(Ir)Regular Ramblings – 3

Welcome to number 3 in the series. I’m not sure if you’re impressed with how much I’ve written, but I am! Thought I’d probably make it to three by the end of the trip; only six weeks have passed and I am onto the third already. It is in no small part, thanks to the experiences we’ve had and the people we’ve met. I expected it to be a bit like it has, but not to as great an extent. While Marg and the girls seem to delight in my new nickname, “Have-a-Chat” it does lead to some interesting experiences.

21/2 – 3/3/03

From Port Vincent we travelled to Moonta. Along the way we had our first mishap. A couple of ‘undulations’ in the road surface literally had the front of the 4WD almost air-born, with the caravan following suit behind us. It wasn’t that I was going too fast particularly, just an unfortunate combination of a double dip in the road that was at exactly the wrong spacing for our wheel-base, mass and velocity…. Or something like that anyway… Doesn’t matter, the result was that we thumped pretty hard upon landing and, as we discovered when we reached Moonta, upset a few of the vans contents. Marg opened the van door when we got to Moonta, immediately shut it again saying “I don’t think I want to go in there…” The brave amongst us (me, Jim) fronted up, took one look and promptly shut the door in complete agreement with my astute wife! The first thing one noticed was that the microwave platter had ejected itself at high velocity from the microwave, bursting the m/wave door open and shattered its-self all over the floor. There were small to large glass slivers and pieces from one end of the van to the other and on all nearby flat surfaces. The mess was duly cleared up with only a small amount of bloodshed…. then the fridge was opened… All the shelves within the fridge had collapsed, combining food in a most interesting manner, along with the egg rack that had detached from the frig door, allowing the eggs to enter-the-fray so to speak. Only one egg remained unbroken, but as something good comes from any event – at least we had egg-bread (French toast) for brecky next day, much to Maddies delight! Once again, the mess was cleaned up… Time for a cuppa and a bit of relaxation – opened the appropriate cupboard – oops… contents came to greet us… more mess. It was decided to go carefully from one cupboard to the next to get it all over and done in one hit (bad choice of words – particularly for anyone sitting below an overhead.). Now, the coffee… “do you want it in the broken cup, the one without the handle, or one of the chipped ones?” Ha Ha… very funny… NOT! They were all in perfect condition when we left home. Ahh well… it could have been a lot worse!

We were informed that ‘seaweed worms’ made good bait for the local fish… seemed to make sense to me so I spent a very pleasant hour rooting through the seaweed decaying on the beach gathering worms. Got plenty too! Only problem was… no-one seems to have told the news to the fish. I couldn’t even loose my bait when I snagged it on weed, let alone give it to a fish. Tried luring a toady or two just to ease the boredom and even they turned their collective noses up at it. The ladies on the pier behind me had got just a bit lucky with pipi’s so I tried some of theirs… again couldn’t loose them. Not one to admit defeat, we headed off the next day to Kadina for some squid jags. Being a Saturday, couldn’t find anything open so continued back to the coast at Wallaroo and got a few…. Lures that is.

