Ranger Ged and Rachel meet the Minister

On Thursday 27 November, Ranger Ged (check out his clothing - never let a man go off shopping by himself) and I were invited to the South Australian Parliament House and met with the Hon Jay Weatherill, Environment Minister of South Australia and Hon Jack Snelling, Speaker Parliament of South Australia.

We spent time explaining to the Minister and Speaker of our adventure. We pointed out that using waste cooking oil to power our vehicle significantly reduces our emissions, particularly our carbon footprint. The use of WVO is actually recycling what is generally a waste product and as we have shown, any one could do it, especially Australians or overseas tourists.

The Minister was able to tell us that South Australia ("SA") has the best record of recycling water in Australia, was the first state of Australia to legislate permissible carbon emission levels and has reduced its carbon emissions by 7% in the last 5 year reporting period. Well done SA in leading Australia in many ways to significantly reducing our carbon footprint, keep up the good work!

We would like to express our gratitude to the Minister and the Speaker for giving us their time.

The photo is of, from left to right: Hon Jack Snelling, Rachel, Gerard the Ranger and the Hon Jay Weatherill.

Days 185 - 196

We left Coober Pedy after collecting 120L of waste cooking oil (“WVO”) and headed for the outback. We took a 4WD track to Oodnadatta (known locally as the mail run), stopping off at the stunning Breakaways and Painted Desert (where Mad Max and Priscilla Queen of the Desert were filmed). After stopping for a chat to the owner at the Oodnadatta Pink Roadhouse, we followed the Oodnadatta Track to Marree (a total of about 600kms). The track conditions were relatively good considering the amount of rain we had encountered. We took our time and stopped off at small places along the way, including a thermal spa at Coward Springs, which was extremely refreshing in the 40 degree heat. It was a great feeling to be back in the outback again – the remoteness, wide open spaces, red sandhills glowing in the evening light, whistling kites and the deadly silence of the star lit night. Throughout our journey to Marree (which took us 3 days), we saw two other cars. Because of the remoteness, we would pull off the track and camp on the side of the road each night. Our only companions were kites sauntering over and the odd kangaroo. Each evening, we would set up our chairs to watch the outback sky change colours after the sunset. It never disappointed. Ah, life was good again!

We had a slight shock when we came to Marree and encountered traffic (ok, it was only four cars and a truck but still). We checked into a caravan park for a hot shower and to fill up on water and met two other campers; Darryl, who was travelling the outback tracks for a month; and Nick, Cath and family from Sydney, who were travelling for 3 months around SA and WA, not in your typical Troopie like us, but in a Merc (although they have been living in Sydney for 13 years, they are originally from Manchester, UK and are Man United football (“soccer” to you Aussies) supporters so this explained some things!) We chatted to Darryl and he informed us that he had wanted to come to Marree for some time to see Tom Cruise. I nearly choked on my ginger beer when he told me that Tom Cruise was here in little ol’ Marree. He asked Gerard if he knew who Tom was and Gerard said of course, the movie star. Darryl looked a little puzzled and said no, he was the postman for the area between the towns of Birdsville and Marree. We had obviously not done our Marree research. We went back to our camper and Nick and Cath came over for some beers. We had a great night with them and felt slightly better that they did not know who Tom “the postman” Kruze was either.

From Marree, we travelled South through the Gammon Ranges. We thought we had seen all of the landscape that there was to see in Australia until we reached this area. We were amazed by the mountainous scenery and winding tracks we encountered. We were stopped on the road by herds of feral goats and yellow tailed wallabies. It was absolutely stunning. Once again, we did not meet any traffic on the tracks until we reached further South in the Flinders Ranges and enjoyed some remote camping.

Once we left the Flinders Ranges, we hit the tarmac and said goodbye to the remote camping and never ending sky of the outback. We were a little sad as that would be the last proper 4WDriving we do on our adventure. To console ourselves, we headed to the wine region of Clare Valley for some wine tasting. We were told of two wineries that we must visit whilst in the region. We decided to hire some bikes and cycle along the Riesling Trail to these wineries. To take in the wineries, it would be a 55km round trip. The trail was described as “gently sloping” and we thought that this would be no problem for two fine young things such as ourselves. The way there was fantastic. We cycled through vineyards, green rolling hills and saw some beautiful stone chateaus. We got to our first winery, caught our breathe (and in Gerard’s case, wiped the sweat from his face) and went inside to start tasting. We walked inside and heard a couple talking with the wine attendant about the wine being “seriously good” and the “raspberry flavours of the wine coming through”. Oh dear, I feared that my knowledge on wine, or rather lack of knowledge, would be shown up. It probably didn’t help either that in the past 6 months, I had only drunk casked wine – best not to tell that to anyone at the winery. It is amazing how you suddenly become really interested in wine when you are at one of these places. I found myself asking about how the wine was stored, its best year to be drunk, the temperature of the wine etc. I thought I had successfully blagged my way through the wine tasting when the ultimate test was put in front of me – an $85 bottle of wine and an $18 one. Yeap, I choose the $18 one as being “far superior.” Nil points for Rachel.

