Hot tubbing with MacGyver on the Oodnadatta Track
Letter #7 - Marree to Coober Pedy, South Australia
G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 7. Today we’re travelling from Marree, South Australia to Coober Pedy. It was one of those days that I remember well for all that went wrong, and how much fun it was.
For those of you for whom this is your first letter, welcome! Good on ya for signing up. Letters From the Road is the story of a family road trip in Australia, told one weekly installment at a time using my journal entries written during the trip. You’ll probably figure this out, but I thought I may as well mention that the quoted bits below are the journal entries, and the rest is me filling in the gaps.
Back in letter #4, I mentioned that I have been working on an addition to Letters From the Road with my brother Nick, a keen artist of the most special kind. Special partially because he’s the only artist I know that will make great art especially for me, but also because he’s pretty great at it to boot. You can find his art here.
From the start, I’ve wanted to include a map of some sort, because I understand that many of you readers won’t be intimately knowledgeable about the geography of Central Australia and have no concept of what a Coober Pedy is, though it sounds like it may have been a character from the old TV show Hee Haw.
Wonder no longer, I’m also sending a handy map with this letter, and hopefully with future letters if I can keep in good graces with Nick. I hope you like it!
And if you’ve just joined us, you’re not that far behind - you can find the other six letters here, feel free catch up while sitting in the hot tub.
Now, your letter-
Luke
Sometimes the world churns you up, like a piece of chuck steak through a meat grinder. Sometimes the gods smile down, and you find a passably inviting hot tub by the side of the road. Sometimes you get a little sausage and some bubbles.
I do like sausage and bubbles as the description of our journey between Marree and Coober Pedy via the Oodnadatta Track, even though it might make you think I am referring to some sort of breakfast special. No, my breakfast on the morning we left Marree was yogurt, cereal and blueberries, while the boys ate a cereal they called cinnamon hay bales because it both looked like tiny bales of hay and were dry as a mouthful of cattle fodder. While eating, I was thinking of my goal for the day. On this Monday, it’d be simple: make it from Point A to Point B in one piece.
I’d been thinking ahead to the Oodnadatta Track since we left Melbourne 6 days ago, even though we’d only be on the track for one day. It would be a short day at that, only 370 kilometres (229 miles). The roads we’d been on for the last several days did not see much traffic, however at least they were of the comfortable asphalt variety. Driving west out of Marree we would have our first experience on one of the famous Outback tracks, where the roads were known snap axles, mangle tyres, and swallow whole cars in the bulldust. What’s bulldust? I’m not entirely sure, but I was explicitly told to watch out for it.
It did not take long for the Oodnadatta to live up to expectations.
7th October 2019 - Coober Pedy, SA
The Oodnadatta Track is foreboding. Dead tyres are everywhere. Whole ones, shredded pieces, just taunting you. ‘Are you up to the challenge?’ They’re saying. ‘Think you can do better?’ I don’t think we can. But it’s just a gravel road, right?
And then you see whole dead cars lying in different awkward positions alongside the road. ‘Does this bother you?’ they say.
We’re in the desert now. Tyres down, but then out the back ones up a bit to 33-34 because they’re pretty loaded back there.
I was also excited about getting beyond the paved roads. The Outback tracks of Australia are famous. Even the names make your ears prick up in anticipation of what might happen. The Oodnadatta. The Birdsville Track. The Canning Stock Route. The Tanami Track. And the most famous of them all, The Gibb River Road. Tell your neighbour over the fence that you just got back from a trip down the Birdsville Track, and his eyebrows would no doubt raise and elicit an ‘Oh! The Birdsville’, an acknowledgement that you’re someone who really gets out there and does stuff. These were places to find adventure, solitude, and the strange.
One thing about driving on Outback tracks is that you find yourself stopping more often than usual, even if there’s nowhere to stop. The roads are often so rough that you need a break from the rattling, bouncing, and swerving. Usually those stops are a flat spot beside the road or alongside some ruined buildings. But sometimes you’ll get something really worth stopping for.
Been travelling 60-80kph, with only a few issues hitting big bumps, but by and large the road treated us well. Until we stopped at the weird sculpture garden...
