An excellent day today!

I’ve had a great day today. I left Coober Pedy for Port Augusta, about 550kms, so I knew I wouldn’t make it in one day. George at the campsite suggested Pimba might be a good place to stay - nothing there apparently apart from a roadhouse where you can camp, fuel, and food.So I got going, but firstly I had to ride through nowheresville.

But I had a stroke of luck on the way. I meant to buy a loo roll yesterday but forget but there on the road was a load of them, clearly having fallen off the back of a lorry. So I stopped and snaffled one!

The first couple of hours were pretty samey; the usual flat featureless countryside all around, so I just sang to myself, waved at oncoming cars, and played games riding on the wrong side of the road and slaloming in between the centre markings when nothing was coming. Another good one is holding my breath and seeing how far I can side at certain speeds.

But after two hours, I was pretty hungry and stopped at a reststop in the middle of nowhere. I’d only been there about ten minutes when another bike arrived and I couldn’t believe it - another postie, and all kitted out for longterm travel! At first I thought it was that bloody woman who had been travelling with us in the first few days, the one who pocketed our rego and insurance money. But it wasn’t, it was somebody much nicer, Yuji, a Japanese chemical engineering student who had bought his bike at 110 Motorcycles in Coolbulture, Queensland, and was riding to see as much as Australia as he possibly could in three months., and also heading to Pimba for the night.

So we rode together for the afternoon and it was nice to have some company for a change. We stopped off at Lake Hart, which  is similar to Lake Eyre but on a much smaller scale, and like Lake Eyre, it has water in it although much of it is saltpan.  It From the lookout, Yuji spotted a dirt track leading down to the shore, so we took it. It was  pretty sandy and deserted but we got right to a railway line before we could go no further. And from there, it was just a few metres to the shore.

The salt had dried in  many patterns, some bits flat but most of it in little waves which suggests that the water must have evaporated very quickly. It was a pretty cool  sight, very much like a frozen sea and which extended right along the shore line for as far as we could see, guarded by the biggest sky ever. And again it was silent, no noise whatsoever.

As we came away, we realised why it was deserted. It was where a combined UK/Australia rocket programme after WW2 tested weapons and there are various bits that haven’t been found.  It’s decommissioned now and returning to nature, and there is public access, but we were careful to retrace our tyre tracks and not deviate too much.

We arrived in Pimba by about 1900, just as the sun was going down, and found the roadhouse with a village of campers gathering for the night. And better still, it was free, so we found a patch of dirt by the trees where we were less likely to be run over by late night arrivals and set our stuff up.

Then Lyn arrived, a French girl hitch hiking around Australia by herself. She’d had a bit of a dodgy lift but was ok but I think quite glad to have found two friends with whom to camp.

So we sat and chatted, looked at the moon which is really spectacular at the moment, and I got bitten on the lip by one of those bastard green ants. For such a small thing, its sting  is very powerful, and not at all pleasant. Bloody thing.