​May 2, 2017 Desert Images

Places like Marla at the northern end of the Oodnadatta Track, are oases with lush green lawns,
palm trees and lots of exotic flowers. Restful to the eyes after the harsh glare of sun and dessert rock.

Talking of colour! We didn't talk to this guy but wherever he is walking to, its a ling way.
We saw another person walking hundreds of Ks up the Hwy.

Desert images from The Great Victorian, Painted and Simpson deserts. Earth and dust - the colours change from the palest white gold through soft yellows and orange, hot ground chilli to a deep red like powdered blood and deep rust nutmeg. And so too the rocks of the Gibber plains but with added purple and darkest brown. Patches of the ground as we approach appear like polished maroon-black mirrors. This is the 'desert pavement' (closely fitted rocks and pebbles) with their patina of 'desert vanish' - a micro coating of clays and minerals which bakes on in the desert sun. Nature's glaze - but of course, man didn't invent it!!

One of many road trains creeping into Kulgera just over the border in NT

A truckload of cattle coming in off the Finke Road (a road I'd love to take one day - so remote)

We have been almost sucked off the road by mighty 50 odd m long road trains, crossed wide dry river beds with their shady eucalypts - red river gums, red and blue mallees and coolibah. And of course we are encountering the iconic ghost gums, desert and silver oak and desert cassia with their brilliant yellow flowers. The variety of colours of the leaves and bark would fill a page, a few pages! Something we found lots of last time we were here are the potato and tomato bushes. They look very similar but the fruit of some is highly poisonous. I decided not to try this time!

This is a potato bush the fruit can be and was eaten by local aboriginals. It looks
very like a wild tomato whose fruit is poisonous. Would have been a bitten lesson to learn.

Once we crossed the border we passed through a number of mountain ranges with ochre cliffs here and there. And happily every night we have been treated to a New Year's Eve fireworks display albeit in very slow motion. Glorious glorious colour everywhere you look!

The Alice night sky. A changing display of glorious colour.

​April 30 2017 Further up the road

Coming into Coober Pedy from the south.  The diggings are everywhere.

And talking about amazing ..... then we came to Coober Pedy! The vista for many miles in all directions is a moonscape of mounds, big and small, piles of discards of the earths innards in the relentless search for 'wealth'. It's awesome and ghastly, reminiscent of one of the MadMax
movies. Totally prohibited to most because of the very real danger of falling down an abandoned shaft.

Almost like pustules, these tailings cover a plagued landscape

As awful as it looks, I wanted to be out there noodling for little scraps of overlooked opal; I did find a piece once and had it polished. So exciting! I carry a gold pan (wishful thinking) and a rock hammer as we travel, although sadly I can't lay my hands on it at the moment. So yeah OK, I'm a frustrated would-be geologist - if I had my time over. ....... Lots of wonderful treasures lurk within those dun brown rocks which often escape our glaze out there.

One small mesa and its subsiduaries - evidence of erosion and land movement over the millenia.
The vivid colours are formed by the leaching of minerals through the soft limestone. Atop is a hard crust which gradually breaks away leaving the soft underlying rock exposed.

We were travelling through a land rich in many minerals and precious stones and ores. Some like the opals and iron ore can only be guessed at but others display their glorious colours in places like the Painted Desert and the Breakaways (part of the seabed 80 millions years ago).
We also drove for a good part of the day through another prohibited area, the Woomera Prohibited Zone. I believe you can get permission to go in there but there are some amazing accounts of the development and early activity of that region in Len Beadells books.
More later from further up the track which, incidentally, sort of follows the route taken by John McDouall Stuart in the mid 1800s. He was the first white person to traverse Australia south to north. And there's a veritable army of nomads following his foot- or rather camel and horse steps.

 

Satellite image of part of SA

Goyder's line superimposed - not a bad match!

Almost forgot to tell you about Goyders Line. Back in the mid 1800s, Surveyor Goyder was charged with determining the boundaries of arable land for farming, cropping etc in the southern part of SA. In a month, on horse back, he traversed a huge tract of land and, as a result of his observations, described a line on a map above which rainfall would be less than 10 inches per year and so be unsuited for cropping. His observations and report look mighty like what you see on a satellite photo of the area. All I can say is WOW!! What a man.
More anon ........

