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Day 5
Coober Pedy to Port Augusta.
Another LONG day in the desert - over 700km including the worlds longest stretch of road without a junction - 234km of nothing. The « Abbey Road » photo of me on the pedestrian crossing ( it isn't a pedestrian crossing - it's marking for the Flying Doctor plane to use the road as a landing strip) is at the halfway point - 132km of nothing either direction. We saw a guy cycling along it - crazy.
We also had a brief stop to take some silly photos on the salt flats at the side of the highway and finally finally after 5 days we emerged from the desert and saw some green grass and even a brief glimpse of the sea at Port Augusta.
Then on to our last nights camp site and last night in a swag.
Day 6
The Flinders Range and Adelaide
At last we could stay in our swags until 07-00am - luxury - and NO MORE FLIES to wake us up at dawn or bother us generally as we were out of the desert. After breakfast we set off into the Flinders range mountains for a walk in Aligator Creek. As we climbed up into the hills in the bus, there were kangaroos hopping about everywhere. There are thousands of kangaroos in the outback but the only ones you see tend to be dead ones that have been run over by cars or trucks. Here we saw them alive, in the wild, hopping about all over the place. After a very pleasant walk we moved on to a South Australian winery in the Clare Valley. To give you an idea of the scale of this place, the average husband & wife team in the Beaujolais has 6 hectares of vines. Taylors Wines in the Clare Valley has 750 hectares of vines ! ! ! ! - and Taylors is not the biggest and there are many more like them in South Australia. Production on an industrial scale, super slick marketing and a perfect climate. It's not suprising the French can't compete with this. Quite depressing that what I consider an art and a passion has been transformed into a mass production industry. Coca cola for adults.
So after lunch at the winery and a couple more hours driving we rolled into Adelaide and the comfort of a real bed in a hotel and we began the process of washing our clothes and removing the red dust which had permeated everything.
Great trip, fantastic memories.
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