Oodnadatta Track - Two

So – our first real day of Oodnadatta driving. The track was pretty good and we traveled along at 80-90km/hr for this section. It was surprising how much other traffic there was – all 4WD’s, most towing a camper trailer (although there were a few caravans) and everybody waving through the dust. Ryan happily identified the make and model of every vehicle we passed (we joked that if he was in charge of writing the blog the entries would be something along the lines of “this morning we passed four Landcruisers, two Nissan Patrols and a Prado”).

The Oodnadatta track (or the first part at least) follows the line of the old Ghan railway, so there was plenty of interesting history to look out for. The railbed itself was visible most of the time, with iron bridges over all the creekbeds, and ruined buildings where most of the sidings used to be. A lot of these had tracks leading to them and areas to park and have a look. One of these was Curdimurka siding, which had been partially restored and has some interesting signs about the history of the Ghan – again, well-worth a look. There were also the occasional roadside sculptures, including “Planehenge” and “Giant-water-tank-dog”.

Somewhere before Curdimurka, there was a roadside lookout over Lake Eyre South (much smaller in comparison to the main lake). It had quite a bit of water in it (and plenty of people stopping to take a look) – with blue water and blue sky blending at the horizon (lots more photos).

One especially interesting detour was to Mound Springs. These were only a couple of km’s off the road, but it was the roughest track we’d been on so far (giant corrugations). There were two main springs, both pumping out an impressive amount of (hot) water. Both were sitting on-top of giant mounds made up of years of accumulated salt and sediment, and the whole area was surrounded by a big salt-pan. Lucky they were worth the drive (rattle).

We stopped for lunch at Beresford Dam – just a big dam at one of the old railway sidings, but quite full and surrounded by trees. Would have been a nice spot to camp (there were signs of several other people having already done so)(which was typical of pretty much every roadside spot-of-interest).

Then we powered on up the track with the intention of making it out to Lake Eyre and back before sunset. This was a 60km (each way) detour which left the track not far out of William Creek. It was also very corrugated (poor BT) and pretty slow. I’m not sure if it was the lack of railway paraphernalia, but we both thought that the drive itself was kinda boring – a lot of it traveling through flat, fairly barren dirt (although trying to find the balance between driving fast enough to skip over the corrugations and yet not so fast as to careen off the road was in itself entertaining). The scenery did get more interesting the closer we got to the Lake – suddenly turning into a moonscape of black-rock hills (which then disappeared again once we reached the shore). The drive ended on a peninsula of land (Halligan Point) jutting out onto the lake and gave a pretty good view, although we were surprised to find seagulls (yes – seagulls) in the parking area. The Lake was full of water – which I guess is a very unique thing to see, but I also wish I had seen it dry (I think a giant salt-pan would have been more unique). We rattled our way back around to ABC bay (not nearly so good a view), then back to the track (big relief to get off the rough dirt onto the slightly-less-rough dirt).

We had another quick stop in William Creek to refuel, then pushed through to find a campsite for the night. We had decided that our best bet was to find creekbeds for our camps (would mean trees and firewood in an otherwise pretty treeless landscape) – but were wondering whether we should have stopped in William Creek when the fading light revealed nothing but expanses of rocks and scrubby grass. Finally we came across a (dry) creek and actually found a pretty good spot nestled in amongst the scrub along the bank. By now we had developed a pretty good routine for setting up camp – park the BT, select the optimum spot for tent and fire placement (re-park the BT several times until Ryan is happy there is no chance of embers getting on the paintwork), scrounge around for wood to burn (dead branches plus Ryan’s usual contribution of the biggest dried cowpat he can find in the vicinity), set up the tent and the cooking gear, light the fire, cook dinner and settle down to watch the stars emerge (which ARE AWESOME out in the middle of nowhere).