Although it was the middle of the day, there were heaps of people fishing off the Wallaroo wharf and a grain ship by the name of Eboni was loading barley at the wharf. Never one to be backward in putting myself forward (bet THAT surprises a few of you…) I chatted a security guard who was busy stealing grain to take home to his stock – shovelling it into a bag from the wharf. He told me the crew on the ship were friendly and he didn’t care if I went through and climbed onto the ship. A few of the crew on an upper deck had already waved to us as we went passed (Marg assured me it was the two ‘blonde haired girls’ they were waving at… I thought it was me!). I climbed the gang plank and walked the deck aft (oooh I love those nautical words…) and climbed some more where I was promptly stopped by some crew. I popped the question and was told I’d have to ask an officer. An officer was duly found and I was informed I’d have to ask the First Officer. Escorted to the correct person somewhere deep within the bowels of the boat, oops, ship – sorry, I was given the OK for us all to have a look through. Marg, Jess and Maddie were eventually hailed from the far end of the wharf and our tour commenced. We were taken all over the ship. Up to the bridge where the purpose of all equipment was explained and a great view could be had of the loading process. We were unable to go near where they were loading, as even the crew are banned, due to the danger involved. Maddie asked what would happen if you slipped in to the now full hold and the reply was short and to the point “You’d die”. They had now finished loading the barley and we watched the on-board crane with a large bucket/scoop move the grain around the hold to ‘trim’ it. Next, down to their swimming pool (salt of course) and a look at the lifeboat. The lifeboat is a fully enclosed fibreglass affair with petrol motor and holds a maximum of 26, as there was only 22 crew, I felt quite safe…. though I really think it would be the ride of your life (in both senses) if you needed to use it. Once everyone is in their allotted seat (so they know who’s missing – that sounds Irish, but I think you’ll know what I mean), the captain (no – he doesn’t go down with the ship – just ‘transfers control’ to the lifeboat) releases the pins and the lifeboat plunges 7 stories, nose first into the sea! Apparently it submerges a few metres and then bobs up like a cork. It would be one hell of a fall and make some of the Gold-Coast rides seem pretty tame!

We were shown the crews quarters, the laundry, their sauna and then the engine room. Their auxiliary power plants, electrical control room, fresh water generator, oil centrifuges… the list goes on. The steering room was interesting, with a huge hydraulic motor mounted directly onto the rudder shaft. We stood, one floor below the top of the main engine, and could look down through another five floors ALMOST to the bottom of the engine! Finally, we were taken back up to the crews mess for drinks. The captain came down to meet us, followed by the 1st officer again, the chief engineer had already rushed down the stairs in the engine room to check we had seen everything we wanted.

THEY wanted photos with us! The crew were all Philipino, the captain and 1st officer were Croatian. Obviously we were a novelty to the crew, just as it was all so interesting to us. The worst thing about it all was that I hadn’t taken the camera that day…. Nevertheless, we had a really interesting time and a great tour.

As we returned along the wharf to the car, a couple of dolphins entertained us for quite a while with their play.

Moonta bay was also an opportunity for the girls to catch up a bit on some of their schoolwork. Jess had to interview one of her teachers and Maddie needed to do heaps of writing. We are finding the schoolwork aspect a bit of a trial as we seem to be either travelling or sight-seeing (or fishing, or swimming or eating…)

Later that evening, while we were all sitting almost at the waters edge at Moonta bay, under the awning, eating our dinner, surrounded by seagulls and looking out over the sea, we heard a noise none of us had ever head before – a seagull farted!!! It was a loud, ½ second affair that had us almost falling from our chairs. I guess what amazed me most was that the gull responsible looked at me with a look that seemed to say “What? What’s your problem?” and didn’t even blush!

1800’s at about 6:00pm for dinner, but it was too hot for anyone to feel hungry so we walked the ruins and cemetery for an hour and headed off again.

Wilpena itself is a great place, particularly if you like ants! I don’t think I have ever seen so many per square centimetre, and standing still for more than 30 seconds guaranteed some would be crawling over your feet. The following day we went for a drive through some of the Pound’s tracks and scenery. Neither my words nor photo’s can do it justice. The scale and the harshness of the terrain needs to be experienced, suffice to say that in its own way, it is beautiful. A top temperature of 37C was quite bearable and we had a picnic lunch with a magnificent view.

Picnic - with the mountains in the background.

One of the things I guess I was (selfishly) disappointed with, is how green it was. I had expected it to be dry, red and dusty. They had four days of rain (at the time I was catching some for our drinking water tank). The sides of the road and everywhere around the camp had a blanket of green. The ranger told us that even while it was raining, you could see the green growing. By the time we got there, tho’ the surface was already dry again and it meant there was some water in the gorges. There was plenty of evidence of the amount of water that had recently flowed and we would not have got to Wilpena along the bitumen a few days earlier as the road had been covered by fast flowing streams in numerous places.

