Garry and Carols Van Trip: Up the centre...

We have covered some distance this past week and it seemed that there was a lot of nothing in between a few places. However, upon reviewing our photos we have seen a lot.

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We have driven over 1,700 kms this week and if we hadn’t turned off into Woomera and Coober Pedy, we still would not have been through a town. We passed through flat barren gravel plains, passed salt lakes, through the stark red and white coastline of the inland seas of old that made the the opal area, and into the rich red sandy dunes around Ayers Rock / Uluru.

Woomera was our first break and is in a great place for a rocket and weapons testing facility. The town looks deserted with whole buildings boarded up. There is obviously no research or testing going on at the moment. There is an excellent display of planes, rockets, and missiles spread over two blocks on opposite corners near the info centre. There are all sorts of successful rockets and also piles of twisted metal recovered from the desert from the not so successful ones. There is also a great display in the Info Centre.

island in a salt lake

Woomera test missile

missile park

more missiles

roadside free camp

We free camped on a roadside parking area that night and were well off the road, so it was quiet enough to hear the rain. Our next day saw us into Coober Pedy where they were all smiles after half an inch of rain and a much cooler change. The opal business looks slow with very few new cars or machinery visible and more shops selling opal than there was people buying it. About half of the town lives underground or more correctly in the ground. The opal fields are spread around the escarpment which is the eroded shoreline of the inland sea. Miners, and home builders, simply burrow into the face of the escarpment and create a series of tunnels or rooms in under the plain above. As most of the escarpment has been mined, there are now vertical tunnels being bored all over the upper plain with the pure white spoil being deposited in cones all over the red rocky landscape. Garry went on an underground mine tour while Carol checked out the shops and selected a charm with nice opal for her Pandora bracelet. On the way out we had a quick scratch for opal in the public noodling area and came up with a nice little chip with good colour for a keepsake. We noticed that there were kangaroo tail pieces with ‘fur on’ available in the smallgoods section of the supermarket. The Serbian Orthodox Church is a very impressive newish underground church on the edge of town with very pretty stained glass windows on the outside wall. They also have a nice garden leading up to the front door made up of vegetables and fruit trees nourished by waste water. The golf course is also interesting with black tar sand ‘greens’ on white barren plains. They are proud of the fact that they are the only golf course in Australia without a blade of grass.

looking back down the 9th 'fairway' at 'Royal' Coober Pedy G.C.

Impressive 1.2m diameter shell fossil

underground lounge room/kitchen

Shovelling for that big one they missed

Entrance sign - full size mine vacuum pump

desert scenery at the Breakaways

these 2 mounds are called the Salt & Pepper

Next night was spent in a big bitumen roadside parking lot on the SA/NT border. The big bitumen bays were good and there was a toilet but it badly needed a stiff breeze. We ran into 3 guys from Mackay, 2 on dirt bikes and in in a landcruiser ute. Turns out the bloke in the ute is Shelley’s husband. Last time we saw Bob was at the Fox Glenn 10 years ago.

As we approached the Rock I was surprised how green it was following the rain a few nights earlier. There has been a big fire recently and the colour contrast was outstanding, red sand dunes, green grass beside the road, and blackened trees. We have watched two sunsets and one sunrise over the Rock, spent most of one day at the Olgas and all day today around base of Ayers Rock. These two places are now referred to as Uluru and Kata Tjuta. The 2 walks into the Olgas are very interesting and the early morning colours of the mounds and surrounding countryside is spectacular. Water in both of the canyons is different. Sunset over Ayers Rock shows off its remarkable colour changes from bluish pink to deep rich reds. Hundreds watch it each night. An early morning rise in the dark to await the sunrise from the opposite side was also worth the wake up with the red rock impressive as always. We took a couple of walks to both of the permanent waterholes at the foot of the Rock and also a visit to Aboriginal Art Sites and caves was very interesting. The climb up the Rock has been closed due to strong winds on the summit but we had a climb part way this afternoon. It was hot and the track was slippery from so much foot traffic and we did not make all the way up. The views were fantastic and worth the climb. The tourist traffic has amazed us with at least a hundred vans and heaps of coaches and bus tours rolling through every day. There were 7 coaches still at the sunrise viewing area when we left this morning.