Port Augusta and Quorn
From Roxby Downs we headed south to Port Augusta. The
LandCruiser needed a service and there wasn’t a Toyota service centre in Roxby.
As we had finished on the dirt, we also washed the car and van.
We have always wanted to go on the Pichi Richi Railway
from Quorn and whenever we've been in the Flinders it hasn’t lined up as it
doesn’t run that often, weekends only and not all. As it was going on the last
Sunday ride we took the opportunity to go to Quorn and have a ride on this old
famous train. It’s actually on part of the original Ghan railway line from Port
Augusta to Alice Springs.
We were wondering where to go from here on the way home. We
were looking at country Victoria but the weather was really cold, Bendigo was
having -1⁰ at night and we had sent all our winter clothes home, so this didn’t
sound exciting to us.
So where do we go? What a problem for us. We have to be
home by mid-November.
Strzelecki Track
With all options considered, we decided to almost do a
U-turn at Port Augusta and we headed north up the Strzelecki Track, yes yet
another famous dirt track, with a nice clean car and van.
We've done the Strzelecki Track once before with our kids,
it runs into Innamincka, which is on the border of South Australia and
Queensland. It was quite a deja vu as last time we didn’t plan on doing it as
well, it was a snap decision between Jayne and I and it was when the kids
reckoned we had E.S.P. as seemingly to them we make this decision without
discussion.
This track has artesian bores along it, when water just
flows relentlessly from the earth in the middle of the desert. There's the ever
present mining for oil and gas around these parts, many tracks lead off to mine
sites, and some aren’t even monitored. Just sitting there in the desert pumping
away.
Innamincka was good, as always. But there certainly were a
lot of flies. Jayne has particular problems with them getting into her ears. She
freaks out.
.
When in Innamincka we headed off to Coongie Lakes where we
were told we might not be able to get our van over the dunes into the camping
area, so the advice from the local Trading Post was to leave the van 20kms short
of the lakes, unhitch and drive in the rest to evaluate. Very sensible advice
which we normally wouldn’t follow, but this time we did, unhitching the van
20kms short of the lake. The drive in was very easy, and we would have been OK
with the van.
There are two camping areas at Coongie Lakes, one on the
Cooper’s Creek and another on the lake, only some meters apart. However to
access the lake areas you have to cross a sand dune. We definitely wouldn’t have
got the van back over this dune. I’m confident we would have got it over this
across, but the track back over the dune was soft, deep and had a curve in it
and there wasn’t a place to get a fast enough run up nor where you could have
held enough speed around the curve to make it over. At 3.5tonnes the van just
makes the car sink in soft sand, esp. up a hill. Its fine over a small hill, but
when it becomes steep you need brute force to drag it over.
However the camping at the Cooper’s Creek where it flows
into Coongie Lakes was OK. But once we got the 20kms back to the van it just
wasn’t worth dragging it back out there, so we headed back to Innamincka.
This turned out to be a good thing, as we headed out to
Cullyamurra Waterhole, which is also on the Cooper’s Creek and was the best
camping we had seen on the Cooper.
Tonight we’re east of Thargomindah camped alongside a dry
lake, and it’s quite warm. We’re headed towards the Gold Coast before going
home.
Our trip so far.
.
