The Oodnadatta Track

The next leg of the trip involved us heading along the Oodnadatta Track which began at Marla on the Stuart Hwy. This track was similar in many ways to the Tanami Rd but with less corrugations. There were many washouts due to a recent patch of rain in the area a week or two before and the road was rutted in parts from where cars had gone through the mud.

The girls absolutely loved the pink roadhouse at Oodnadatta as everything in and around it was bright pink.

You can tell the size of the town by the cinema complex.

From Oodnadatta we did a detour to Coober Pedy as we promised the girls when we went through the town at the start of our trip that we'd go back and look for opals. On the way to Coober Pedy we passed through the Moon Plain, a vast stony desert with hardly anything growing on it. This was where the first Mad Max movies were shot and you wouldn't want to get stuck out here, especially in summer.

Moon Plain

Remnants of a wet past week or so

Coober Pedy (which is aboriginal for 'white man's burrows') is a small town until you realise that half of it is underground. They do this to escape the brutal summer heat which can reach 52°C and most underground houses stay a constant 25°C all year without heaters or aircon. We visited an underground house as part of a tour in an opal mine and it was hard to imagine there's tonnes of dirt above your head.

An underground house.

Opal miners

Down town Coober Pedy

 Next we went 'noodling'. This is where tourists (and locals) can hunt for opals in mounds of dirt which were pushed up by bulldozers in the 1970's as most other areas have a mining lease. We spent a couple of hours here but only found several small and poor quality ones. The girls had fun though.

The noodling fields

We returned to the Oodnadatta Track via William Creek and continued past Lake Eyre which had a bit of water in it from 40mm of rain recently.

Southern end of Lake Eyre. The dark blue is water up to 80cm deep.

It's no joke, they actually do sail on the lake occasionally

A 'Pussy Willow" tree at William Creek. Look closely at whats hanging in the tree.

Metal art on the Oodnadatta Track near Maree. It's definitely a man.

Along the way we called in at Coward Springs where they had a 'hot' spring. They should have called it a 'luke warm spring' as it didn't really warm us up from the cool 15 C day. Down the track further we came to a series of natural mound springs created by warm water reaching the surface from the Artesian Basin.

Mound spring

These springs are the main reason the Oodnadatta Track exists at all and the old Ghan Railway used to run parallel to the road following the series of springs. Even before white man the aboriginies used this route to travel across the area. The old Ghan line still exists but is now derelict including the old stone buildings at each of the sidings.

We finished the Oodnadatta Track at Maree and continued south to the Flinder's Ranges. This dry mountain range is where people from Adelaide like to come to 'rough it' in the great outback as one local told us. We were expecting it to be taller but it was still impressive, especially Wilpena Pound which was created by tectonic plates pushing in different directions to create a 17km wide amphitheatre.

The Razorback lookout

Inside the Wilpena Pound

The start of a cold evening at Wilpena

Sophie sock-hands

We couldn't work out which way the track goes from here. They need better signs!

Native Callitris pine woodland in the Flinders Ranges

The Euro or Common Wallaroo Macropus robustus, a scruffy cousin of the familiar Grey Kangaroo, was seen on almost every rocky hill in the area and we would have seen hundreds, if not thousands of them. (Sophie counted 107).

Euro

Yellow-throated Miner

Wurmbea sp

White-breasted Woodswallows

We camped last night in Wilpena in the centre of the ranges and it dropped below 0 C at night. Brrr. We are now spending the last night of our holiday in a cabin (to save our sanity and our noses from frostbite!) in Renmark on the Murray River.