South Australia part 1 - Dust Galore

It’s a blog post bonanza… Three at once! We were so busy in South Australia that we didn’t have time to post all the cool stuff all at once. Here’s part 1 of our SA trip - it’s a dusty old part of the state that makes the Northern Territory look lush in comparison, but it’s full of charm and cool things to do!

Thursday 17th: Yalara to Coober Pedy

Today should be our last big drive of the trip as we head across the SA/NT border. A 7.5 hour drive to Coober Pedy where apart from this road sign, there really isn’t much to do or even look at!

After a long day of not much we eventually drew close to Coober Pedy, and the landscape suddenly became a mess of large piles of dirt on a flat plain as far as you could see. The only other thing of note was that our engine warning lights came on about 100km out of Coober Pedy, and after arriving at our evening stop the rental company advised us to continue as normal until we get to Adelaide 1000km away…

We hopped up the road to the Big Winch to watch the sunset over Coober Pedy, before turning in for a campervan dinner and good night’s sleep.

Friday 18th: Coober Pedy

We kicked off our morning with a coffee from the Downunder Cafe before heading over to Tom’s Opal mine for a tour of, you guessed it, opal mining! Our tour guide was the eccentric owner called, you didn’t guess it, Paul who was a former opal miner before retiring and buying the mine tour company. Armed with UV torches we were taken down into the mine to see the various formation levels and hear about Paul’s decades of experience in the business. Chloe was lucky enough to have some rubble drop on her helmet too! The tour even finished with scones with jam and cream, winner winner!

In the afternoon we called in at Josephines Gallery and Kangaroo orphanage, but unfortunately the kangaroo tour was fully booked so we had to settle for just the gallery. One thing that was always open for us was the underground Serbian Orthodox Church. We walked a good half hour out of town to visit it, luckily avoiding the frequent dust swirls kicked up by the wind and explored the humble but impressive place of worship.

we walked back to town and called in at the oldest cemetery in the town - a startling reminder of how tough times were for the early pioneers. We finished our evening at the “Coober Pedy Outback bar and grill with pizza”, and the huge pizzas were as much a mouthful as the name! Looks like it’s leftovers for lunch tomorrow!

Saturday 19th: Coober Pedy to Port Augusta

When you’re in the opal capital of the world and there is a trade fair on you can’t not visit so that was our first stop if the day! We expected a huge trade show but in reality it was maybe 10-15 stalls but there were some incredible opals, ranging from the normal whiteish ones all the way through to blue/red and even some crystal opals which we had never seen before. They werent cheap so we just stuck with the one we found while noodling yesterday and Mike spent a good hour of the drive trying to polish it up!

While we thought SA would be much more exciting to drive, more like the east coast maybe we were most definitely wrong and if anything we would almost describe it as more barren! We did see 3-4 huge wedge tail eagles having a feat on some road kill or just chilling in the tree at the side of the road which was pretty cool.

We had a couple of stops offs on today’s drive. The first was at Lake Hart which was an incredible salt lake right in the centre of the desert! An impressive expanse of white which looked like clouds from the car park. We had a walk down to the edge which took us through a tunnel under the train track and into ‘prohibited land’ due to the RAAF rocket testing area, but we couldn’t not when we saw others doing it as well. Continuing along the Stuart Highway, we stopped at a viewpoint which looked at a different salt lake, this was probably bigger than Lake Hart but you couldn’t get anywhere near as close.

Our final stop before Port Augusta was Woomera RAAF village, this was the main area for Brits and Aussie to test rockets, both nuclear and non-nuclear around the 1959s/60s. It was incredibly quiet, and we didn’t see any locals only 2 other cars of tourists but there were heaps of rockets to look at in the park. A lovely stretch of the legs and some awesome things to look at but not oh boy the flies are ridiculous around this area!

We made good progress and arrived at our campgrounds for 6pm. We had a chilled evening planning some of the next couple of days and also looking into our trip to Japan. Can’t believe our time in Australia is nearly up </3

Sunday 20th: Port Augusta to Wilpena Pound

Happy Easter! This means only one thing a relaxing morning reminiscing about our travels and eating chocolate!

We started the day by going back a little bit up the Stuart highway to a Botanical Garden and the Flinders Lookout. The looks out was beautiful showing the cliffs of the Flinders range, but the botanical gardens, well that was probably the worst botanical gardens we have ever been to!! There wasnt much to see and the plant were basically what we had been driving/walking through since Alice Springs. There was a pretty interesting section when Mike suddenly squealed, turns out the ants here basically attack you when you walk on their patch of ground and also bite - not sure we will be wearing flipflops for the next few days.

Next stop was a hike at the start of the Flinders Ranges, this was called Devil Peak. It was another rock scramble near the top which promised 360 views. It didn’t disappoint in either category. The walk up wasnt easy but it had a well-worn path and the rock scramble wasn’t until right at the top where you had to kind of rock climb your way through a crack, but the views were incredible. I went and looked over the rock where we sat and looked and chilled for a bit when suddenly Mike decided he wanted to look, safe to say he regretted it as it was literally a sheer cliff face on the other side of us! A pretty awesome 2 ISH hour walk with stunning views.

We decided to push our next walk to tomorrow morning and head straight to Wilpena Pound Resort. We saw heaps and we mean heaps of Kangaroos in the fields as we drove but didn’t see any Emus. We had high expectations of this Discovery Park but we’re pretty unimpressed even though it was expensive. We did however manage to make a delicious dinner on the BBQ for Easter. Turns out the desert was much warmer at night than the ranges and we both had to resort to warmer clothes for the first time in what seems like forever!

Monday 21st: Wilpena Pound to Port Pirie

Damn it’s cold in south Australia - think we will have to get the duvet out for the first time since Tasmania! We warmed ourselves with a little walk up to the campground hill to see Wilpena Pound. It’s a pretty impressive rock formations but the cloudy start didn’t do it justice.

We were heading back to of the Flinders ranges today and we started with the hike we skipped yesterday called Arkaroo Rock Art. It was about an hour’s walk through bush/rocky ground to a sacred Aboriginal site and the painting was so vivid still. We would have liked to read about the paintings but there sadly wasn’t an information point. A lovely walk and the sun came out about half way so it warmed up nicely.

On the drive from Arkaroo we spotted a number of wild emus and we were finally able to pull over and sneak a photo of the huge birds from a distance just casually walking in the trees. Pretty cool seeing all the wildlife again, NT was mostly just reptiles.

Our next stop was Quorn for a campervan lunch. When we got there the distillery was open so we just had to pay a visit! We got the gin taster paddle which had all 4 of their gins and a super fancy tonic to go with them. The 4 gins were London dry, Quandong (bush peach), bush lime and lemon, and then a butterfly pea flower gin. The Quandong and lemon and lime were delicious but we walked away empty handed to save the wallet!

Final little hike of the day was Alligator Gorge. The gorge has only just reopened after a bush fire from a lightening strike wreaked havoc and it was really eye opening to see quite how much had been destroyed. It burned around 30% of the national park and took over a month to get under control. The walk through the gorge was still really impressive and we enjoyed the rock hopping in the bottom. The smell of the burnt just added to the atmosphere but it did mean sadly no animals in the park at the moment - they don’t think any got caught out though which is good.

Our stop for the night was the Federal Hotel in Port Pirie which has a free self-contained campervan spot around the back. We made sure to pop in for a quick tipple and a chat with the owner Mark who had many stories to tell of his life around western Australia. Oh, and we also encountered a wallaby on our drive that evening!

Guess what? Part 2 is already available to read! Go check it out!