Lake Eyre Trip, Day 2: We meet our tour group and set off north

Keen to get started on our adventure, we got down to the hotel foyer at 9am to check out and be ready for Outback Spirit’s 9.30am pick-up, only to find three others – identified by their Outback Spirit name-tags – already there. Turns out one of them thought the pick up was 8.30am! They had a long wait – but after discovering that tomorrow we will need to be at breakfast at 7am, ready for a 7.45am departure, we decided that 8.30am was not so bad. Of course, we could choose to miss breakfast tomorrow but that’s not going to happen! The joy of organised tours. 

It took three pick-ups, ours being the first, for us to have our contingent. We come from all over – from Kingaroy and Buderim in Queensland to Cervantes in Western Australia. This geographical diversity is not, however, matched by a chronological one! Say no more! The good thing is that while the maximum tour group is 26, we are but 14, excluding tour leader and driver. Very pleasant and manageable, for them and us. We are five couples and four singles, and so far everyone seems perfectly congenial.

We are lucky in another way too, because our bus is rather new, having only done around 11,000 kms, some of which were done driving it to Adelaide from Brisbane, its place of manufacture. A particular feature of this new model – a Mercedes Benz something something – is that each seat has a charging port for devices. Such are the demands of modern travel.

But you can’t have all those positives without some negatives can you? The negative is that the day was colder, wetter and windier than forecast, so much so, in fact, that Adelaide suffered some strong wind damage. “Lucky”, our tour leader Greg said, “today’s not an attractions day!” And, anyhow, he said, there’d be a prize for best hairstyle of the day (if you get his drift)! The weather did, in fact, add to the adventure, in ways that surprised even Greg, because …

Often on this first day lunch is a picnic, but given the weather Greg had organised for us to lunch at Main Street Cafe in the tiny town of Two Wells, so named for its two indigenous waterholes. However, when we got there, the cafe looked very closed! A phone call ensued, a cafe person arrived in a few minutes – it’s a tiny town, remember – and by the time we’d braved the wind and rain to attend to certain personal needs (including checking our coiffures), a lunch of feshly made sandwiches and hot spring rolls was ready. (For me, there was a simple but very fresh shredded chicken salad). You know what Shakespeare said, all’s well…

Not a day of attractions, but …

Although it wasn’t a day of attractions, tour guides do have to keep the customers happy, and of course the countryside is not without its points of interest. So, as we passed through little towns and mostly flat countryside, we learnt all sorts of interesting snippets, which are probably more interesting for us than for you. Do skim, if you wish! We won’t know, but I do want to document them for our own edification! Here are the main ones:

• Some 285,000 tonnes of salt are gleaned pa from the Salt Crystalline Pans on the northern edge of Adelaide.
• Salisbury’s market gardens produce much of Adelaide’s fresh food, and their produce was frequently featured in the ABC’s The Cook and the Chef TV series.
• The Gulf of St Vincent is shallow, and ideal for crabbing
• Port Wakefield, a little town near the northern tip of the Gulf of St Vincent, has around 8,000 cars passing through per day. Good for tourist entrepreneurs Greg hinted!
• Lake Bumbunga (indigenous word meaning “rain water lake”), just north of Lochiel, has been mined for salt since 1912.
• Snowtown, infamous in Australia for some awful serial murders, has a large 47-turbine wind farm.
• Stobie poles for electric power lines were invented by Adelaide Electric Supply Company engineer to solve the problem caused by the shortage of long termite-resistant timber in South Australia.
• Crystal Book was named by explorer Edward John Eyre for the crystal clear creek near it. It’s known these days because it is where the north-south and east-west rail-lines meet. Goyder’s line – a line “identified” by surveyor George Goyder in 1865 as marking the northern limit beyond which crops would fail – passes through near here. 
• Port Pirie has the largest lead smelter in the world (and a 205-metre high stack!)
• Port Germein, where we stopped for our afternoon cuppa, was sighted by Eyre in the 1830s, but named by Samuel Germein. Spencer’s Gulf, on which it is located, was named in 1802 by Matthew Flinders for one of Princess Di’s ancestors. Around the same time, French explorer Nicholas Baudin named it Golfe Bonaparte! 
• Port Augusta’s last coal-fired electric power station was shutting down today! Solar powered facilities are now being developed there.

An enjoyable day – though not particularly dramatic. What drama there was, was unexpected, such as the closed cafe, wild weather, and a luggage hutch that kept opening until duct tape was applied. The landscape is very flat although we did glimpse the odd low mountain ranges, to the east mostly, such as the Flinders. The coach had little work to do today!

Our evening ended with a drink in the bar of our motor inn, and a very tasty buffet style meal in the motor inn’s restaurant. We were sat at tables of four, with Len and me ending up with the couple from Cervantes. Ex-farmers and now active volunteers in this tiny town that they chose somewhat randomly to retire to, they were good dining company. Such interesting people you meet. We felt a little silly, though, saying that we lived in Canberra because we don’t like cities, when they live in 700-strong Cervantes for the same reason. Hmmm … it’s all relative.

And here we’ll leave you with some pics:

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 PS: Remember, the next post could be a few days away.