King's Canyon

We had a lovely couple of days at King's Canyon. The walk around King's Canyon rim was tough but spectacular, and the easy walks along King's Creek and Kathleen Springs very interesting.

The campground was also interesting - with dingoes wandering all over you had to be careful not to leave anything outside the van they might get into - apparently people have even lost shoes. While they look a lot like cuddly dogs they are most definitely wild animals and needed to be treated with caution. They also spent a lot of the night fighting, howling and doing whatever it is that dingoes do, in as noisy a manner as possible.

When we left to come to Alice Springs we had a bit of an outback wildlife experience, passing on the road in fairly quick succession a dingo, some wild horses (brumbies) and a group of feral camels.

Uluru - Kata Tjuta

We've spent a week at Yulara, which is the purpose built resort to service Uluru and Kata Tjuta (formally known as Ayers Rock and The Olgas). We visited every day, and did all the walks on offer, as well as going at both sunrise and sunset to see the changing colours. The day we went to the sunset was a bit cloudy and thus a bit disappointing (see photo left with the 2 of us) but the sunrise day was perfect (see below). Except that was the only day of our stay that was chilly, particularly at sunrise at 7:05! Lucky that we didn't visit in Summer, when the sun rises before 6, you'd have to get out of bed by about 4:45 to get there in time.

Some of the walks were quite taxing, particularly the Valley of the Winds at Kata Tjuta, which was 7.6km with some very steep climbs, while others were very gentle, such as a 1km flat walk into a waterhole at the base of Uluru. We didn't even know there was permanent water at Uluru, but there are several waterholes that are at least semi-permanent. Although the area around is certainly arid, it is by no means the treeless desert that we had always imagined. There are some quite large trees around both Uluru and Kata Tjuta, and even on the flat plains there is scrub and spinifex grass.

We didn't climb Uluru, the local people who have ownership and joint management of the nataional park ask that you don't, as it violates their spiritual beliefs, particularly when people die up there as apparently they do fairly regularly. Besides, it looked extremely difficult! We did however walk around the base, which is 9.4km but totally flat. The place absolutely swarms with tourists, you see them setting off up the rock climb without even a hat, or pass them on the base walk with no water or food even when the day is 33 degrees.

A cool change finally came through a couple of days ago, resulting in our chilly morning, and now we can look forward to a series of perfect mid-20s days and good sleeping temperatures overnight. We went from tossing and turning with just a sheet over us to the Winter doona in the space of 2 nights!

Life in a Caravan

We've been on the road 5 weeks now, and have settled pretty comfortably into the caravanning life. We share all the driving, breaking up our journeys into fairly short shifts of no more than 1.5 hours each. We've planned not to do very long journeys in any one day, but we've found that out here its hard to actually get anywhere worth getting to sometimes, so we'll throw in a long day occasionally in the future.

One of the secrets of caravanning happiness is 'a place for everything and everything in its place'. There just isn't enough room to afford clutter, and with cupboards and drawers fairly full you don't want to be rummaging all the time. We have boxes within boxes and bags within bags - a box of small hardware items in a larger box with other small boxes of things in it for instance. This way you can find everything fairly quickly and with the minimum disruption to everything else.

We now have the hitching up and setting up in a new place routines down to a fine art. We each have our jobs, and we each check that the other person has done their job properly. We have a hitch up checklist to make sure that we don't miss anything, and that there is no chance of anything being left loose that might cause damage. Hitching up takes us about half an hour, as does setting up in a new place, once the van is on the site. Getting the van onto the site can take anything from 30 seconds to a very tense ...... well, who knows how long it could take, but at least we haven't had any shouting matches in the midle of the caravan park as we have seen with at least one other couple. We're getting a lot better at backing into sites, but we still fervently hope for a drive through whenever we arrive at a new place!

The worst part about caravanning life is the park bathrooms. Thank heavens for the loo in the van so we don't have to go out in the middle of the night, but we still rely on the park facilities for daytime visits and bathing . These range from clean and functional to decidedly grotty, sometimes you have to run around under the shower in order to get wet, but somehow the same shower manages to soak your towel, clothes and toiletries bag. Wherever we can we get an ensuite site, which gives us a small private bathroom next to the caravan. These are a little more expensive than an ordinary powered site, but you can unpack your toiletries and towel, and you generally (although not always) get more room. Also you don't have far to go - some of the parks we've been at have had the facilities miles away!

All in all, we feel we're no longer novices at the game, although we've still got a bit to go before we can call ourselves experts. Hopefully we're starting to run out of silly mistakes to make!

