Day 3

Day 3
11 JUN 06 Sunday evening

Set out from Tailem Bend early and headed to Adelaide (capital of South Australia), 99km away.

Arriving in Adelaide on a Sunday morning makes one realise that not all cities are populated with insatiable consumers who demand 24 hour shopping seven days a week. Sunday mornings are for sleeping in and taking it easy.

Not so for Osca, desperate to find an electronics store to get a new flash card reader – but this is Adelaide, sleepy Sunday morning Adelaide. After some searching we found one. Lucky, they are open Sundays, but not until 11am. What does one do in Adelaide for 2 hours?

I won’t tell, you’ll have to go to Adelaide to find out for your selves.

Finally, a new card reader. Boot up, install drivers, don’t hot-plug anything, restart, insert card…

Nothing. Laptop locks up.

Ok, must have done something wrong.

Uninstall drivers, shut down, reboot, install drivers… yada, yada.

Still nothing.

Take card reader back to store. “No problem sir, you can exchange it for another”

Boot up, install drivers, don’t hot-plug anything, restart, insert card…

Nothing.

The store ‘guru’ was helpful “Looks like windows 2000 is causing a short and burning out the card readers”.

Great! This is a major spanner in the works. If the photos can’t be transferred from the camera onto the laptop, then I am stuck with a very limited storage and the whole idea of being able to edit, transfer to CD and mail photos has just become complicated.

Plan B then. There is no plan B.

… and we’ve been in Adelaide for 6 hours now.

Ok, decision time. We’re 700km into a 12,000km trip, it might be worth going back, getting the laptop conflict sorted out and heading out again in a week or so.
Or
Stay in Adelaide and get it fixed. Today is Sunday, tomorrow a public holiday, the earliest anyone can have a look at it would be Tuesday and even then I am assured the operating system might become unstable.
Option 3, keep going and hope to find internet café’s or computer stores in the regional towns and have them transfer the card content onto CD’s. More complicated, but doable. Option 3 it is. Picked up an extra flash card, that’ll give me just over 700meg of storage (about 7 days of photos). Let’s go with that. I’ll just have to compile and edit them when we return.

Port Augusta (about 300km northwest). It is one of the best places to take photos of the Flinders Ranges at sunset. We should just make it.

We arrived in Port Augusta just as the sun touched the horizon.
Now what ? That’s right we’re on our Walkabout. Brought a special coin just for this occasion. ‘Heads’ we go left on to the Eyre Peninsula, ‘Tails’ we go right and head to Coober Pedy.

Heads it is.

Slight problem. The sun has just set. Past Port Augusta is the true outback. No fenced off farms, just vast expanses of low shrubs and Kangaroos.

We’ve all seen photos of Kangaroos, lying about dozing in the warm Australian sunshine? That’s because they are tired from all the hopping they do all night.

They are most active during dawn and dusk, when they are the hardest to see and during the night they hang about roads enjoying the residual heat stored in the bitumen, or just going about their business not recognising any boundaries such as roads or fences.

Rule number 1 for outback driving at night – Don’t !
Unless you are sitting on top of a 36 wheel road train with giant ‘bull bars’ on the front of it.

Kangaroos are not the brightest of creatures when it comes to ‘collision avoidance’. When startled, they don’t ‘hop off’ in the opposite direction, they use their evolutionary gift instead. ‘Apply spring action and leap’ – in any direction, as long as it is unpredictable. A personal encounter with a Kangaroo about 4 years ago just outside of Mildura has taught me that.

Well, Port Augusta is about as exciting after sunset as Adelaide before 11am. We headed west into the night. 75km to Whyalla.

Option 2 for night time driving in the outback – pretend you are in a school zone. 40 to 50 km is about as fast as you’d want to go and still be able to distinguish a ‘small bush’ shape from a ‘kangaroo shape’ and stop in time to avoid an unpredictable leap.

Option 3, wait until a road train (a truck with a trailer, trailer, trailer, trailer) goes in your direction. Hook up, follow and let them clear the path.

Whyalla is a port town dominated by a petroleum refinery and an oil tanker terminal at the northern part of Spencer Gulf. ‘Lights so bright, on all night’. Not the most idyllic location to spend a romantic evening. We hooked up with another road train and 106km later arrived at Cowell. Counted 3 kangaroos that we did see, probably more we didn’t and thanks to the road train, no encounters of the ‘close kind’.