Yulara
The car, you’ll be delighted to learn, is doing very well indeed. It has been driven a serious distance along Australia’s highways since I last updated this log.
We set off bright and early from Burra yesterday morning and four fuel stops later, we’d made it to our intended destination of Coober Pedy without incident. Well, there was one minor incident when I was trying to take some snaps of the beautiful scenery on the road into Port Augusta (or as I’ve heard it called, ‘Porta Gutter’) where my camera refused to play ball and just stored pictures of random horizontal lines. This is the second time that the camera has threatened to die on me, so perhaps it really is time to replace it. Or at least when I’m earning again!
Coober Pedy is claimed to be the Opal Capital of Australia, nay The World. However, I was unable to find any experts who could tell me why they changed the name to Starburst. We shall return on the way to Adelaide to see if anyone has come up with a satisfactory answer.
As well as opals, Coober Pedy is home to The Big Winch. We visited The Big thing just before sunset. Photographs will be uploaded to the Australian Big Things group on Flickr, when Internet access does not cost AU$2.50 for six minutes. Without the benefit of a thermometer to back up the statement, you will have to take my word for it when I say that yesterday evening was the hottest, windiest and most arid evening that I have ever experienced.
Our motel room was lovely and cool, though. It was built out of mud. I shall let the reader look up the Mud Hut Hotel in Coober Pedy as an exercise (I’m on holiday, you cannot expect me to do all of the work!).
Thankfully the power-cut that affected Coober Pedy did not interrupt our alarm clock and had been resolved by the time we wanted petrol before hitting the road for the day. The early start paid off as we’d covered most of the distance to South Australia’s border with Northern Territory (no Daylight Savings here, watches back an hour) by lunchtime and so the journey was pretty cool. In fact the temperature needle on the dashboard display hardly made it over half-way all day. This is good news!
After a few minutes the amazing redness of the landscape, the green-ness of the small birds, the quickness of the lizards and the hugeness of the birds of prey circling overhead begins to seem normal. So normal that I find it important to mention them, yet hard to write about them. Odd, really!
K drove the last section of the day along the Lasseter Highway. According to the distance markers at the side of the road we were just over 140km from Uluru when the vast rock presented itself on the horizon. The skies had clouded over and rain wasn’t far away as we got our first views of Ayers Rock across the plains. It looked purple and gigantic, even from that distance.
We are now at the Ayers Rock Resort at Yulara where the monolith in the skyline is not the only oversized entity. You should see the prices. Having a monopoly on everything for kilometres around they can and do charge what they like here. Still… it’s pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime experience, so mustn’t grumble, eh?