Adelaide to Coober Pedy

We are now well and truly in the outback of Australia. We have seen so many wonderful sights since my last blog I hardly know where to begin. I do know that if any part of Australia, that has been struggling with drought for some time, needs some rain, just give us a call and I guarantee within a couple of days their water worries will be over! We arrived in Adelaide from Hall’s Gap on a lovely sunny day and booked into Brownhill Creek Caravan Park in Mitchum, Adelaide. This park is in a lovely valley with lots of trees showing off their beautiful autumn colours. Adelaide has been in drought conditions for over 9 months but within a day of our arrival, down came the rain. Amazing. We had been to Adelaide about 15 years ago with a group of friends from our Foxton Caravan Club. We had stayed there for about a week as we waited to board the Indian Pacific train on our way to Perth. We had loved Adelaide then and came armed this time with a list of places we wanted to visit and re-visit. Top of our list was the Barossa Valley vineyards. It was still raining but it didn’t deter us. I am a great fan of Maggie Beer and our first stop was at her Farm Kitchen. We watched a cooking demonstration and then I had my photo taken standing in Maggie’s place as if I was doing the demonstration. Great fun and a really lovely spot with lakes and farm animals all around the property. We stopped at a couple of wineries but not that impressed with the prices so carried on to the last one on the list, Yalumba. It was very cold by this time and getting dark but the atmosphere in this lovely old winery made us stay by the fire and do some very serious sampling. We had a great time and drove back to Adelaide through the hills in low mist and fog. The next day the weather was worse but we decided to keep working our way through our list and headed to Hahndorf. Hahndorf is a very old village about 15 kms. out of Adelaide and had been settled by predominately German settlers in the late 1800s. It only consists of one street but that street is full of cafes, craft shops, antique dealers and beautiful art centres. Hahndorf has gone very upmarket in the years since we were there last. After our lunch we headed to Glenelg, a beach suburb, where the weather had really started to pack it in. We’d planned to have a walk around the shops and perhaps a coffee but after my umbrella blew inside out twice we dicided to call it a day. Our neighbours in the caravan park were from Auckland, so along with the neighbours on the other side who hailed from Sydney, we would all meet in our van most nights and share our travel tales. On the night before we’d planned to leave Adelaide I went to use my computer and the hard drive had packed up. After a long call to Stephen in NZ trying to sort it out we ended up taking it to a repair centre to learn the bad news that I had lost everything. Luckily I had printed out my address book before we left so that was a start but we’ve lost photos of this trip and all my spread sheet work.

After Adelaide we moved onto Port Augusta which had been a stop on the Indian Pacific for us all those years ago. Wow, this town has been through a total transformation. The river banks have been turned into lovely walk ways with gardens and great views. This is a “work in progress” and we look forward to seeing the rest of the handiwork next year when we travel through Port Augusta after crossing the Nullabor. We stayed at Big 4 Port Augusta Holiday Park which was very nice with great facilities and once again we met some lovely neighbours. That has to be the best park of caravanning, the great people you meet. Port Augusta is the crossroads for traffic travelling to Darwin and to Perth so the caravan parks are very busy at this time of the year. It is also a very busy rail junction and we saw some huge trains measuring 1.8kms long. We measured one so I know we are right! We were also told that most of them are this long but no longer as all sidings only measure 2kms. and they wouldn’t be able to fit on them. We visited a very interesting Outback Centre in Port Augusta. It was an interactive centre and very informative about the history of the area. We also visited an “Australian Arid Lands Botanical Garden”. All the plants in this area only require less than 250mm of annual rainfall to survive. We really loved Port Augusta and look forward to returning.