Let me paint a picture for you. Imagine you are driving across the desert. Flat, khaki coloured plains and angry scrubby bushes run as far as the eye can see. And then, off to the side of the road, are two airplanes sticking straight out of the ground, like they were planted there and sprouted. That’s the sculpture garden we came across about an hour north of Marree.
Living in the Outback requires resourcefulness to survive. In the little towns along the way, you often see houses with piles of what looks like junk lying around in the yard. Three cars, two of them for parts. Coils of rusty fencing, stacks of salvaged wood and old pallets. An old pontoon boat lying in the dust, never destined to see water but hey, you never know. An old airplane propeller. These random assortments of things were more than just junk or a social issue inflicting local men. These junk piles are the local hardware store.
With this in mind, the sculpture garden fit. A bunch of random junk, put together into things new and interesting. Along with the two airplanes were a 2 metre tall metal man, torso made of old bits of an engine. His meat thermometer eyes stared off into the distance. The metal man’s creator was kind enough to fashion him an old job between his legs out of a piece of pipe. In one of the man’s outstretched muffler arms was a metal baby made from a fuse box and random bits of metal.
On one end of the sparsely populated area was an old windmill. The bottom was painted green and the propeller done in different shades of pink so that it looked like a giant flower. Attached was a sign that read ‘Callana Creek’.
The Outback is full of random things like this, surprising signs of civilization after driving through nothingness for hundreds of kilometres. Sometimes it could be the ghostly remnants of an old settlement or railroad siding, solid stone structures still standing up to the harsh unforgiving sun long after its residents had given up and gone somewhere more hospitable. But interestingly, these places still served as rest stops for travellers who needed a reason to stop, stretch their legs, and wander through the empty buildings wondering about who had once called them home - and why they thought this unforgiving sliver of the desert was a good spot to set up shop.
As we returned to the car from our wander amongst the junk sculptures, I stopped short. Hanging limply from the camper trailer was a ragged bunch of electrical cables. They’d been chewed through by the Oodnadatta.
We’d driven barely an hour and the Outback tracks had drawn first blood, a good bit of our electrical setup added to the rest of the automotive carnage we’d passed since leaving Marree.
And not only were our cords simply shredded. Our Anderson Plug was missing.
I’ve always wondered who Anderson was, and how he got a plug named after him. Admittedly, at the time I was not pondering the origins of things you can buy at the auto parts store for 30 bucks. More so I was wondering which godforsaken Oodnadatta ditch it was that did the damage. But some things must be known, even if they are not subjects worth researching*.
I’d like to think that the Anderson Plug was named after Richard Dean Anderson, the guy who played MacGyver on the TV show of the same name. In case you’re not familiar with MacGyver, and I consider you unfortunate if not, it was an 80’s television show where the main character worked for a quasi-government agency fighting bad guys. I understand that this description could cover any number of 80’s television shows, but MacGyver was different from other 80’s heroes like the A-Team, who took on baddies with a cool red van, muscles, mohawks, and machine guns, or Knight Rider, who battled evil with tight pants and a Trans-Am that was outfitted with an early version of Siri.
Instead, MacGyver was a super-genius with an understated mullet, and he would get out of jams by building wonderful tools, weapons and contraptions using a Swiss Army Knife and whatever miscellaneous junk he had on hand. Sometimes this was a simple thing like boots made from duct tape, other times he got really creative and made his escape using a jet pack made from seat belts and a pressure washer.
To me, there are some definite parallels between MacGyver building an arc welder out of jumper cables, a car battery, and an antenna, and the little doodad that connected our car to the tent-on-wheels we pulled behind us. Or maybe it’s just that MacGyver excelled at building things out of junk. He would have appreciated the sculptures at Callanna Creek, and probably could have fashioned a fix for our wiring using chewing gum and odds and ends found on the side of the road.
In any case, our Anderson Plug performed functions like making sure that the batteries in the trailer were charging, making the trailer brake lights work, and operating the trailer brakes. All things quite important, but we could still function without them, and had no choice but to keep moving.
*The Anderson Plug is actually named for Anderson Power Products, and its founders Albert and Johan Anderson. The company first made the plugs back in 1953.
