Hi all, we are on another adventure, this time in Australia. We have hired a large motorhome and set out a few days ago from Adelaide, South Australia, and are already enjoying our time on the road.
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| Us with our new motorhome in Adelaide, South Australia |
This trip will be like a holiday for us as we anticipate that the language, currency, driving, food, customs, cleanliness, and sanitation etc will all be very familiar. Whereas, our last few adventures have been in countries foreign to us, keeping us on our toes and requiring lots of energy.
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| Our route through Sth Australia, Nthn Territory and Wstn Australia |
Our route will take us from Adelaide at the bottom of Australia, north to Darwin at the top. Then we’ll drive west across the top through Western Australia’s (WA) Kimberley’s before heading south down to WA’s Margaret River region. Our final leg will take us east across the Nullarbor Plain to finish back in Adelaide in around 3 months.
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| Colonial architecture in Adelaide, South Australia |
While in Adelaide, we gave ourselves a couple of days for sightseeing. We last visited Adelaide in 2008 and hired a motorhome to drive around rural South Australia. This time, we focussed on the city centre and loved it. Adelaide is the capital of South Australia and has a population of around 26,200.
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| Lovely wide boulevards and lots of parks in Adelaide, South Australia |
The traditional owners of the Adelaide region are the Kaurna people. But in 1836, British free settlers arrived and founded Adelaide as a ‘planned city’. Now days, it is surrounded by beautiful parklands, and has lovely wide boulevard-type streets, lots of heritage buildings, and a wonderful vibrancy.
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| The hot house at Adelaide Botanical Gardens, South Australia |
We wandered around Adelaide for hours, enjoying the architecture, visiting the market, museums, large public squares, and the botanic gardens. On our third day there, we picked up our huge motorhome (8 m long x 4 m high x 2.5 m wide) and named her Ixi because of her number plate. Orientation and paperwork took most of the morning, then we were finally on the road.
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| The lovely shaded riverside walkway near our Adelaide motorcamp |
Our first stop was a supermarket. We got lost getting there, but eventually found it, managed to park big Ixi, and did our food shopping - food is expensive here. We stayed overnight in an Adelaide motorcamp to unpack and organise ourselves in our new home on wheels. While there, we took a lovely riverside walk and heard kookaburras, and that afternoon we saw a koala high up in the gum trees (no photo!).
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| Inside Ixi, our home on wheels for the next 3 months |
Ixi is wonderful. We have a whole separate bedroom with separate wardrobes, an ensuite and a TV; a good size living/dining area also with a TV (we hardly ever watch TV but nevermind); a kitchen with microwave, grill, 4-hob stove (rare in motorhomes) and a full fridge-freezer (also rare), and a wee automatic washing machine (extraordinarily rare). It has air-con and heaps of storage too. Perfect!
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| Marg at O'Leary Walker Wines, Clare Valley South Australia |
Two days later, we were on the road heading north. Our first stop was South Australia’s Clare Valley wine region. We had a list of vineyards to visit, but we found O'Leary Walker Wines and after a nice lunch with wine tasting, we bought a bottle of their finest and skipped the other vineyards in favour of moving on.
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| Blossoms in the Clare Valley, South Australia |
The drive through the Clare Valley was great, with vineyards everywhere, spring blossoms out, and huge fields of bushy green pulse crops mixed with bright yellow rapeseed crops. After a couple of hours, we reached Port Augusta where we stayed the night.
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| Port August, South Australia |
Port Augusta is a large country town (pop 13,800) at the top of the Spencer Gulf. It sits on the intersection of the main north-south route between Adelaide and Darwin, and the east-west route between Sydney and Perth. There was not a lot to see and there was a wind storm that rocked and rolled us in Ixi all night.
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| Flat terrain driving in the outback of South Australia |
The wind was still strong when we left Port Augusta the next morning, and over the next 2 hours the temperature climbed from 16 degrees to 35 degrees. Marg as our driver, managed the windy conditions magnificently. We were now officially in the “outback” where the red sandy terrain is flat, broken only by grassy tussocks, stunted trees, and the long straight road.
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| One of several small dust storms along the Stuart Highway, South Australia |
We came across several small dust storms on the road, then stopped for fuel. But we needed a service station with a high roof over the pumps as we are so tall. Once we found one, we had trouble undoing our fuel cap as it had developed an air-lock. But a nice man at the next pump loosened it for us and it’s been fine since.
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| Some of the spaceships on display at Woomera, South Australia |
Next, we took a small side-trip to Woomera (Kokatha), built in 1947 as a ‘cold-war’ project between the British and Australian government to test rockets, weapons and missiles. The once-thriving town of 5,000 people, has shrunk to 130. It’s a real Aussie outback town, and the displays of rockets tested in the area were interesting.
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| Marg with a makeshift flyswat at Lake Hart, South Australia |
Later, we passed wind farms, salt pans, and lots of dead kangaroos that were the victims of fast traffic. We stopped to stretch our legs at Lake Hart, one of the largest of the many salt lakes in the area. But we were so beset by flies that we didn’t really get a good look at the lake. Our next purchase will be fly nets to cover our faces!
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| The roadhouse at Glendambo, South Australia |
That night we stayed at the Glendambo Roadhouse campsite. The wind stopped while we were there and we went from a hot windy 35 degrees to a cold 10 degrees overnight. The roadhouses along the Stuart highway are an average of 160 km apart, and they have campsites, fuel and food – it’s great. Meanwhile, Marg has perfected the one-finger-raised-off-the-steering-wheel outback wave.
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| Overtaking a 60-metre-long road train on the Stuart Highway, South Australia |
We left Glendambo on a beautiful clear day with no wind, which was a great relief. But we came across lots of road trains – trucks pulling 3 or 4 trailers – and they are hard to overtake as you have so much more truck to get past. The speed limit is 110 kph on this road but we were only managing 90 on average. However, we are not in a hurry so no worries.
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| Entrance to an underground facility at Coober Pedy, South Australia |
Our next stop was at the underground town of Coober Pedy, where its 1,500 or so residents live in subterranean homes to escape the desert heat. We were here in 2008 and stayed in an underground hotel, which was very novel. It is still dominated by dirt mounds that lead to below-ground hotels, shops, cafes etc, and by rusty-looking machinery above-ground. It is quite unique.
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| Replica of an opal miner underground home, Coober Pedy, South Australia |
Coober Pedy is the opal capital of the world. The mines in and around this higgledy-piggledy town supply 95% of the world’s commercial opal. We visited several places while there, including the Old Timers Mine where we went through many tunnels seeing how opal was mined, the miners working conditions, and examples of their subterranean homes.
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| Marg checking the water at Cadney Homestead campground, South Australia |
That night, we stayed in a wee place called Cadney Park. The water along this route is bore water and so we’ve had to purchase large bottles of drinking water and use the local water only if boiled. While there, we ate or cooked all of our fresh produce because we can’t take it over the border into the Northern Territory tomorrow when we go to Uluru - but Uluru’s in the next blog.
This post is the first in a series about our travels through Australia’s south, centre and west.