The storms had done a very good job in making life pretty hard and miserable for the poor people of Northern South Australia. I know a lot of people in Adelaide complained that they went for a whole evening without power, but as it turned out some of these small country towns were without power from Wednesday to Sunday. It meant it was really hard for us to find a petrol station to fill up, let alone buying any fresh food. Luckily we were pretty prepared and got through it fine.
We stayed a night in Leigh Creek Caravan park which looked to me like nothing more than a gravely carpark with a toilet building. There was still no power there, which meant we couldn’t have a hot shower, watch the footy grand final, or do our washing like we had really been wanting to. With the weather starting to get warmer Leigh creek was really very un-appealing. Nothing was open, due to the power outage and there were locusts everywhere. The one activity we did manage to find was to metal detect in a playground where we found a grand total of $4 in various rusty looking coins. Great success!!
I wanted to get as far away from Leigh Creek as possible, as it hadn’t really been the most enjoyable experience, but Jamie was cautious of the fact that we weren’t able to get petrol at many places. I thanked our lucky stars that we had a Satellite phone on us as well, as there had been no phone or internet reception, so we relied a lot on Jamie’s parents calling to let us know weather reports etc.
We decided to do the Oodnadatta track, which is basically a dirt road that runs from Maree to Oodnadatta. Little did we know it would be so rough and torn up from the previous weeks wet weather. We were going along fine in the dry and dusty landscape when after a couple of hours Jamie noticed the trailer was towing at a funny angle. He got out and realized the trailer brakes had seized on and they were boiling hot. Not great news, but we were able to jack the car up on this dirt track in the middle of the desert and take the brakes off completely, leaving the wheels to free spin again. Crisis averted, or so we thought. Another hundred metres down the track it was still towing at a funny angle so we got out again and I noticed that on one side the trailer mud guard was touching on the tire. This, it turned out, was because we had snapped the welding on the leaf spring locator. Now we knew it was pretty serious. We were in the middle of nowhere and needed a welder to be able to fix the problem. Luckily we were about 25km from a campsite called Coward Springs, so we were able to hobble the trailer into camp going about 30km/hr. What we arrived to was a beautiful little oasis in the middle of the dry, arid desert. Coward Springs is an old bore hole that they weren’t able to cap, resulting in a water hole as well as some nice trees and vegetation. They were very well set up and they even had a hot shower that you had to light a fire to get the hot water. We decided to camp the night and work out our next move in the morning, as unfortunately the manager of the camp didn’t have a welder. Luckily we had our Sat phone again as there was of course no other phone reception and we were about 200km from any major town. We called Jamie’s dad Dennis who suggested the RAA, which wasn’t something we had thought of, being so remote. Dennis organised a free tow to Roxby Downs for the trailer while we followed behind the next day. The next day the tow truck came and we followed behind on another bumpy dirt track to Roxby Downs. On the way a huge rock was flicked up from a passing caravan and put a big chip in the windscreen as well. We certainly weren’t feeling all that lucky. However it all worked out in the end as we had our trailer fixed that day and decided to stay a while in Roxby Downs Caravan park, where they had power, showers and even an air-conditioned TV room and kitchen. This was the ultimate luxury to us at this stage. Jamie was even able to get some work with Coates Hire to help us pay for the repairs to the trailer. The weather is also starting to really heat up and is forecast for 41 degrees on Sunday. Roxby Downs happens to be a really nice town, with friendly people, a library, rec centre, swimming pool, cinema and even a woolworths.
On our first day in town, while Jamie was trying to organize some work, we went opal hunting in a town called Andamooka. It is a very interesting town that looks nothing more, than small-outdated houses amongst huge piles of red dirt. We walked around town and found out that everybody is able to go “noodling” for opals in the dirt/rock piles around town, and much to our surprise we actually found ourselves quite a lot of small opal inside the rocks we were breaking up.
