Matt Down Under

I woke up to the calls of a swarm of Galahs flying across the campsite, beautiful birds, and they fly so fast it’s impressive. It was a very cold night, even inside the camper van. Fortunately it came with an additional blanket.

We tried to get up early and visit a car mechanic before leaving Port Augusta, the cigarette lighter in our car seemed broken. Not that I am smoking, but I wanted to plug in a power inverter so I could plug in my MacBook when I’m not driving. But somehow it didn’t work. Unfortunately we would have had to wait several hours at the service station, and we didn’t have that much time, so we left without a working cigarette lighter.

The landscape was incredibly fascinating. Long straight roads, sometimes you can’t even see the end. Red soil and lots of green bushes and grass, an amazing contrast.

We stopped several times to take photos of landscape or funny road signs.

While I was driving I saw several dead cows and sheep at the side of the road. A lot can break when your car hits a wallaby or kangaroo, but when you’re hitting a cow, it’s probably time to buy a new car.

Around lunch time we stopped at a roadhouse. The menus are really quite simple. Basically you can choose between fried food or meat products. From a culinary point of view you’re literally in the desert when driving to the centre of Australia. My steak burger came with three layers of bacon (on top of the steak of course).

A couple of times I saw huge eagles sitting next to the road, but I was driving too fast to quickly pull over at the side of the road and run back to take a photo. They probably would have gone by then.

In Coober Pedy we first looked for a car mechanic again, but the hourly rate he asked for didn’t impress us, so we postponed the decision until the following morning.

There are several caravan parks in town, but none of them came even close to the great one in Port Augusta. We chose the one with nice palm trees at the entrance, but sadly we got fooled and it turned out that the actual caravan site was pretty disappointing. No palm trees at all, instead some pretty bad smell from brackish water holes around the compound.

Once we parked the car we walked back into town to take a look at some opal mines and also see some locals — while driving through we saw a lot of Aborigines and they all seemed to stick to themselves and talked in their own language.

We walked through a free underground opal museum and then got to witness a spectacular sunset. What I also got to witness were the most aggressive mosquitoes I ever found in Australia.