Apologies for the gap between posts. I still feel that I’ve yet to find my niche.

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’).

We took a walk all the way up the outside to a lookout today, which really revealed the beauty of this outback landscape. On our way we were lucky enough to see lots of Euros (a small kind of kangaroo adapted to rocks) bounding about, with many of them fairly unperturbed by our presence.

One of the Euros having a feed just a couple of feet from us.

Part of the inside of the circle of Wilpena Pound.

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….

So you look at a map and see that this drive through the park is about 40km, and the park tells you that 2WD cars are absolutely fine on this road you want to take. You allot about 1.5 hours to do the whole thing and be back home in time for tea.

Lovely.

So you start driving. It’s lovely. The scenery is fantastic. The lookouts are great. You’re having a great time. Then you hit a rocky gorge which you might only suggest as suitable for a monster truck, nevermind a stationwagon with about a foot clearance (if that!).

This is where you get a little worried.

Add to this, no matter how slow and careful you go, there’s always just one rock that you didn’t see which decides to jump up and attack the base of your car with a shit-inducing BANG! You go slower, and this drive starts to take longer and longer.

Then it starts to get dark. Now back in the UK this doesn’t matter a jot, particularly if you’re from the city because a) your wildlife doesn’t come out in droves at night (and foxes aren’t stupid as a rule) and b)there’s lights all along the road anyway.

Australia doesn’t meet either of these points, which means that I have to crawl home in the car in the dark so as to prevent hitting a kangaroo on the way back. This has a twofold purpose – 1)My conscience isn’t scarred for life with the guilt of ‘roo blood on my bonnet and b)hitting a kangaroo would total the car and end our trip right there and then.

So, 4.5 HOURS LATER, we finally return to camp. It’s 10pm, I expected us to be back 3 hours ago, I’m bloody hungry and Good Lord I need a beer!

But I would still recommend the scenic drive through the Flinders Ranges park. Just give it a little more time, particularly without a 4×4.

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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.

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.

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….

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.

If you’re ever coming to South Australia, I cannot recommend Kangaroo Island enough. We’ve had a great time here. With an ‘overwhelming’ population of 4800, but still taking about 2 hours to drive across, Kangaroo Island is pretty rural. But it’s got a great atmosphere and there’s lots of little foody and wildlife orientated things to do.

When we got here at first, I was completely destroyed. We’d been on the road for 8 days solid without a break and had over-stretched ourselves. 8 days of solid driving, stopping, sightseeing, back in the car driving, sleeping, driving etc. You get the picture. So we decided that a)we needed to build in more downtime for ourselves to just chill out and what-not, and b) we needed more of a budget if we were going to actually enjoy our traveling experience and eat healthily and not get stressed out with the whole experience.

So, you learn a lot of things on the road and you can only learn these things by actually doing them. You need to find your own pattern and no-one else can dictate this for you – this we’ve learnt through personal experience and through all the people that we’ve spoken to. Every person has a different pace and a different pattern – we might need more chill-out time than others (especially considering that we’re taking a long trip) and we might be covering more distance than, well, most, but you’ve got to ‘find your stride’ and our time chilling out on KI allowed us to reflect and measure up all these things.

It’s also given us some of our real stand out experiences so far – feeding kangaroos and cuddling a Koala. We did both of these at an animal sanctuary called ‘Paul’s Place’ in the north. Here we got to feed the ‘road-kill joeys’ that he’s taken in over the years who are so gentle and love to be patted and stroked and eat out of your hand! How cool was that?!

(Incidentally, for those who are concerned about any commercial exploitation here – all these animals were rescued when they have been either abandoned in the wild or their mothers have been killed by a car on the road and they have survived as babies. They are then taken in, but once a wild animal leaves the wild it can’t return because it won’t survive. Therefore they must stay in captivity. But believe me, these animals didn’t have a hard life!….)

Another big thing for me was cuddling a koala. Photos to follow, but it was wonderful to have this cuddly thing holding onto you and feeling so natural about it.

Back at our campsite in the west, we were surrounded by wildlife. When you went back to your car/tent at night you suddenly realised that you were surrounded by dozens of wallabies. If you stood still all you could hear was the firm ‘tug-tug-tug’ of wallabies eating grass. Allow your eyes to get used to the light or turn on your torch and do a quick scan and you were surrounded by about 70 or so wallabies on a midnight forage! Fantastic. Plus, on our last night we had the chance to watch a koala just walk around the camp, up and down a few trees and then wander off on it’s business and we found an echidna rustling around in the shrub ground just behind our car. Echidna’s rock – fact, and it was great to watch one from a few feet away (they’re not scared of people because they haven’t had to learn to avoid people during their evolution).

From here it’s straight up to Adelaide. Here’s hoping that I manage that ferry a little better this time….

I get a little silly at Clifford’s Honey Farm

Bernice feeding a Kangaroo Island Kangaroo (they’re different to other ‘roos and are only found on the Island)

Me feeding some roos by hand – this was so fab!….

…but not as fab as this – cuddling a Koala – he was lovely. Although brief, this is a real standout experience for me.

This is an Echidna – again on KI they have blonder spines than their mainland counterparts. These guys are so cute – one of my favourite animals.

When camping at Flinders Chase in the west of KI, our car was surrounded by 70-100 of these guys – Tamar Wallabies (again, particular to KI).

Bernice standing atop the tallest dune in Little Sahara – which really was a Sahara like desert in the middle of KI!

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!

Australia has a total fire ban on at the moment – that means that you can’t use a naked flame anywhere outside whatsoever. This includes camping stoves, which means that for the time being our funky outdoor stove that we were so pleased with buying is rendered redundant. Therefore, the only way to cook things is to use the public barbecues that are at least pretty much ubiquitous around Oz’s public spaces and park lands.

However it’s a not a ‘real’ barbecue, it’s a hot plate. So whilst I’m glad that we can at least cook something, you have to start getting a bit creative because you can’t heat water with these hot plates, so that means you can only fry stuff and you can’t cook rice or pasta or noodles etc.

Add to this is our problem with cold storage. Ice/ice blocks last about a day, but thereafter you have problems. So this means that we also can’t store dairy for a long time – although margarine is fine outside of a fridge so that’s okay. So this means that we can’t store meat or dairy for any length of time.

Until now we haven’t considered just using caravan park kitchens because our budget was so tight. We’ve also been so tight that we haven’t been able to afford takeaway and that’s not all that healthy anyway. But we had to admit defeat here and expand our budget for each day/week and just hope that we undercut it sometimes to save money. There’s no point in doing all this traveling and not enjoying it is there? So hopefully, now, life will be easier.

Another issue is finding our stride with regards to traveling distance versus chilling out/down time versus seeing things and ‘doing stuff’ like visit attractions etc.