The Long Ride South:

The Long Ride South: World Cup 2018

Now you probably know that Australia is a big place and that to get anywhere takes an age, well we were just about to find this out for real. Our next destination was the Opel mining town of Coober Pedy but from Uluru, it was just too far to drive in one hit, so we decided to have a leisurely start and then break our journey somewhere near the South Australian border.

We took our time getting up and having breakfast, nipped to the supermarket for some supplies and a coffee, then went to the get diesel at an astronomical price, (yeah, yeah, we are in the middle of a desert, I know), and finally started the trip south. The first part of the trip was retracing our steps back to the Stuart Highway some 244km before we turn towards Kulgera, which would be our stop for the night. Kulgera is the very definition of a one-horse-town, there is literally the Roadhouse & petrol station, a campground and a police station, if there was any more to this outback metropolis, they were doing a very good job hiding it.

It's a small world sometimes, the guy that checked us in was a Kiwi

from Addington. He told us where our spot was and where the shower block was and that happy hour in the Roadhouse was from 6 to 7pm, so just the important stuff. We set up camp and chilled out after a long drive, before heading off for a happy hour beer or few in the quirky Roadhouse bar, before returning to our wheeled home and making some dinner and turning in for the night. We had another 400km + day driving day tomorrow, so we wanted to make a reasonably early start.

It's obvious to me that we are just novices at this camper/caravaning thing in comparison to the Aussies who do this sort of trip all the time because even though we got up early, showered and ate breakfast to get us on the road, we were still almost the last people to leave the campsite that morning. We have a lot to learn... 

The Stuart Highway that runs between Adelaide & Darwin is a smooth 2 lane stretch of bitumen, so I locked the cruise control at 90kph and followed the white lines for kilometer after the kilometer. The Outback is vast, a vast empty plain of almost nothing but sand & rocks and desperate vegetation. You travel along unbelievably long straight sections of roadway with nothing but stunted shrubs and dusty trees for as far as the eye can see, no people, no buildings, no features and hardly any other traffic. I was expecting to see some wildlife along the journey, maybe some dingo’s and the ubiquitous kangaroo that Australia is so renowned for, but the only wildlife we saw were dead at the side of the road, sheep, cows, and kangaroos, the only living things were saw were the crows pecking at the carcasses.

Another interesting sight along the highway was the mangled wrecks of cars that had obviously had an unfortunate interaction with the pre-deceased wildlife, and after a while Fiona & I started to wonder if these were left here as a warning to other road users, if so, it was a pretty sombre reminder that these roads could be dangerous. As you move towards a subtle rise in the landscape you wonder what you might be able to see on the other side, only to crest the hill and see even more of what you have been looking at for the last 100kms. Occasionally, the landscape will change almost imperceptibly and where there were short desert oaks and wild shrubs now there are only shrubs, with not a tree in sight, then before you know it, it was back to dusty trees. This went on for hours as we cruised steadily south, counting down the endless kilometers towards our destination.

We could tell we were approaching the World Capital of Opal mining when about 30kms away from our destination when small pyramids of dirt started to appear on the skyline, followed by more pyramids and bigger piles of multicoloured dirt until the whole of the landscape both sides of the road was covered in them. Then we started seeing the occasional piece of mining equipment or an excavator in a hole, and signs marking out mining access points, and finally, we could just about make out a few building in the distance. Welcome to Coober Pedy.