Oodnadatta Track - Three

Although we had been noticing slightly longer days and warmer nights, we still woke to ice on the BT (although it was all gone by the time we started driving).

The highlight today was a detour to Peake ruins. After debating whether the H.S. that appears on many roadsigns out here stands for Historic Site or Homestead, the argument was settled after an 18km detour to Peake Homestead by mistake (oops). A bit further up the road, we found the right turnoff (which ended up being very clearly signposted). The Pink Roadhouse mudmap (which we had printed off their webpage and which has all the interesting sights along the way listed on it)(and which we found very useful) described this as an “entertaining 15km drive”. I’m not sure that “entertaining” is necessarily the word I would use – maybe narrow, corrugated, rutted, washed out, rocky??? Despite all this, we still passed someone towing a caravan in on our way out (!). The ruins themselves were well worth the drive. There was once quite a substantial village there based around a telegraph station and then a copper mine. Most of the buildings are still there (although the majority were just walls in various stages of falling down)(don’t sneeze) as well as quite a substantial series of walled terraces where the mine and smelter used to be. All of it was well sign-posted, with a lot of interesting information about the history of the place. After a pleasant lunch, we battled our way back out to the track (still can’t believe someone was towing a caravan in!).

We had another interesting stop at Algebuckina Bridge – an old Ghan railway bridge and apparently the longest in SA. The majority of the span was fenced off, but you could walk out onto the bridge for about 20m and admire the iron-work up close and personal. It all made for some (hopefully) very nice photographs.

We continued north to Oodnadatta and the famous pink roadhouse. There were literally hordes of travelers there and we only really stopped long enough to refuel, take some photos and enjoy (?) the use of their flushing toilets.

We had heard that the track north of Oodnadatta was the worst part of the trip (in terms of road condition) and were wondering what we would find. Turns out that about 70km of it from Oodnadatta had all been recently graded (in fact, we passed the grader the next day), so it was all (surprisingly) smooth sailing. In hindsight, the worst section of track was probably between William Creek and Oodnadatta (lots of corrugations, but still allowing speeds of mostly 75-80km/hr). We hunted out our last campsite – this time next to a creek that actually contained water and enjoyed the most spectacular show of stars we had seen so far on our trip.