2008-10-14 Coober Pedy Tallaringa CP
In the morning the service of the Troopy was finished. After that I bought food and fuel for the Anne Beadell HWY journey, filled up with water, updated my weblog and finally got underway in the early afternoon.
This first section brought me across a station into Tallaringa Conservation Park. Near Cooper Pedy there is rocky desert, very flat, no vegetation and heaps of light colored soil all over the place as proof that mining has been done. Then the scenery changed into the red dry mud plane with low vegetation and mulga trees. This is a cattle station. The west boundary of the cattle station is a dog fence, one of those miracles in Australia: a fence of thousands of kilometers long to keep dingos from migration and in early days probably rabbits.
After crossing the fence I entered the Woomera area. The terrain there is either red mud with mulga trees or low sand hills. The sand is red, but not as dark as further north.
I made camp at a nice sitre in the sand hills in Tallaringa Conservation Reserve.
2008-10-15 Tallaringa CP Anne’s Corner
I visited to sites where British atomic weapons have been tested. These sites are now marked with concrete obelisks and lots of signs that there may be radioactive remains. These weapons must have been small. There is no crater and the soils looks undisturbed.
I made camp in the sand hills by the side of the track, still in the Woomera Area.
On the red mud sections the track is heavily corrugated, even worse than the Gunbarrel Highway. There is little corrugation when passing through sandy hills.
It was to my surprise a busy day: 6 vehicles in opposing direction, this was a tag along tour and after I had made camp a vehicle with two defence people, checking my permit and doing a reconnaissance for a military exercise in November, when Woomera will be closed to the public.
2008-10-16 Annes Corner Unnamed Conservation Park
This was a day in total solitude, no other travelers. The track is easy, no 4WD needed, except when I had to get out of my camp and my lunch stop by the side of the road. The scenery varies all the time. These is an awfull lot of vegetation in this most waterless area of Australia, as one of the road signs warns. I traveled mostly through sand hills. These are generally high but with very gentle slopes and run parallel to the track most of the time.
The weather remains great, not to hot during the day, comfortable and sometimes cold during the night. There are more flies then before, but so far not really annoying and certainly no need for fly nets.
IN the course of the day I left the Woomera Defence Area and entered the Unnamed Conservation Park, where I made camp some 50 km before the no-camp zone.
2008-10-17 Unnamed Conservation Park to Western Australia
The scenery continues to change between different types of vegetation, sometimes clearly depending on the type of soil, sometimes for no apparent reason at all. It was again mostly sandhills, high with gentle slopes and no need for 4WD. At places the desert was flowering although not so abundant as I had seen on the Gunbarrel Highway.
Just after crossing the border to Western Australia there is a rainwater tank, a modern affair with a roof the catch the water. There is even a pit toilet. I was amazed that there was plenty of water in the tank. Later I learned that three weeks earlier there had fallen some 20 mm of rain which also explains the flowering desert.
I made camp not far across the border. Here I met a German couple, Thomas and Lilli traveling in the opposite direction. They made camp at the same spot. They told me that they had started traveling the world seven years ago after they sold their company. This was their last visit (12 months!) to Australia. They would sell their vehicle, an old Landcruiser which had been used as an ambulance in its first life and after a short pause back home they would go to another continent.
Their original idea had been to travel around the world by car, but they found out that it costs a great deal of money to ship a car from continent to continent and that for most countries it is very cumbersome to get all the paperwork to be allowed to take the car into those countries. When they go someplace, they just buy a cheap vehicle and sell it again when they leave or just hang on to it when they want to return. At this moment they own three vehicles in three continents.
2008-10-18
I woke up to a cloudy morning no wind and a very comfortable temperature. This made me decide to take my time for breakfast, read a while in Len Beadell’s book about building Outback tracks and do some housekeeping in the Troopy. I came to talk again with Thomas and Lilli and in the end decided to move on to the next rainwater tank and camp together again, where we would have dinner together. After dinner they showed me the slide show of some of their travels in Africa. Thomas makes beautiful pictures, a great slide show with music and spoken comments.