Oodnadatta Track (well, some of it)

We left the van at Marla, a road house/general store/caravan park that has been dignified with a town name. It is in fact the last road house in South Australia heading north. We then deflated the tyres, bunged the Patrol into 4wd and headed down the Oodnadatta Track. This turned out not to be quite as intrepid as we had imagined - this part of the track at least is a reasonable dirt road, and doesn't really have too much of interest. We spent the afternoon in Oodnadatta, which involves a walk up and down the 500 metre long main (only) street and a visit to the museum. The road house closes at 6pm, so dinner was early - there is a pub but the kitchen was closed for renovations. After a late breakfast (the roadhouse doesn't open again until 8:30) we headed back to Marla via the Painted Desert. This part of the trip made the journey worthwhile, it provided all the 4wd adventure that we had expected, as well as stunning views of the Painted Desert itself. We even came across a cattle muster, which was utilising not only horses and motor bikes, but a helicopter! Luckily we weren't mown down by any stampeding cattle, and only had to wait a few minutes for them to clear the road.

Opal Capital of the World

We spent Easter at Coober Pedy - producer of over 80% of the world's opal - and 0% of the world's grass. The Opal Festival was on Easter Saturday, a parade of floats from the local businesses down the main street, then an afternoon of fun activities at the footy oval - wheelbarrow race, tug-of-war, egg and spoon, all the old favourites - culminating in a fireworks display in the evening. Not to be missed was the emergency services demo, using an old car that was supposedly involved in an accident. First the SES ripped off the doors using the 'jaws of life', then the ambulance service rescued the 'injured driver', then the fire service doused it in petrol and set it alight, so they could put the fire out. Cool!

Tourist activities here include tours of various mines, both still working and historic, inspection of various underground buildings (a reasonable portion of the town is actually built into the hillsides, insulating the residents from the at times 50 degree heat in Summer, and freezing cold Winter nights), drive to the Breakaways - interesting rock formations - and the dog fence, which stretches for over 5000km to keep dingoes out of sheep country. Lastly is the approximately 2500 opal shops selling jewellery (at least it feels like that many). We had a look at the golf course, you carry your own little green mat to hit from, decided not to give it a go.

The weather is still hot, we haven't been below 30 in the day for a couple of weeks now, although the nights generally cool down sufficiently to sleep. Last night the bureau promised us some rain today, but they've now decided they were just teasing, and the rain isn't coming after all. The promised cool change seems to consist of changing the forecast high to 29 instead of 30.

Woomera

It is very quiet at Woomera, not much here apart from an open air display of rockets and planes. We visited Roxby Downs and Andamooka, we planned to do a tour of the Olympic Dam mine, but when we rang it was fully booked. Andamooka is an opal mining town and a very strange place, very frontier town looking with giant mounds of earth everywhere and looks very shabby. See photo.

Roxby Downs is a reasonably sized town (about 4000 people) and is quite picturesque. It was built from scratch in the 1980's to house the workers at the Olympic Dam mine. The mine is one of the largest in the world. We did the obligatory town walk. It is a very neat and tidy town and friendly as well.

The caravan park here in Woomera has it's own bar, complete with flashing lights and music which opens at 5pm each night. Certainly different from all the other parks we have stayed at so far.

Flinders Ranges

Isn't technology wonderful? Here we are at Wilpena Pound in South Australia's Flinders Ranges, 60 km from the nearest town, with no radio or TV reception, and we can sit outside our caravan with our wireless broadband modem and access the internet. Good on you Telstra! Not so good for Optus, we don't have any mobile phone coverage.

We've spent 4 days here. It is a walker's paradise, and we have taken full advantage, with some short and not so short hikes. Lookouts, aboriginal rock paintings, old homesteads, geological marvels. And if you don't want to walk to it, you can hop into the 4wd and rumble over the rocks and gravel tracks, visiting out of the way and scenic gorges (or was that really just hooning around?). We have of course taken heaps of photos, none of which really do justice to the spectacular vistas.

Just for a change of pace, we spent a couple of hours on the historic Pichi Richi steam train, running from Quorn to Port Augusta, in case you have forgotten what we look like we have posted a picture of us on the train.

This is the first really out of the way place we have been so far on this trip and we have had a ball. Even the wildlife have welcomed us!

Port Augusta

We played our last game of golf here before we get to Alice Springs in about a month. Now we'll have to figure out how all the other travellers spend their time, when they don't play golf every second day! It's been very hot here for the last couple of days, perhaps softening us up for when we shortly hit the outback. Apart from a game of golf, the other highlight here was a cruise - yes, our second on this trip - up to the very top reaches of the Spencer Gulf. Some very friendly dolphins played tag with the bow of the boat, and the keen fisherman on board was excited to see some large kingfish. We've also had our first swim for the trip, the caravan park has a pool which we were most grateful for yesterday at about the point the temperature hit 35!

We've stocked up on foodstuffs here, as we don't expect to have any decent shopping for the next few days. After a bit over 2 weeks travelling, we are about to leave the cocoon of civilisation behind.....