A time to relax

Hi Everyone! Graeme’s been doing all of the blog writing the last few days, so I thought it’s about time I wrote a thing or two.

After a week’s travel of roughing it in the heat, we’ve been staying at a motel in Alice Springs since arriving here yesterday evening – aahhh the relief to be walking on carpet in bare feet and having a shower whenever I darn well want to and not having bugs and mozzies hanging around us! I don’t do bugs! I’ve been taking FULL advantage of the shower, laundry facilities, air conditioning and tv since we arrived!! I know you all probably don’t want to hear this, but it’s been a relief to go to the loo and not have to share it with a bazillion spiders, flies, moths and dust that is inevitable in the rest stops in the outback. Not that I was under this illusion to begin with, but just to let everyone know who perhaps is thinking this, the outback is not the romantic place the brochures make it out to be. It’s full of flies, bugs, dust, lizards (these are cool), weird centipede things, mice!, ants, HUGE spiders and a level of “cleaniless” that is not as per the definition in any dictionary I know of – everything’s filthy. Oh, and you can’t drink any of the water because it’s salty, stinky bore water. Thank goodness for our 40 litres of drinkable water!

Just to fill you in on a couple of things that Graeme’s written about previously, we didn’t end up getting the tyre fixed in William Creek because the tyre repair guy (who is also the guy in the pub, the pilot for the area and the garbage guy among many other jobs for the place), got called out to a plane crash in the area. Thankfully we heard on the local radio the next day that the victims survived relatively unscathed. Due to the extreme heat and the fact that we had no reliable spare tyre and no certainty that Oodnadatta would have a tyre repairer, we decided the best thing to do was to get off the dirt roads. We also felt that not being pub people we weren’t excited to drive a long way to another “outback pub” which really stands for “extremely overpriced drinks and fuel with the promised scent of sweat and cow dung in the air” – it felt like driving dirt for dirt’s sake. So, we got up at dawn and travelled back towards the Stuart Hwy to Coober Pedy. There we found a tyre place where the guy showed us that the tyre was not repairable, so we bought a new one and he balanced our front left wheel for us while he was at it.

Another thing I wanted to point out is that we did actually pay more than 189.9 cents/L for fuel. We paid 199.9 cents per litre at Mt Ebenezer on the way to Uluru yesterday!! Needless to say we only put in as little as we could and then drained the 10L we had in the jerry can to top it up. Yikes, I’ll never complain about $1.30/L for fuel in Canberra again!

Today has been a wonderful day of doing absolutely nothing but bludging and I’m not ashamed to admit that. It’s been an absolute treat and exactly what we needed to refuel ourselves and not the car for once. Alice Springs is an interesting town to say the least. Unfortunately due to the Christmas/New Year’s period practically everything is closed so I don’t think we’re experiencing the town in full swing.

Tomorrow we’re checking out, filling up the fuel tank again and heading further north to Mt Isa. Thanks to Warren for the advice on the roads to take. From there we’ll have to check with the locals to find out what the flood situation in QLD is like so that we can figure out which way we go to get back into NSW. We’re hoping to go to Cameron Corner which is the point where the NSW, QLD and SA borders meet. But, we’ll see how we go. Either the floods, road conditions or our mood will determine whether we end up going or not.

It’s been a real adventure so far and we’ve had many experiences that I’m looking forward to sharing with everyone and anyone who wants to listen to me babble on!

Thanks everyone for your comments on our blog. It’s so lovely to hear from people at home. I hope you all had fun with New Year’s Eve  last night. Happy New Year to you all and cheers to a great year ahead!

Take care, Cassie

PS: Here are some random photos of our travels so far…

A “portrait” of an emu at a fuel station we stopped at on the Stuart Hwy. They make the weirdest sound – like someone tapping on a drum. Not the smartest birds on the planet either.

 

 

 

 

Here’s a picture of a centipede thing that meandered on the ground around us at our camp near Leigh Creek. Have no idea if it’s poisonous or if it even bites, but I certainly wasn’t wanting to find out. He did have bright red legs which aren’t really showing up in any photos we have of it. It did look pretty cool.

 

 

 

We’ve been treated to some beautiful sunsets and sunrises.