. Across the road is an old, and now disused railway station barely bigger than a shed, then there’s the railway line which has just one empty train north per day, and one coal train south per night. And then right next to the line on the other side is a plane – a Cessna 172. Beyond the plane is the vast, flat nothingness of the South Australian outback.
After a photo or two we climb in and before I know it (i.e. before I’ve even got my seat belt done up!) we start taxiing away from the railway line into the spinifex and grass tussocks which stretch as far as the eye can see. Just 20 meters or so later we turn right parallel with the railway and Ian (the charter guy) turns to me and says ‘let’s go’. I had an initial moment of being completely stunned – “what do you mean let’s go? For a start, where’s the runway? And what about our pre-take of checks….what about getting clearances?”. “Clearances?” he said, “Who from??!!” Then I could see in front of me a narrow - and not entirely straight path where the spinifex was either missing or not as high as everywhere else. That’s when I realized - this IS the bloody runway!! In the same split second I realised I had to get this thing off the ground. OK, full throttle, feet on the pedals, steering a path through the spinifex, trying to get up to 60 knots……where’s the Air Speed Indicator!?!? It wasn’t in the normal place, so I had to try and judge the speed until I thought it was close to the required take off speed by gently pulling back on the controls to see if the plane responded by lifting off the ground – eventually it did. Once we were in the air I tried to revert back to my learned procedure to feel I was fully in control. The procedure is to maintain a take off path in line with the ‘runway’ until you are at least 500ft above ground level before making a turn. However, at about 250ft Ian turns to me and says ‘OK make a right turn here’. I was back to being stunned and thinking to myself “what do you MEAN, “turn here?”!!! This is when Ian fessed up to being what I had already concluded – a Bush Pilot. Bush pilots are a special breed. Firstly they can fly almost anything, and they can land it almost anywhere, and they seem to be able to deal with almost any situation. They operate according to a slightly different set of rules than other pilots, they fly to a set of rules which works for them in the bush and keeps them as safe as possible in some very harsh flying environments.
Once we were up there however, the flying was normal and it was great to see the Flinders Ranges and the outback from the air. We did a big circuit over the ranges, and down through a gap and headed back towards Parachilna. As we got closer I was straining to see where our ‘runway’ was, and even flying parallel to it on then downwind leg of the approach I still couldn’t see. Then the realization again – it didn’t bloody exist!! It was just an area next to the railway which was flat and firm enough to land on. Late on final approach I could make out the tyre-marks from a previous landing and headed for them, putting us down pretty much on them with a nice smooth landing.
So does all that make me a Bush Pilot? Not quite, but I loved playing at being one for a day and would love to do some more bush flying. As Ian noted – that was a good landing – and a good landing is one which you can walk away from!
Man’s mad race……..to see a bloody bit of water!
As I have intimated already, when we were back in the Flinders Ranges we had congratulated ourselves on our cunning itinerary-planning, which ensured we would be far away from caravan parks over Easter and out on the remote Oodnadatta track and on Lake Eyre. We had received early reports even back then, that water from the Queensland floods had finally found its way into Lake Eyre and we were naturally pleased to now have a worthy comeback-reply to the large amounts of teasing we have had over the past two months about having kayaks on our roof in a drought-ridden South Australia - and so we proudly informed everyone we were going to kayak on Lake Eyre! What we didn’t quite anticipate at that stage though, was just how much the imaginations of half the population of a frenzied Adelaide would be equally as captured by this rare event as us – or that these people love to come and “do the Oodnadatta” at Easter because the weather is cooler and they have the long weekend to do it!. Jeeeez! By the time we had arrived in Parachilna we realized the extent of our naivety in thinking we could have the Oodnadatta track and Lake Eyre to ourselves and that, in short, we were buggered….by man’s race to see a bit of bloody water! But it wasn’t until we arrived further north in the town of Maree - gateway to the Oodnadata and Lake Eyre - that our noses were really rubbed in it. We were quickly informed by 4WD people making their way back that, “you cant see it unless you take a flight”. This was accompanied by remarks such as “hey, nice kayaks, where were you thinking of using them then?! You can’t get to the water!” followed by heaps of guffaws! Even the Lake Eyre Yacht Club wasn’t sailing (and how funny that there IS a Lake Eyre Yacht Club given that there has only been water on it 3 times in the past 150 years!).
