Thanks to the best efforts of Google to prevent us accessing emails, blogs have by necessity been a bit delayed, and as we’re now in remote country and there’s no cell phone communication, they’re even further delayed. We have a satellite phone and use it sparingly to report our position daily to our youngest son in the UK. If we fail to check in, the idea is that he can work out approximately where we should be and alert the emergency services. Fortunately, we’ve never had to resort to the emergency procedure.
Leaving Alice Springs we soon left the last bit of tarmac and hit dirt roads, or tracks really. Some tracks are wide, with lots of space to recover if the vehicle slides on the loose surface stones, while in other places they are so narrow that two vehicles cannot pass. I won’t go into the quality of the tracks. They vary from good to awful, often with no warning of the change.
We saw perhaps, half a dozen vehicles on the way to the Maryvale Aboriginal settlement. Once there, a few scrawny dogs lay around and a number of wrecked cars propped on rocks was about the sum total of life. Of people, not one, so we carried on to a spot called Chamber’s Pillar. This natural rock formation towers over the surround flat landscape, near to another known as Castle Rock, which looked to us a little like two faces, mouths open looking towards the sky in wonderment.
It’s impossible to put into words the magnificence of the sky at night from a place with no man-made light to obscure the view. The sky seems enormous, the stars clear and bright, and the Milky Way really does look milky. We stood and stared until our necks hurt.
Arising before dawn, we watched the sun rise and cast its colour-enhancing morning light on Chamber’s Pillar. A cold wind whipped up small whirlwinds of dust and we were happy to get back to Vin Rouge, put on the kettle for a warming cuppa.
More dirt tracks and our mid-day stop was at the Lamberts Centre, which is the geographical centre of Australia. We realised that we were further away from the coast than we had ever been before. Time for a few photographs and a bite of lunch and it was necessary to be on our way. We still had a long way to go to reach Mount Dare before nightfall.
We did make it, with almost an hour of daylight left and something in excess of 350 jarring kilometres of rough track completed in the day. Now Mount Dare is not a mountain but a roadhouse/pub. Our tent was erected in record time and we adjourned to the bar for a cold beer or two to wash away the dust. We decided to eat in the pub and I can honestly say that the fillet steak I enjoyed was one of the best. Replete, we turned in for a (reasonably) early night and slept like logs.
A lazy start to the following day was a bit of a novelty but it was necessary to fill up with as much diesel as we could carry for the next filling station is over 600 kilometres away in Birdsville and we have more than a thousand sand dunes to negotiate before then.
A relatively short run of about 70 kilometres and we reached Dalhousie Springs. There’s not much there, just a campsite and a billabong naturally warmed by fresh water from the artesian basin. So we soaked away some aching muscles in 34 degrees watched by hundreds of corellas roosting in the trees.
Camp set up and we heard tales of vehicles breaking down in the desert and met one chap whose vehicle needed towing. The tow truck had travelled over 400 kilometres to find him. Fingers crossed we’ll be OK. Tomorrow is the beginning of the Simpson Desert.
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