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May 1 2017
As you might have guessed we are much further up the track - actually in The Alice! But back to where we were further up the track and ....... back out on the road to Coober Pedy. Just as we got out onto the road, a crazy emu dashed out like a heat-seeking missile wobbling on its course before shooting across the road in front of us. Eek and ye gads! Lindsay managed to brake sufficiently so that we missed him, but he and we left a cloud of tail feathers spinning in the air over the road. Phew! The last emu that dashed into our path, we hit and mortally wounded. It's a devastating experience.

Lake Gairdner - often a stunning expanse of shimmering salt.

On our push north we passed extensive 'system' of lakes, some huge like Lake Gairdner and Lake Hart, some with lots of water and mirror-perfect reflections, all with broad skirts of pink mud and presumably salt. There's been rain in the region but not enough to fill these small seas - it comes and goes!

Lake Hart. The reflections although a little difficult to see here, were beautiful, mirror perfect.

The outback is such a surprising collection of wonders and underlying it all is the biggest artesian basin in the world - the Great Artesian Basin, that covers 25% of our continent and which supplies life giving fresh water to so much of inland Oz. We live in an amazing place you'd have to agree.

At the junction of the Stuart Hwy and the road to William Creek on the Oodnadatta Track.

​April 29, 2017 We are in fly - and caterpillar - country!

This is one of the many nests of the hairy caterpillar of the bag shelter moth.
They build these quite large nests mainly in acacia trees in arid regions of Oz..

So out have come the fly nets for our hats - we look very fetching! But they're effective.

The clouds have been an ever changing story all day.

We're in big sky country and I have been watching the clouds and of course the sunsets. First up this morning the sky was filled with Popcorn clouds but that changed as we went along till they looked like they were smudged or bleeding like water colour paint on wet paper. The blues are endless in more ways than one and at the end of the day deepen to green, bruise purple and finally deep dark indigo.

Island Lagoon not far from the turn off to Woomera. It is just one of the many lakes
albeit not always filled with water. The sky was beautiful.

We had seen a couple of old Land Rovers on the road and also at Woomera. Got me wondering if there was a rally somewhere. But no I discovered that they were part of a group of 6 vehicles heading for Coober Pedy and then on to do 2 weeks driving in the amazing remote deserts of SA with none other than Connie Beadell (Len Beadell's daughter).

Len Beadell did his surveying and road building work in a trusty Land Rover.
I highly recommend reading his books to those of you interested in the central inland deserts.

I simply have to do that trip, if possible with Connie, because one of the things on my bucket list is to drive the Heather highway so named, after another daughter, by Len Beadell who surveyed and then led the team that built a number of the roads through scrub and salt pans in that remote part of Oz. To make it just that more compelling the hwy is in the Gibson Desert (I am a Gibson). Too good not to do you'd agree!

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April 29 2017 From Woomera

I am beginning to be stuck for superlatives so just go with me please.

We started the day watching cows paddling in the Loddon and now we're hunkered down at Woomera under a desert sunset (actually now under a toe-nail sliver of new moon). It is so glorious! I always forget just how much I adore the desert - the air is so 'light'. And it is always surprises me anew when I get out here - I simply love it. Plus it is too dry for mozzies - hallelujah !!!!

The road speaks for itself - vast stretch of Oz slide
under your wheels as we journey under big expansive skies.

As we have driven further and further west today, it has been amazing watching the changing colours. Greens of every hue from deep forest green through Nashi pear green, blue green-grey to the palest silver 'green' of the iconic saltbush. And the earth has been so many shades of 'terracotta'. Colours ah!! some of you will remember Derwent, or was it Lakeland, coloured pencils, the big box that had a triple layer or was it ..... ? my memory is not good (and sadly I didn't have the 'big' box). The gradation of colours of today was rather 'lolly shop' magical.
We've travelled over 500 km today and have crossed and recrossed Goyder's Line (more on that later), bought delish 'true' Cornish pasties in the copper town of Burra at a shop Vanessa would absolutely adore (sorry pet I didn't take my iPhone in), sat at a rail crossing while a train ~2km long passed by, and have started to encounter road trains, the real Aussie road trains.
We are in Len Beadell kind of country, country of a type that is probably a good half of Oz - salt pans and desert. I feel like I'm in a Dorothea Mackellar poem and feel replete!

