From Pimba we drove to Port Augusta - Hello Civilisation!!! It was cold, and wet....something we hadn't experienced for a while! So we left fairly quickly and continued south to Port Germaine. Here we were confused by their claim of having "the longest wooden jetty in Australia" because we had visited "the longest wooden jetty in Australia" a few years ago at Busselton in WA! After some quick Googling we decided that South Australians were petty little nit-picker...

From Coober Pedy, we played "spot the cow" or "spot the dead cow" to pass the time. Pretty boring drive, except for a couple of lakes when we got closer to Pimba. We also detoured into Woomera before parking at Pimba for the night. Woomera was interesting - a town developed to house/service people working with testing rockets in the 1960s and 70s. There was some really good information at the visitors centre and displays of recovered rocket parts and fighter jets...

The drive back to Coober Pedy from Alice Springs was pretty boring, but we tried a variation on an old game to entertain us. Instead of "spot the emu" or "spot the goat", we played "spot the desert pea". Unfortunately there was only one patch of them, about 70kms north of Marla. So that game didn't last very long. We stopped overnight at Marryat Creek rest area again and met some nice people from Kingston in South Australia who we might catch up with again later....

We didn't venture very far into the East MacDonnell Ranges, given our time restraints and also the greater need for a 4WD vehicle to see the things we really would have liked to. So only 10-20km out of Alice Springs we visited the Emily and Jessie Gaps where there is some aboriginal rock art. We went early in the morning and saw some dingo tracks at a small waterhole at the first stop. It was a nice easy end to our stay in Alice Springs (even though it has been r...

West MacDonnell Ranges The West Macs was a surprising change, in stark contrast to the flat plains we had seen for the past few days. They were filled with dramatic scenery, awesome geology, birds and animals, and waterholes with WATER in them!!! Our first stop was at Standley Chasm because we wanted to be there around midday to see the sunlight on the chasm floor, and as a bonus we saw a dingo on the drive in. We made it with plenty of time so spent about 2 hou...