So we’re now into South Australia, definitely the most country folks like state in Oz! Our little van ended up visiting SA twice, first after finishing the Nullarbor then taking the same road back down after seeing Ayers Rock in Northern Territory.

We stopped in Port Augusta after the Nullarbor, woo hoo civilisation!! People, normal shops and even had phone signal!! We went and got some food supplies in, our kitchen was looking a little bit bare! Now bananas are one of the cheapest fruits to buy at home, not here, $9 for four little bananas, i.e. £6.75, crazy, no more nanas are getting in our kitchen!! Alysha and Keaton decided to spend the night in a Big 4 campsite (they love them), they had electricity in their van so wanted to hook up and get things charged. There wasn’t a chance we were paying over $30 for a site for parking up our little wicked camper so we carried on driving on the road to our next stop, Coober Pedy, then stopped at a free site. After the petrol costs on the Nullarbor we needed to save the bucks!!

We only ended up seeing this part of SA because we decided to drive up to Northern Territory to see Ayers Rock, we’re so glad we changed our plan and headed up this way, Coober Pedy is a pretty cool place. It honestly looks like a film set from the Wild West! It’s an Opal Mining town so there are shops everywhere selling Opals. There are even left over pieces of set from where Pricisila Queen of the Desert was filmed. The place looks deserted as pretty much everyone lives underground because of the heat!! They even have restaurants underground! It was nice and toastie for us, about 30 deg’s, according to them that was cold, it gets to over 60 deg’s in the height of summer!! I’d be glad of an underground house then too!
It was Keaton’s birthday so we all parked up in a paid site (woo hoo hot shower!) and headed out for pizza at Pizza Johns, yum yum! Seriously these pizza’s were huge, after eating pasta, noodles or beans on toast for a few weeks they tasted amazing!! Thanks Lysh for treating us!! We managed to find a saloon, aka pub, to have a few beers in before heading back to the vans and helping Keat celebrate! Alysha and I decided to call it a night pretty early but the boys stayed up talking absolute crap about the SAS and god knows what else! Our mission in getting Keaton nice & boozy on his birthday definitely worked!! ;o) The next morning we were all a little bit worse for wear so didn’t make it out on the road til about 11….after treating ourselves to a fried egg sani first! That ended up being good luck for Eli & Mari, the American guy & Finish girl, who had been stranded in Coober Pedy after having a punch up with the two guys they were travelling with! They ended up hitching a ride with us, well with Alysha & Keaton. I was secretly happy we didn’t have seats to take anyone as Eli seemed like the typical annoying, loud, know it all American! Hm how were two Canadian’s and one know it all New Yorker going get on in such a small space for hours on end?! Not very bloomin well, Alysha couldn’t stand him! Don’t blame her, I wouldn’t be happy if someone started making coffee whilst I was driving, rooting through my cupboards or putting his feet up on my table!! Poor Mari was so nice and quiet she couldn’t get a word in edgeways!! Good job they had their own tents to sleep in when we stopped en route to Ayers!

Like I said we visited Coober Pedy again on the way back down from Ayers (we’ll tell you about there in our next blog), we wouldn’t normally stop in the same place but hadn’t been able to visit one of the underground houses on our last visit. We definitely had to check one out. We drove for about 9/10 hours to make sure we could park up right beside Coober, visit the house in the morning then get back on the road to Adelaide. There was no problem in being up early and getting the hell out of the site as the flies were mental! Huge horrible things that bit you through your clothes, no way were we having a leisurely breakie outside our van!! The drive into Coober takes you right through where all the mining is going on, for miles into the distance it looks like there are mini pyramids everywhere! The underground house was amazing. The house itself was built by one women Faye, back in the 60’s. The kitchen area was already there and used to be used by a Postie, Fayed arrived then built the rest. It’s pretty impressive. It just looks like any other house but obviously there are no windows! They never need air con or heating as it permanently stays around 22 degs, perfect. Colin who owns the house now did the tour, as usual he had family from Scotland. Honestly every Ozzie we talk to has family from Scotland and they all want to tell us about them!! His were from Insch, we could tell he was chuffed when we told him we knew where that was! He was majorly into his golf, the only problem is the course in Coober Pedy has no grass because you’re basically in the middle of the desert! They carry a little fake piece of grass around with them so they can take their shot! Crazily they have a partnership with St Andrews club to go play there for free. That’s a long way for someone from Coober Pedy to have to go just to play a round of golf on the grass!! We carried on driving, hit Port Augusta again (yay phone signal), and drove until 5.30pm, just 2 hours from Adelaide. We’d taken off at 7am, that was one long days driving!!
We woke up nice & early to be greeted with rain & dull grey skies….are we in Scotland?! The drive into Adelaide was freezing, thank god little ‘Jock Patch’ had heaters! We weren’t too impressed with Adelaide, don’t think it helped that the weather was so crap, there just didn’t seem like there was much going on. The centre itself seriously looked like it needed a bit of TLC. There was nothing for us to do at night so we bought some cheap veg from Central Market (possibly the only good thing in Adelaide!?) and made some noodle soup in the camp kitchen. We’d paid to stay in a site as you can’t really get any free spots in the cities. We finished off our night eating our tea in the TV room then having some wine & crisps in the back of the van. Went to bed wearing two pairs of bottoms, two tops & my hoodie, bbbbrrrrrrrrr! As usual Dean slept with not a stitch on & didn’t even feel the cold. I’m beginning to think he has central heating built in!!

More rain the next morning so we decided to try & get through SA as quick as possible & hopefully get some more sun in Victoria. Drove to the Barrosa Valley, the home of Wolfblass, woo hoo more wine!! We’d been seriously looking forward to going here since we booked our trip & had planned to stay a few nights but the weather meant we couldn’t do the cycle tour of the vineyards that we wanted too. It was a shame because it’s a beautiful place. Never mind we still got tastings in Wolfblass & Rockford & were happy bunnies with our purchases! We drove on until it got dark & parked up beside Albert Lake in a place called Meningie, again it would have been gorgeous but the rain didn’t want to leave. We ended up having to cook our tea inside the van because of the wind…...we’re pretty sure that’s against Wicked’s rules!! We hit the hay early & cozied up to warm up my blue body! The next day looked promising for sun but nope the rain & cold appeared again. We drove into Robe to check out the beach but it felt like Aberdeen in the height of winter! Plenty of free showers along the beach but we decided we’d rather be dirty than freeze our asses off! Bonus though we got free internet in the visitors centre, now that never happens in Oz.

So hoping for some sunshine on the Great Ocean Road....

Lots of Love
Chelle & Dean xxx