There was however a bit of an upside to all of this though, as Maree itself - practically a ghost town since the Old Ghan Railway was re-routed away from there in the 1980’s – had indeed sprang to life with “there’s-water-in-Lake-Eyre!” fever. Whilst scenic flights could be heard landing or taking off for the rest of the day, a most amusing afternoon was spent in the front bar of the Maree Hotel, watching the madness unfold and the barman/owner (a worn out, old, gruff and abrupt Aussie-Outback version of Basil Fawlty) trying to cope with the sudden influx (10 or so) of bar customers! He had us in quiet stitches as he complained about the fully booked-out status of his hotel - “I was up cooking 42 bacon and eggs this morning while they were all still in bed scratching their arses and I’ve got 80 to do tomorrow” he grumbled and then, with the straightest, most miserable face you’ve ever seen, concluded: “It’s madness down here. I haven’t stopped. I’ve even got two planes coming in from Sydney. Thank God for me knee replacements. Now what do you want?” and took our order, shuffling away only to return a minute or so later and shove it unceremoniously towards us! He served one or two more people in the same way, before returning to his own seat and beer, wiping his forehead as he drank and ignoring the fact that there were more people wanting to be served! His hilarious Basil Fawlty lack-of-etiquette kept coming forth all afternoon, with comments to one man from Queensland such as “Where are you from then that you don’t like any of the beers here then?” and, to a woman who wanted to know when would be the best time to book for dinner that night “You cant book. If it’s full you’ll just have to wait…..it’s not a bloody race is it?”!!!!! Just as hilarious was the city couple who had ordered a steak sandwich but received sweet and sour pork – “Well…that’s what’s come out of the kitchen” he said with as much consideration as he could muster, plonked it down in front of them……and they ate it without a word! Priceless! And the backdrop to all of this were the people coming in and out, who were waiting for flights or just come off of a flight, with the most bandied about question of the day coming off everyone’s lips and driving us insane by the end of the afternoon - “Did you go up and see the water yet?”. Jeeeez!
It’s fair to say then, that by the time we had left Parachilna and Maree, we were well and truly passed caring about seeing the salt in Lake Eyre, let alone the bloody water – a thing can be talked about just too much I guess! Besides, we had already elected to save our flying money for other treasures over in W.A later on in the trip. And so we set off on the iconic Oodnadatta track, waving farewell to a gone-mad Maree and looking forward to an iconic outback trail. Now, I’d love to tell you that the Oodnadatta was a great experience but, on what was an incredibly hot day and with a shredded tyre happening to us just 40km out of Maree, then a limp back to the town to get the spare tyre fixed with a new one, only to sustain a stone chip to the front windscreen 70km back out of Maree again (thanks to a careless and mad city 4WD driving too fast the other way), I must confess to having had a rather large sense of humour failure….which may well account for the lack of documentary photographs about all this in the blog!!!! Hmmm, some things in life just don’t always turn out how you imagine them to, eh?!!!!
Coober Pedy – another outback town gone mad!
We have decided to let most of the photos in the blog do the talking about this rather insane outback town that is on one hand uniquely Australian, but on the other looks like a war-torn Beirut and furthermore has a higher percentage of Europeans living there than any other culture!! It’s a “Wild-West” kind of town full of paradoxes, “characters”, history, underground living, and where the 4-5million mine holes within the 40km radius of the town look like they have been dug by huge moles on acid! This is the place where a restaurant and the Magistrates Court House have both been blown up – testament to the lethal cocktail in Coober Pedy of very hot climate, hot-headed and flared Mediterranean tempers and a knowledge of explosives that comes from the town being a mining town! It’s where pieces of moviemaker-sets have been just abandoned on the street, along with old, rusted out buses and cars. Indeed, the whole place looks like the set of Mad Max III (this was actually filmed here so we are guessing they did not have to use too many props!). Alternatively you could also describe it as a moonscape or looking like the “end of the world”. But we actually had fun here and enjoyed the town for what it was, so we will let our photos explain the rest and hope you enjoy them!
Until next time – safe armchair traveling to you all (at least you don’t have to deal with shredded tyres and stonechips to your windscreens!
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)