Monday, May 5, 2014

Coober Pedy

Monday 5th May.
Today we moved on a further 320 km's to Coober Pedy. The road conditions along the Stuart Hwy are first class. Although there are a fair number of massive road trains who are all travelling at least 20 km's an hour faster than us, there are no problems or concerns with them passing.
Something we have noted is the lack of wild life even though the landscape has apparently had a recent watering as patches of new green grass seem to be popping up along the way.
The terrain is quite varied along this most isolated road, patches of wide open (no fences) spaces with barely a tree over the entire area as far as the eye can see. Then for no apparent reason everything changes to dense scrubland with stunted saltbush covering the entire area.
Hills simply do not exist during our travel over the last three days or so. I am able to leave the Iveco in 6th gear and we cruise along quite comfortably at 85-90 km/h. This speed certainly helps the economy of diesel usage as since leaving home a fortnight ago and covering 3,000 km in that time we had averaged 12.9 litres per 100 km. Not bad for a mobile block of flats !

Today has been quite overcast but no sign of any rain. We arrived in Coober Pedy around 2:00pm, drove along the Main Street (are there any others ?) then booked into the Opal Inn Caravan Park in the centre of town. YES, we have actually checked into a caravan park with 240v power etc.
I think Gail has earned a meal out, so we will take ourselves off to a nice Chinese restaurant as they seem to be the main eatery places here.

Nothing much seems to have changed since we were here in Central Australia with Colin about 22+ years ago. The mullock heaps look even bigger and more widespread. The streets are still straight out of a John Wayne movie of the 50's and the indigenous population seems to represent about 95% of the total.

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