Beware the advice of casual acquaintances

We did INTEND to take it slowly today, stopping for a casual visit to The Breakaways – a ten kilometre off-road experience (probably just to say that we’ve been there, and it was part of the set for Priscilla…) Ev’s addiction to noodling had her looking in a barren creek bed in a place where one couldn’t see a single opal mine for dust! Thought we’d lost her for about ten minutes.

Tried taking it slowly through to Marla – speeds of about 90-95 km/h. One cannot escape the desert, no matter what speed one takes it at. Whether at 130+ (at which some cars went past us!) or 80, it is unrelenting, but ever changing. Rachel commented that she expected to see nothing but sand (a la Lawrence of Arabia), but the harshness of the landscape was as daunting as the changes were intriguing. Set up a Wedge-tailed eagle count on the journey. Two four-eagle days the last two, but today was a bonanza – we saw 21 of them: sitting, eating, flying. Magnificent birds to watch. (How I wish I was reporting my golf scores at a major championship!) At one point I saw four sitting together, two clearly younger and smaller. In comparison we saw only a handful of Kestrels. In addition to the normal litter of kangaroo carcasses, we also encountered dead cattle. Ev managed to spy a dingo chewing on the carcass of one.

The marks of human presence on the landscape give pause for thought – garbage littering the side of the road; roadkill; a bitumen scar dividing the nation in two, and the occasional building and phone tower. Is this indicative of our contribution to the planet’s well-being?

Made a brief stop at the border, where we met Happy Harry the Encouraging Tour Guide who could barely crack a smile and gleefully informed us that the camp sites at Uluru and Kings Canyon were booked out until September. There was a quiet tension in the air as we made our way into Kulgera and on to Erldunda, where Ev made some frantic phone calls. She was able to book us into Yulara TONIGHT – it was 4 pm and there remained another 260 km to go. Asked the guy at the fuel stop about animals on road, and he commented that he never drove anywhere at night. Hmmm. The next two hours of daylight were absorbed at something close to the speed of light, determining to limit the amount of night-time travel before getting into Uluru. We arrived at 7 pm and set up camp for five days, determining that we were going to have a lazy day tomorrow. Gained an extra day on the journey, lost a few non-grey hairs!

Later note: the camp site was full the night we arrived then there were dozens of unoccupied sites in the days to follow...