Our next stop was a trip into the Flinders Ranges to see Wilpena Pound. We stayed at Rawnsley Park which is a working sheep station with about 50 caravan sites, cottages and a restaurant. We set up the caravan and then went for a long drive through the National Park and Brachina Gorge driving along old river beds, goat tracks and very dusty roads. The scenery was magnificent with towering rock formations all in different colours depending on the sun light. On arrival back at the camp we were greeted by friends we had met up with back at Hall’s Gap. It was a great night sitting out under the stars around the camp fire. The next day Jim & I drove into Wilpena Pound, which is a vast natural ampitheatre surrounded by peaks that change colour with the light. We climbed up to the top of one of the peaks and the view of the Pound was breathtaking. Worth every hard backbreaking step of the 1.8kms climb. Being a National Park, this area has loads of wild life, kangaroos, emus, wallabies etc. One of the funniest sights we saw in the caravan park was a couple sitting outside their van, eating their breakfast with a big kangaroo sitting opposite them at the table. We also saw a fox run throug the park while we were sitting outside by the camp fire one night. The original Ghan train travelled to Alice Springs via Hawker which is the gateway to the Flinders and the old railway station still stands. It is now a very upmarket restaurant and art gallery. We spent a very interesting time talking to the owner about the old trains. The photos are taken in the Flinders Ranges.

Yesterday we moved onto Woomera which was a rocket launching site for the British and Australian Defence forces from 1946. The Defence Dept. owns a huge area of land still in this area. The area is bigger than the size of England. This town is a dying town with most of the population working for the forces. It was also an immigration centre for illegal immigrants up to a few years ago. Woomera had not had rain for months but last night it had a downfall, of course we were there to enjoy the spectacle!

Today we arrived in Coober Pedy. This place has to be seen to be believed. People had told us it is like the moon with craters everywhere. It is a mining town, with opals being the main sourve of income. There are little mounds of dirt everywhere, remains of diggings. Some of the local inhabitants homes; churches; motels and shops are built under the ground. This was to protect people from the high temperatures in the summer and the cooler temperatures in the winter. We visited one of the mines today and saw how people lived under the ground. Not for me but very interesting indeed. There is no greenery here at all, no lawns or gardens. Everything is brown, dusty and very dry.

As you can see we have seen some very different sights from those we saw last year but I’m sure this vast country has more in store for us over the next few months. In the next couple of weeks we will be visiting Ayers Rock (Uluru), Kings Canyon and Alice Springs and it will be from there that my next blog will be coming from.

MELBOURNE TO ADELAIDE

Waking up at 2.30am. on a cold Waikanae morning and catching a shuttle to the Wellington airport at 3.30am. is not my ideal way of starting a holiday but things could only get better I thought. Leaving Wellington at 6am. with the temperature showing 18C we were looking forward to having some warmer weather. Owing to Qantas cancelling our original flight to Melbourne, we had to travel from Wellington via Sydney to Melbourne. Anyone who has experienced travelling from international to the domestic terminal at Sydney airport will understand the turmoil, especially if you have only limited time to get to your next flight. It was total chaos and if we hadn’t jumped the queue we don’t know where we would have ended up. The temp. in Sydney was a pleasant 22C and once we were on board the Melbourne flight the pilot had great delight in telling us that Melbourne was having a very cold winter’s day and the temp. was only 9C!!! It was absolutely freezing. So much for the warmer weather! Stephen picked us up in our Prado and the friends we met in Balina last year were also at the airport to welcome us. It just felt like coming home again. We went and picked up the caravan which was looking good after being under its cover for 6 months and headed out to the Melbourne Airport Caravan Park. We spent the next week getting everything organised and sorting out where everything belonged again. We spent quite a bit of time with Stephen, which was great and on the Friday night we went to the casino to watch the Hurricanes beat the lights out of the Blues. It was a good night.

