Day two of driving in the outback left us 750 kilometers from Broken Hill, through an additional quarantine station (and impromptu pig out on apples, cucumbers, and a carrot all banned from entering South Australia), past Port Augusta to the small outback town of Woomera. We left the hostel bright and early Friday morning, did a quick twirl around the city, checked out the mines, streets off the highway, and headed to a petrol station to fill up the tank for the long drive ahead. We also stopped in an outback store and I got a hat (yes, one of those cowboy hats that we were told to bring to the farm), some mozzie repellant for the bruuuuutal mozzies and a head net (for the blasted flies that seem to love smashing into one's head). The hat is very comfortable and leather and well you know what they say about being in Rome, right? We also supported a small local supplies store and not a k-mart, which I think is a good thing.
After the impromptu shop, we took a 25 km detour to a small, ghost town called Silverton. The town made famous by the Mad Max movie and currently has a population of 8 across the hotel, cafe, mad max museum and a coin carver. Yes, a coin carver a chatty old man named Andy Jenkins who carves the back sides of Australian pennies (not in circulation, everything here is rounded up or down) and sells them as pennants. We stopped in to see the action and had a lovely chat with him. He told us that he'd grown up in Broken Hill and is planning on moving south once his wife retires. We stopped to have a look at the Mad Max Museum, and had a snack at the cafe. I had a spider, which turned out to be a coke float. I'm not sure why they call them spiders though...i should have asked, even if it meant i'd have to play the stupid tourist card.. the town itself was neat to see, although due to a lack of building materials in the area, most of the homes that once were in Silverton are actually in Broken Hill (which were moved after the boom-town of Silverton lost it's boom at the end of the 19th century). They had a couple of other things to do and see including the Silverton Gaol (and old jail built in 1888, Australia was a convicts island after all), the Silverton hotel, and two very tiny churches. By tiny i mean enough to hold about 10 people.
After Silverton, we got in the car and headed west, stopping at a roadhouse for a stretch and a toilet. The town was called Mannahill and had a population of 7. Outside the toilets, there was a sign for a roadhouse, selling goods, coffee, etc. It also said that the owners were having trouble keeping the place going, and that every dollar helps. We decided to check it out. Inside the Roadhouse there were three large tables, a little Christmas display (by the fireplace), and a small women behind the bar. We ordered some coffees and while she was preparing them, went into a tiny history museum of relics the women had collected from around the town. We later found out that the town used to be bustling when it was a train stop on the Ghan railroad, the famous and only rail line running from Adelaide to Darwin. The train stopped coming in the 60s and the town went from 200+ to 7. We were also told that recently someone moved into town and opened a refreshment shop 50 m from the road house and had stolen her business. From there we drove anther 150 kms through the outback, a road that is so straight that you can't see the end of it, and very very flat. At some points you could even see how the earth curves. The occasional transport truck livened things up...and towns were few and far far between.
After the coffee break, we got back on the road to South Australia, stopping only to have lunch, consisting of eating all the fruit and vegetables we were carrying that were banned from the state. It's funny because we had an impromptu fruit binge the day before when we entered our first quarantined area....I down two apples and a peach in 10minutes ....entering South Australia also meant that we were only 200 km from our initial final stop, Port Augusta. Port Augusta is the last stop before heading North, and the only place in Australia that connects to every point in the city. En route we made a detour to elephant gorge, climbing a large hill overlooking the Flinders Range, and went to see a 500 year old Gum tree. Oh, and we drove through several swarms of lotuses, which in the heavy bits sounded like a mix of hail and pebbles hitting the car .After hitting a few swarms of them we could barley see through the front window due to all the guts from the lotuses. It was so bad, It took us twenty minutes of DIY carwash scrubbing to get all the remnants of the bugs out of the car front.....
No comments:
Post a Comment