skills&training

It was getting to the point in the year that I was feeling jaded and worn down by the mundane and banal.

Time for a road trip to somewhere that offered a chance to break out of the patterns of the daily routine and some new horizons. I have been wanting to go to see the phenomenon of Lake Eyre for some time, having driven past it on many occasions on other road trips.

Co-opting a friend into the trip added some extra chaos. It didn’t take a lot of planning, just the lining up of the dates really.

I packed the usual array of required stuff for a trip into the Australian ‘outback’; extra drinking water (20 ltrs); spare tyres (x2); 2 burner gas stove and gas bottle (9 kg); cooking utensils and pans; swag; fold up chair; fold up shovel; tow rope; tarpaulin; spare oil & coolant; spare engine hoses and belts. Apart from that there was a few other added bits’n'pieces; small portable fridge (about the size of a conventional ice box, but able to run off the car’s battery; some non-perishables; 2 bottles of wine; small tent.

Of course I also loaded the camera bag with extra batteries, dust protector and cleaners and memory cards.

My travelling companion is from the legal profession and I was thinking that this may end up a little like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but in the outback of Oz…

It didn’t start off all too well, as I arrived at my friend’s house to find him in a black mood, which wasn’t helped as he examined the back of my Subaru and sputtered ‘What’s all that crap! We won’t need any of that shit, it’s useless. You just need a swag, camp oven and a box of food. All that over stuff is rubbish!’

I wasn’t in the mood to take the bait and chose not to reply. We ferried his assortment of gear into the car, but after some debate elected to leave the camp oven behind. Being a senior operational officer in the SA Country Fire Service I refused to allow us to leave behind a gas stove and have to rely on burning wood fuel, especially in the tinder dry bushland. Sorry, not going to happen on my trip.

Things soon settled down as we got underway and I did the usual stop and re-fuel, tyre and engine check at the last major fuel stop on the road out of the city.

We pressed on and my travelling companion, a man of stature, relaxed enough to doze off to the soundtrack to the film The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford.

We made good time and arrived at Port Germein as the sun was lowering on the horizon; ideal time to take some shots with the Canon (I use a 5D MkII). I love the openness and softness of this place at this time of day, the clarity of the light and the glassy rippled smoothness of the water, as well as the worn nature of the timbers and metal of the jetty.

We had enough time to stretch our legs and fill our lungs with fresh sea air with a walk along the 1.25 klm jetty, before once again getting in the car and driving a little further on, to Baroota where my sister lives in a farm-house, nestled between the flat salt lats of the coast and the hard bony rocky foothills of the lower Flinders Ranges. Here we overnighted and relatively early the next morning headed off on the longer part of the drive, North to Maree and Lake Eyre.

It was a reasonably long drive, broken up with a number of stops for fuel, food and coffee. The fuel got increasingly expensive, the food was mostly from my own provisions (taken from the sneered at car fridge) and the coffee was of a surprisingly good standard. The temperature also climbed as we moved relentlessly further and further North.

By now my companion was re-telling stories from his numerous road trips, as a travelling solicitor servicing remote and regional aboriginal communities and he fluctuated between exultation and despair at the state and treatment of the indigenous population. Racism was a common thread in our conversation, sadly.

We made good time and by mid afternoon we had arrived in Marree, where we stopped for a brief drink and to gain some intelligence from the locals of the track conditions up to the camp site close to Lake Eyre. The signs were good and after another hours and a half we drove into a sandy, sparsely wooded area, marked by concrete picnic tables and benches, surrounding a long and narrow strip of water, pumped up as overflow from a local artesian bore.

Swag under the trees at bush campsite