A Day on the Oodnadatta Track

Muloorina to William Creek
09Oct08

Today we drove a long section of the famous Oodnadatta track which follows the old abandoned train line and telegraph line that were historically very significant. Everyone used this particular route through the harsh desert because it follows a string of natural springs.

First stop was in the town of Marree to see some old train tracks and an engine.



Next up was the not-so-historical Sculpture Garden full of various sculptures cobbled together from random junk. This airplane sculpture was inhabited by cockatoos (who were not happy with us!)



My other favorite was this robot-like statue of a film maker :)



And here's Justin playing the gongs...



The land in this area is extremely arid, harsh and flat - very surreal. At one point we were driving along listening to my favorite Dead album - Live Dead - and I realized that the song "Feedback" is the perfect compliment for this bizarre landscape.

Later on we stopped at the Wabmu Mound Springs National Park to see, you guessed it, mound springs. These are salty hot springs bubbling up from the giant underground aquifer that have built up large hill-like mounds from all the minerals in the water. The springs are pretty but unfortunately inhabited by biting flies that quickly chased us back to the car! This was our first encounter with the friendly biting fly... as though the bush flies constantly dive-bombing into our eyes, nose and mouth weren't bad enough!



Our last stop for the day was a ghosttown called Strangeways (how could we pass up a place with a name like that?)It was a town built around one of the telegraph repeater stations.



The telegraph line across the center of Australia was so extremely important because it linked the populated area of SE Australia with the rest of the world via an underwater cable from Darwin to Indonesia. Strangeways was an interesting place with many half-crumbled buildings and some good information about the town's history, but again there were clouds of bush flies following us around so we could only stand it for so long before running back to the car.

That night we stayed at the holiday park at the William Creek roadhouse - the only settlement within at least a 100 mile radius. This is a proper outback roadhouse - a tin roofed rambling building with a bar/restaurant/gas station decorated with everything from rusty lanterns and faded photos, to foreign paper bills and ladies underwear stapled to the walls! We were hoping to eat a real meal there so we hurried to shower before the kitchen closed at 8pm. But alas when we returned at 7:30 clean and hungry, the rather acerbic young women at the counter informed us that it was too late - the kitchen had closed. I started to argue about the time and she just snapped, "you're in the wrong time zone!" So frustrated and hungry we trudged back to the truck to scrounge up something to eat (more canned soup) and tried to figure out how we had crossed time zones! We didn't figure it out til about a week later in Uluru when someone clued us in that South Australia had switched to daylight savings time while we were camping in the Flinders - and by then we were completely confused because NT (Northern Territory) doesn't follow DST! So it seems that we now can't keep track of the date, day of the week or even the time of day :)

Oodnadatta track photoset