Big skies and glorious colour!

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April 27 April

And that's just the back of the car!

On the road again ... tra la la! With, but not with, Willie Neilson 😏 (i do have loads of his songs on my phone), but up the road on our trek north-west. We are stopped over night at Kerang on the Loddon supping on proper camp food - yep, tinned (I was a mad keen fan of The Famous Five and anyone who read those books knows that they, Georgie, always raided the larder to stock their adventures with tinned 'stuff'. Yeah!? Pure adventure). Its easy fare after a tiring day.
Loads of packing and lifting and ....... Our rig, car and van, weighed in at around 6 tonne this morning before we left. We are packed to the eyeballs with supplies - edible, drinkable and every other kind of use you could imagine - almost! Along with the booze, under the bed, I have packed 5 kg wool to turn into beanies etc - I won't get bored.

Note - the car is clean!! But not for long I reckon.

I have to tell you that we or rather Lindsay excelled himself getting a 60 kg wheel up onto the roof rack - no mean effort. Heaven help us if we need to get it down. The two of us have lifted and shifted so much over the last few days, we'll have muscles on our septuagenarian muscles - and loving it !!
Tomorrow will be another day in this wonderful odyssey. I'm hoping to make contact with a very remote community on Croker Island (near the Cobourg peninsula). This community is keen to get knitted stuff from kogo. Would be fantastic to deliver a little! we'll see.

First night sunset over the Loddon. Next stop way west from here.

Chat to you somewhere further down the road.

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Two more sleeps and then we are gone - NW!

Great adventure ... and we made it right to the tippy tip tip of Cape York Peninsula 2015

Having just been to the southern most point of Oz, we're heading off to find the other northern most point in Oz. No, not 'The Tip' of Cape York Peninsula (we were there in 2015), but the Top End - places like Arhnem Land and world renowned National Parks and wilderness preserves.
We will be travelling up the Stuart Hwy through The Alice to reach Kakadu while there’s still plenty of water around - we hope. A place that's been on my list for many years is the Cobourg Peninsula. We'll be heading there next - Garig Gunak Barlu National Park, Arnhem Land (350 km east of Darwin) followed maybe by a trip out to the Tiwi Islands which are not too far off shore from Darwin, 'near' the Cobourg Pen and part of that whole scribbly piece of coast line.
On our list also are places that seem so remote and magical - Katherine gorge, the Adelaide River, Litchfield National Park, the Kimberleys, Gibb River Road (a look see at least)  .. and who know where else. Kunanurra, Lake Argyle, Ord Rover, Bungle Bungles, King Leopold Ranges, Fitzroy Crossing and …..
We are packed to the gunwales with all manner of back up equipment and rescue gear .... and tons of food (and wine), but of course! We've also pack lots of other things to keep us on track - both of us subscribe to a range of online learning courses but I also take a range of reference books on plants and rocks, etc and fungi of course. I would so love to see desert fungi - seems there are heaps. I will just have to keep me eyes open.
Travel for me is about exploring places and 'things' I don't know about or about which I have forgotten. For example in Tassie I learned about the discovery and settlement of the Furneaux group of islands in Bass Strait. Each trip sends me back to books or to Google to learn more about matters big and small. I learnt so much on our Tassie trip but I won't bore you with my ravings! But maybe just one question - what causes hexagonal granite formations? So many questions. Thank goodness for Google and of course visitors centres are wonderful sources of all manner of information. You can take it or leave it but explore a little and a whole new book opens and once you're hooked. The internet is a mine field of treasures - when you have internet - and where we're going there wont be much, oh well. We'll be off the grid, unplugged for much of the time. Marvellous!!