2008-10-19
I took another easy day. I had another yarn with Thomas about photo equipment, traveling Australia and traveling Africa and then said goodbye to him and Lilli.
My first stop was Ilkurlka Roadhouse. This is a modern affair, not build so long ago. I asked the caretaker, Graham, why this place was build in the first place on such a remote location with not enough traffic to earn a living. He told me that this is all aboriginal land and the roadhouse is at the intersection of routes between indigenous communities. It serves as a communication and rescue center for this area and is remarkably well equipped with communication devices and medical stuff so that it can serve as an emergency station for the Flying Doctor Service. Graham told me that on the average each month there is an emergency, mostly caused by reckless driving.
We talked a bit more about the issues around supporting and integration of the aboriginal people. Before he retired he was a teacher, for a long time to aboriginal children. He said that for solving the problems, he good name a million ways that don’t work but sofar could not think of one that might work. At the same time he said that apparently both the (white) public and the government are becoming impatient with the progress of the communities to become self supporting in terms for money and there is an increase in efforts and pressure to educate the aboriginal people for jobs in modern society. This will inevitably lead to the situation where many aboriginal people will move to the centers where work is available and thus leave the communities in the deserts. Aboriginal art is an area which is doing well commercially at the moment but is a rather thin market segment to build an economy.
After this interesting yarn with Graham I took a shower at the roadhouse campground and moved on. I made camp at the site of a light aircraft wreck, some ten kilometers from the main track. This means traveling perpendicular on the direction of the dunes, there were a few interesting dune crossings. The wreck does not look to bad, the pilots must have come out alive. Not too much is left, many things have been taken away, either for research into the cause of the accident or as souvenir.
2008-10-20
An hour underway I saw oncoming traffic, a Troopy. The driver? Warren, who I met on the Canning Stock Route. We had sort of arranged to meet again on the Anne Beadell Higjway, he would give me a call on the satphone to make sure we would not miss each other. This he tried but he could not get through, so we both had given up. It was a nice surprise, we had a few cups of tea with cookies together and had a big Yarn about traveling, the weather, the absence of flies and what not. We said goodbye, I got underway and looking in my rearview mirror I saw him scramble out of his car and wave frantically at me, I could even hear him screaming. So I went back and he said he had a flat battery, in fact both his batteries were flat. He had a very worried face when he said that, Had I not looked back he might have been there for a few days. With the aid of my jumper leads we got is engine going in no time at all and he went off to the roadhouse to give it a serious check. Luckily he also carries a satphone.
We parted again, I had an uneventfull trip through the always different but never changing country and by the time I wanted to make camp I ran into two prospectors who we were out there for more than a fortnight. The older bloke was eager for a yarn, so I spend some time there but decided to make a solitairy camp further along the track.
At night I could see a thunderstorm far north, with lightning going on for two hours or so. It did not come nearer I never even heard the thunder.
2008-10-21
Only 100 km away from my camp to the west is Yeo homestead. It is no longer in use as homestead, the area around it is a nature reserve. The homestead is in good shape, there is a well and a hand pump, a rainwater tank for drinking water and a bucket shower. All in all it is a nice place and I stayed there the rest of the day, reading Len Beadell’s stories, organizing my photos and walking around a bit. It was my last camp on the Ann Beadell HWY crossing.
2008-10-22
I left early for the last section of the Ann Beadell Highway. After passing the ruins of another station, this one still operating, the track changed into a properly graded dirt road which brought be to Laverton, really the and of the crossing. I always have both a feeling of accomplishment as well as a feeling of regret when I finish such a long bush track.
In Laverton I did some minimal shopping, checked my e-mail and answered the important ones and then went on to Leonora, all bitumen road for a change. In Leonora I refueled and headed north to go back to Derby where I will stay a while. I made camp at Wiluna, where I had begun the Gunbarrel HWY crossing.
