Day ?? – Back to Port Augusta.

Today is the day that I totally lose track of time and get the days wrong, and then decide, “Who am I kidding? Who wants to know EVERY DAY of my travels?”

So no more ‘day labels’. I’ll just try to distill the essential bits of each section of our trip.

Anyway, this one – boring. After phoning the road rescue dude for the area, I’ve decided to not take a road called the ‘Ooodnadatta Track’. It’s rocky, it’s bad, and it’ll destroy my car was essentially what the chap told me. Doesn’t sound like good adventure to me. So we had to take the long way round on bitumen back the way we came more or less to Port Augusta before we set off for Coober Pedy – world Opal capital and then onto the middle to see Uluru and Kata Tjuta (formerly known as Ayer’s Rock and ‘The Olgas’).

Day 20 – Wilpena Pound

Wilpena Pound is a sacred place for the Aboriginals of the area and it’s not hard to see why. It is an area of outstanding beauty and interesting formation and structure. It is essentially a small ring of mountains with a valley in the centre. The Aboriginals believe it was formed by two snakes traveling to a ceremony who, when they got there, ate all the tribesmen (apart from a few who escaped) and stayed there and formed a circle of mountains because they got so bloated from their huge meal that they willed themselves to die. Indeed, one of the escarpments on the outside of the pound really does look like the head of a snake.

Day 19 – Awesome/Nightmare drive through the Flinders Ranges National Park

Today I thought would be a nice chilled out day.

And in some ways it was.

Get to a caravan park. Check in. Chill for a few hours, then decide to take a scenic drive through the Flinders Ranges.

Oh man, how wrong things can go….

Day 18 – Drive, drive drive to the Flinders Ranges.

Not much today really.

We had to peg it up to the Flinders Ranges today. We kind of didn’t make it (we’ve ended up in a town called Quorn – Lord knows how it got that name!), but the scenery is great up here as we began driving deeper into South Australia’s best known mountain range.

The campsite is abandoned – there’s space for a few hundred people and there’s less than 10 here! This evening I was chatting with some Swiss travelers and they were told that the only people traveling right now are ’stupid Australians and Europeans’, whatever that’s meant to mean!

Tomorrow we hope to make it into the middle of the Flinders Ranges Park and check out some bush walking and some cool scenery.

Day 17 – Hahndorf and Warrawong Animal Sanctuary.

Days 15 and 16 – Adelaide

After we’d recovered from the fact that we were camping in Hackney (Adelaide was obviously settled by a big group of East Londoners, because they’ve got Hackney, Mile End, Stepney etc. as suburbs – all shitty areas of London!) Adelaide proved to be a really nice city.

We wondered round Central Market and stuffed ourselves with lots of funky specialist food, wandered around the impressive botanical gardens, visited the aboriginal art centre they have there (where I bought a new bag for my pipe and tobacco – tres exciting!). A wander around the city revealed more of an old-style charm to it than other large towns in Australia, although the main shopping plaza felt thoroughly English which was strange. There’s a strong presence of public art all around the city.

It’s a real shame that we didn’t get more time to stay here – we kind of wish we’d skipped Melbourne now and come here instead in one sense. It’s making us think of doing things very differently on our trip to New Zealand which we’re planning for this time next year. It would have been nice to have been in Melbourne and then moved here after just a few months for a few more months. Anyway, thoughts are slow-cooking for travel plans in 2010 as a result of finding somewhere that we might have preferred….

A bizarre but welcome change was the opportunity to actually use our legs! After 2 weeks in a car for most of the day, you get this feeling that your legs are beginning to atrophy and then, BOOM!, all of a sudden your walking a few kilometres down to the city and back from the camping site. My goodness, I do have legs! So for 2 days we didn’t use the car – a welcome change since we were so used to walking everywhere in Melbourne.

Day 14 – To Normansville again

By the time we’d caught our ferry in the afternoon (which, I might just say, I didn’t get ill on at all this time! Ginger tablets, water and sitting at the back all helped!) and driven a bit up the Fleurieu Peninsula we were ready to make another stop at Normansville again.

This is a lovely little town with a nice little beach with a beautiful sunset and, even better, a fantastic little food wagon on the beach that is open all day until late and did great fish’n'chips and good coffee. I could have done a few days here chilling, but we needed to move on unfortunately.

Adelaide was calling….

Days 8 – 13: Kangaroo Island

Wow, when we finally got ferry over to Kangaroo Island I suddenly remembered why I haven’t been on a ferry for over 20 years – I have not felt so bad and sick in a long time! My only consolation was that I didn’t chunder all over the deck!

Kangaroo Island has been amazing. A few of our experiences have been;

• visiting a family run honey farm, tasting amazing honey, finding the queen bee and marveling at how industrious and organised bees are.
• cuddling a koala (WOW!)
• feeding kangaroos (wow-wow-wee-waa!B)
• feeling sad at all the road kill
• watching possums, echidnas, koalas and kangaroos just stroll through our camp site
• being surrounded by dozens of wallabies at night time
• resting up and getting a chance to reflect and catch our breath.

First week on the road – Thoughts, reflections and challenges

So, we’ve had our first week on the road.

I’d like to think that we’ve done pretty well; we’ve certainly survived and there’s been no major arguments – a good start! We seem to have got into some sort of routine at least, although we’re still finding our feet with regards to living in a way that isn’t going to blow the budget to pieces too soon.

We’ve also quickly discovered that spending a bit of money on the right things makes a big difference (like an electric lamp that recharges in the car and a power inverter to convert car electricity to mains current so you can charge the laptop and phones etc. on the road), as do the small things (like buying a decent pack of playing cards and a slab of MDF to use as a table/MahJong board!)

The biggest pain so far is – what do you eat when you can’t use a stove, can’t store dairy and can’t even heat up water?

Plus, the begrudging admission that you really do need a certain amount of money to actually have fun and not go mad through stress!

Day 7 – Robe to Normansville (not quite Kangaroo Island!)

Today we resolved to try and make the ferry for Kangaroo Island this evening. We were also concerned about the lack of distance we had covered this week, and so decided to try to burn it to the port crossing.

So we haven’t really done much except drive today. We raced up the Coorong across and then down the Fleurieu Peninsula towards Cape Jervis. Unfortunately, when we got to the ferry we found out that they were fully booked for the 6pm and 9 and 10am for the next day! So we had to accept tickets on the 12pm ferry for tomorrow.

Subsequently, we headed a bit further up the Peninsula and have ended up in Normansville. To my surprise, there was a food van down at Normansville Beach that stayed open late and we were still able to get a coffee! Deep joy! Today has been characterised by being absolutely freezing. We swam in the freezing sea in lieu of a shower this morning and it has been cold for most of the day. Mind you, I bet the people of rural Victoria wish they could be saying the same thing (in case you haven’t heard in the news, the bush fires here in Victoria, Australia have been the worse for over 25 years).

Tomorrow we should be on the ferry and exploring Kangaroo Island and, shock horror, we may actually pay for a caravan site!