Ceduna

Although nearly 500km east of the Western Australia border, Ceduna is the last decent sized town in South Australia heading west. Although it doesn't have a lot of tourist delights, we spent a couple of days here before heading across the Nullarbor back to WA. The highlight was a visit to the local meteorological office for the daily launch of the weather balloon. Filled with hydrogen, this explodes out of its little store house and rises like a bat out of hell into the air. Apparently it keeps going to about 60,000 feet and stretches to the size of a small room before finally bursting. The met radar keeps track of it all the way, so that punters like us can know what to wear tomorrow. The local meteorologist gave a moderately interesting talk about how the met station works and what his duties are (not much it seems, mostly just making sure the computers that are doing all the work are still going) and we had a look at the other bits and pieces of equipment at the station, ranging from thermometers stuck in the ground, to a rainwater gauge and the evaporation level monitor shown in the photo at right. Some of it mind-blowingly high-tech and others not much more sophisticated than a wet finger stuck in the air!

The other main thing we did here at Ceduna was a visit to the local aboriginal cultural centre where we actually bought a painting. Our relationship to 'culcha' is usually fairly distant, so this was bigger deal for us than perhaps you might assume. Now we just have to keep it undamaged in the van until we once again have a wall to hang it on.

One good thing about Ceduna is the local seafood outlet, we've had meals of fish, prawns and bugs, all local and freshly caught, and John managed to scoff a dozen freshly opened oysters for morning tea.