After indulging in far too much food at a local cafe, it was time to get back on our bikes for the journey home. On the return journey, everything started to feel a bit more strenuous. With about 10kms left, the seat just got far too painful and I had to hover gingerly over it. The “gentle slopes” that we had encountered on the way there were certainly not “gentle” on the way back and the combination of eating too much and wine tasting started to take their toll. We did not have fun on the way back and were very grateful to see our campsite after riding for 55kms.

We learnt our lesson in Clare and decided to take the car around the wineries of the Barossa Valley. We were due to head to the Fleurieu Peninsula afterwards but were told that “schoolies week” was happening and to give the area a wide berth. On advice from a local, we headed to the Yorke Peninsula instead and enjoyed some scenic camping and walking in Innes National Park.

We are heading to Adelaide tomorrow where we are restocking on food and catching up with Noel and Shelia, whom we met at Exmouth in WA. We would usually be restocking on WVO but we hit the WVO Jackpot at Wilpena Pound Resort in the Flinders Ranges. One of the workers drove us around to where they stored the waste veggie oil and we could not believe our eyes. There was close to 600 litres of waste cooking oil sitting in 20L drums. We could not take all of it but spent the morning filtering the oil and filled up our tank and all of our storage. It was the biggest collection we had encountered on our trip so far.

I have included some photos of the Painted Desert, the outback sky after sunset, Gerard and I enjoying a thermal spa we came across in the middle of the outback, the scenery in Gammon Ranges NP, some feral goats climbing the mountains in Gammon Ranges NP, cycling through the vineyards at Clare Valley in happy times on the way, a Kangaroo with a Joey in its pouch and an emu and its children we saw at Innes National Park and the beach we camped by at Innes National Park.

Hope everyone is well and as always, thank you for your emails and comments we have received.

Rachel and Gerard.

Days 170 - 184

Rain, rain and more rain. This summed up our time in Esperance, which is a shame as the scenery was stunning. The 4WD tracks that we wanted to take were all closed due to the rain and we decided to move on and start our crossing of the Nullabor Plain.

Many Australians that we had spoken to on our trip were really looking forward to their crossing of the Nullabor. They told me that you are not a true Aussie unless you have crossed it at least one. However, I hope that when they came to do their crossing, they could see out of their windscreens better than we could. The rain pelted down and we were pretty miserable. To top it all off, due to the weather, we could not filter all of the oil that we had collected for the crossing and kept on having to stop at roadhouses and asking if we could use their undercover forecourt for some filtering of the oil. While Gerard got stuck into filtering the oil, I mingled with the truckies and got stuck into some pies and toasted sandwiches. Each time Gerard had filtered 20 litres, we set off on our next 100 kms before we had to stop again and filter more oil.

It took us five days to cross and we passed through three different time zones – WA time, Central WA time (45 minutes ahead of WA time) and SA time (1.5 hours ahead of WA time.) It all got pretty confusing.

We passed signs that warned us of kangaroos, camels and wombats on the road. Unfortunately, our first sighting of a wombat was of the squashed variety on the side of the road. We also saw tons of skippies who had suffered a similar fate.

The road was always busy with both travellers and road trains. We had a “small” run in with a 3 carriaged road train (about 40 metres long). I told the driver on the two radio that I will slow down if he wanted to overtake me. I did not get a response and pulled off the road slightly for him to pass me. Over the two way radio, I heard a very angry driver saying “Fing 4WDrivers. How would you like it.” Not knowing what he meant, he overtook me and deliberately went over to the hard shoulder and flicked stones up at the car. I heard him saying “So, how did you like that, you punk. How Fing wide do you think you are.” I then realised that I had accidentally thrown stones up at him when I pulled over for him to pass. I apologised to him over the radio and told him I was having a fat day. Another lesson learnt.