On Tuesday 5th May we left Melbourne and headed for Ballarat. We knew that most of Victoria was in a state of drought but nothing could have prepared us for the dry barren land we passed on this trip. It was worse than anything we had seen last year. Paddocks with no grass on them at all, only brown dust. There was no stock on any of the farms and even the gum trees have given up the fight to stay alive. I wonder what these farmers would think if they could only see the lovely green grass on NZ farms.
We had stayed in Ballarat in 2001 and we remembered the lovely stately homes around Lake Wendouree so we decided to stay in that area. The first shock came when we pulled up at the caravan park to find it had been closed and was for sale and the second shock was to find that Lake Wendouree was no more. It had completely dried up and was only a large area overgrown with weeds. It had just evaporated with the zero rainfall. I’m sure the value of some of those stately homes have disappeared with the demise of the lake. Ballarat was know as the “garden city” but the gardens have all disappeared tool We had intended staying 3 days in Ballarat but it was so cold we cut our stay short by a day and moved onto Hall’s Gap in the Grampians.

This little town at the foot of the Grampians is the centre of the Grampian National Park. It reminded us of St. Arnauds in the Nelson Lakes region of the South Island.
It is totally awe
inspiring. There are more than 160 kms of walking tracks in the region varying from easy to very difficult and the surrounding mountains with huge rocky outcrops supply the backdrop that really blew us away. Our caravan park was situated just below part of the range and in the morning when the sun came up and shone on the mountains, it was a sight to behold. We tramped around most of the smaller walks and on the Sunday, Mother’s Day, we decided to climb Mount William, the highest peak in the whole Grampian area. The powers that be made it a bit easier for us by putting in a road to within 2 kms of the summit. It still wasn’t easy. There was a very steep climb to the summit at 1,167 metres but what a view from the top. Magnificent. We nearly gave up a couple of times but just took it a bit easier for a while and it was just exhilarating to get to the top. Many more climbs like that and we will be like mountain goats by the time we get to the end of this trip. We just loved Hall’s Gap for the scenery but also the great people we met there. This was the first camp that most sites had their own camp fire. The people opposite were from South Australia and Tasmania but they were quick to welcome two Kiwis. It’s amazing what a difference a few wines and a camp fire make in the freezing cold. We cooked our dinner on the fire and every time we went out, we would keep our eyes open for wood to bring back to add to the wood pile. The bird and animal life around us is just the best and the sulphur crested cockatoos are everywhere. Jim went out with a few crusts for the birds and they ate out of his hand and were all over his head, shoulders and knees. The kangaroos are all around us and come in and eat up all the scraps and just ignore the humans. The cockatoos are very destructive though and they picked at our rubber matting so much we had to put it away. We were very sad to bid farewell to the Grampians.

We intended to have a stopover between Hall’s Gap and Adelaide but as the road was one of the best we have struck in Australia and the speed limit 110 kms per hour, we decided to press on and drive the 500 kms to Adelaide in one trip. The farmlands in this area were mostly wheat and the paddocks looked a bit greener than they had in Victoria. We were very surprised to see lots of lambs in the paddocks so obviously the farmers don’t expect to get the cold winters here. We booked into a caravan park in the suburb of Mitchum. It is in a valley with lots of maple leaf trees. It is so pretty with all the autumn colours but I’m glad I don’t have to pick up all the leaves. Yesterday we went for a drive to the Fleurieu Peninsula and to Victor Harbour. We drove through lots of vineyards at McLaren Vale and didn’t stop at any. We intend to go up to the Barossa Valley in the next few days and I’m sure there will be some sampling done then. There were some lovely beaches and sea views on the Peninsula and lots of interesting shops, cafes and old hotels.

I intended to get this all done last night but just as I was getting my computer out there was a loud bang and the whole camp was plunged into darkness. I tried reading by torchlight but that wasn’t very satisfactory and after an hour of no computer; no lights and no television we decided to go to bed. It was quite cold and I couldn’t even put my electric blanket on! How we get to rely on home comforts.

We intend having a week in Adelaide and then move onto Port Augusta to begin our trip up the middle of Australia and into the wide blue yonder. I’m not too sure what sort of internet coverage we will get from now on but I will endeavour to keep you as up to date as I can.