(Tourists - Wilpena Pound We weren’t the only tourists… these roos passed close by)

Dinner that night was compliments of a tour group of Dutchies with an Aussie driver. Lasagne and salad saved us having to work too hard and we kicked back and enjoyed the evening. I had the laptop out, downloading the GPS data (it shows every detail of where we’ve been and camped) and the group of dutchies were around me like mossies.

Next morning the bus driver made numerous phone calls, all with the same result. The Oodanadatta Track was closed and we could not follow our intended route, to Marree, William Creek and then to Coober Pedy. There was no option other than to retrace our path back down to Port Augusta.

Port Augusta – the less said the better I think. Suffice to say that the caravan parks have 8 foot fences with four feet of double barbed wire on top. When I went shopping on Thursday morning for some more groceries, of the 200 or so people I saw, 150 were of the ‘pigment enhanced’ variety queuing outside the ATM and the bottle shop. 9:30am already had plenty of drunks with a small fight in the middle of the road. One highlight(?) was the entire compliment of Australian Army tanks (about 6) passing along the highway in convoy – more on that later…

The trip up to Coober Pedy was long and hot, and again the amount of grass along the roadside was amazing. That is more than the caravan park can claim tho’… they don’t even make any pretence towards grass.

It doesn’t surprise me that Coober Pedy is called a ‘Frontier Town’. There must be quite a few characters here, going by the junk that some of them use to adorn their underground houses. The golf course rates in the top ten of the worlds most unusual, but the clubhouse has been blown up. Apparently it’s a common occurrence around here for things to be blown up with either Gelli or Nitro. Two cop cars went not long ago after their city cop drivers arrived and started booking the locals for everything from bald tyres to seat belt offences – needless to say they got heaps in a short time… and had to go…

We met Crocodile Harry, a dirty old man who is permanently drunk but who has done massive excavations in his mine over the last 20 or so years. We looked through both the mine and his living area which is entirely painted with either art work or signatures. Part of his diggings were used in the film Beyond Thunderdome. He even gets a mention in the Lonely Planet book. We ‘noodled’ in a dump and found a few pieces of opal with faint colours – not enough to make us rich. We even went into an underground church. I always say that if I go to church, there’s a risk the roof will fall in – well, in this instance, I was truly concerned!

(Underground Church)

Went out to the ‘Breakaways’, an area near where many films have been made including Priscila Queen of the Desert and the Mad Max movies. There is to be a fourth Mad Max movie later this year – Mal Gibson was offered $25mill… apparently he deliberated but has now accepted!

When we arrived at the caravan park, only a small area was available as the army had ‘secured’ the rest. Their heightened state of alert meant no-one was allowed camp near them. Apparently when the tanks had passed through the day earlier, they had been two inches too high to pass under the entrance gate. The manager’s daughter suggested they let some air out of the tyres, but the officer didn’t like her suggestion and said they’d park out the front, off the road. She advised against that due to all the recent rain (rained for four days here too) but he knew best. About an hour later he fronted up, covered in mud up to his waist and agreed they’d now let the tyres

down and camp in the park. Ahh well… maybe it was part of their training exercise?

This morning (Monday 3/3/03) we toured the Olympic Dam mining site at Roxby Downs. 75% of the mined ore is copper, 20% is Uranium and the remaining 5% is Gold and silver. About 300Kg of gold is produced a year as a BYPRODUCT of their other mining…. Poor sods… It is a massive exercise, with over 270km of tunnel below ground and a workforce of about 1500 plus 600 contractors. 12 hour shifts and lots of money… sounds vaguely familiar…. But not too attractive!

OK, That’s about it for now,

Love to all, from

Marg, Maddie, Jess and Jim