Not long after we had crossed into SA, the sun started to shine. We drove into Ceduna, where the quarantine station was and were greeted with a cheery sign: “Welcome to Ceduna. Drowsy drivers die.” We stopped for a couple of days in a sleepy little beachside town called Streaky Bay on the Eyre Peninsula to recharge our batteries and restock on food. That whole peninsula is stunning, with golden hay fields backing onto sand dunes leading into the ocean. We did some cliff top drives around the peninsula and stopped off to see a sea lion colony. I had never seen sea lions before and it was great fun watching them play and swim in the ocean.

Further down the peninsula, we stopped off at a lookout and saw some surfers making their way down a rocky track on the cliff with their surfboards over their shoulders. We thought they must have been crazy to surf this area as the sea lion colony was not far away and is known for having great whites (or white pointers as they call them here) present in the waters. We sat down and watched the surfers, who managed to get some great waves. Whilst I was taking pictures, Gerard saw a single fin appear not far from where the surfers were. We looked around to see if we could see any more fins or jumping from the water as this would mean it is a dolphin. We could not see any of this and thought we were about to witness a horrible attack on the poor surfers. Gerard started to yell at the surfers about the fin he had seen but they could not hear us. All of a sudden, we saw about seven more fins appear and realised that there was nothing to worry about – it was just a pod of dolphins. Phew! We watched as the dolphins went right up to the surfers and started to surf the waves along side them. One or two dolphins would jump through the wave just as it was about to break. It was fantastic to see. The surfers eventually had enough and climbed back up the cliff. We asked them what they thought when they saw the fin. They replied that they had seen the fin and were extremely relieved when it made a beeline for them that it was only a dolphin.

From Eyre Peninsula, we made our way up to Port Augusta. Before we got to Port Augusta, we once again made the mistake of camping too close to the road in a roadside rest area and had the worst night’s sleep of our trip. It went a little something like this: we pulled into a free rest stop area at about 5pm. It was a nice spot, right by the beach, but was quite full and a huge thunderstorm had just started in the area so we decided to move on. The next road side rest area that was described as being not next to a road was another 200 kms on so we made our way to this. We arrived at 9pm in the pitch black and with the rain pelting down. We set up the camper trailer but the ground was rock hard so we could not put any tent pegs into the ground to secure the tent. We got into the trailer and all we could hear were road trains, one after the other. They did not stop all night. The wind picked up and before long, both Gerard and I had to get out of bed to stand on either side of the trailer to stop the tent from blowing inside out. As we got back into bed to try and get some sleep, the tent did blow inside out, twice, which involved us getting up each time to stand in the corners until the gusts died back down again. A huge thunderstorm broke out and the thunder was clapping right above our trailer, making the trailer rock. A road train then decided to come and stop right next to us to take off one of his trailers. He then drove away, only to be replaced about 30 minutes later with another road train picking up the trailer. The road train driver decided to play us some loud music, which was nice of him. When first light broke, we got out of the trailer, assessed where we were (we were literally 5 metres from the roadside) and got the hell out of there!

We headed inland from Port Augusta to Coober Pedy and the landscape quickly changed. We left the beautiful, lush, green grass and coast behind and came to low scrubland. The whole area looked extremely dry and there were eagles everywhere devouring their road kill. We stopped and watched one feeding frenzy of eagles and could not believe that they did not fly off as we drove slowly passed them. Times must be hard for them around here.

We are now in Coober Pedy, which is an opal mining town, and you will be pleased to hear we are back to the weather we enjoy, bright sunshine. It is an extremely strange but fascinating town. The weather gets so hot here that most of the locals live in underground houses called “dugouts”. We visited some of the “dugouts” and an underground church and hotel. There is absolutely no grass in the town and water is strictly limited. From here, we are heading Northwards to visit some sites where Mad Max and Priscilla Queen of the Desert were filmed. We are then going to the Gammon Ranges and Flinders Ranges before heading to Adelaide at the end of the month.

I have included some photos of the stormy but beautiful sea at Esperance, our crossing of the Nullabor, some sea lions we saw, the surfers with dolphins beside them, an outback sign warning of the flies, an eagle in mid flight, a picture of Coober Pedy from the local scenic spot “The Big Winch” and St. Peter and St. Paul's underground Catholic church.

Hope everyone is well and as always, thanks for all your emails and comments.

Rachel and Gerard x