Shortly after leaving the sculptures, we pulled off to an overlook for Kati Thanda - Lake Eyre. It’s a normally dry lake that on average only sees water once every three years. When it does, the water then famously turns pink. It’s a stunning site and also bizarre, a pink lake in the middle of the desert.
The words of the explorer Edward Eyre come to mind to describe what we saw when standing at the lookout. He had come to this part of the desert with Captain Charles Sturt (he of the Murray River and Sturt Highway, who I wrote to you about in Letter #3) in search of an inland sea, and is noted as having said the following at one point: ‘At last we climbed a rocky outcrop, hoping to see blue water, and white crested waves. The cheerless site closed all my dreams. The horizon was one unbroken level, a vast unending plain that disappeared in a haze of heat. I named the hill, Mount Hopeless.’
And thus will the lookout at Lake Eyre be referred to: hopeless. There was no water, creamy pink or otherwise, and thus from a distance all we could see was a flat expanse of sand and salt and rocks, air shimmering in the heat.
There was another car at the lookout, a Jucy Camper van filled with a happy family of sightseers. A Jucy Camper is basically a soccer mom van outfitted with a bed in the back. What they’re not outfitted for is driving on the Oodnadatta Track. The family was blissfully oblivious of this fact, and the van appeared undaunted and undamaged. I grumbled in their direction before pulling back on the road.
Somewhere off in the distance past the lake is another of this area’s odd attractions: the Marree Man. It is Australia’s version of the Nazca Lines that are found in the Peruvian desert, the ancient pictures carved into the ground that are so big to be only visible from high above. The Marree Man is a 2.7km tall bloke who looks like he’s about to throw a stick to his dog. Unlike the Nazca Lines, which are estimated to be over 2,000 years old, the Marree Man showed up out of nowhere in 1998. No one knows where it came from. We did not stop to see it, and I don't even think you are allowed to, but a 3 kilometre tall drawing scratched in the earth wouldn’t look like much from the ground anyways.
Our next stop after Kati Thanda - Lake Eyre was a place called Stuart Creek and Coward Springs. It’s a campground, date farm and there’s a spring fed wooden hot tub that anyone can use for $2.
No matter that the hot tub was located just off the side of a gravel track in the desert and that you had to wear a net over your head to keep flies out of your nose, ears, and any other open orifice that might look inviting - it was still great. There wasn’t another person in sight, so we soaked for a relaxing spell, rinsing the dust from our bodies and a few of the worries from our minds.
We were positively enjoying ourselves by the time we pulled into William Creek, a tiny hamlet which was over half way to the town of Coober Pedy, which would be our stop for the night.
William Creek Hotel for a cold one.
We had good vibes, and were having a good day other than the wiring, though it’s fixable and Coober Pedy isn’t a bad place to get it fixed.
There’s writing all over the walls, along with business cards, stickers, people’s old drivers licenses. The lady behind the bar had glasses and an old timey haircut. She told us that we were currently on the largest cattle station in the world, Anna Creek. Because they’d only received 4mm of rain in two years, they were having to truck out all their cattle because the land was so dry and there’s nothing for them to eat. That’s rough.
I’ve written before that Australia’s dry, but this is worth mentioning again. It’s the driest continent on earth outside of Antarctica. And the driest spot in Australia just so happens to be Kati Thanda - Lake Eyre, the parched salty patch just to the east of where we were having a cold drink. It receives only 125mm (~5 inches) of rain per year. It’s a mouthful of sand, stale bread, and cinnamon hay bales all at once. It’s like the hamburgers my father used to obliterate on the gas grill, with a side order of blackboard chalk fries.
But even then, 125mm a year sounds tropical compared to the 4mm that Anna Creek had received over two years.
Then we went out to leave the Hotel, and found our left rear wheel flat.
It took about an hour for us to fuck around and get the new wheel on, meanwhile Henry walks by just as I’m about to start jacking up the car and says ‘When are we leaving? I’m bored.’ I just about threw the tyre iron at him.
The tyre has a gash on the sidewall on the backside. Part of me wonders if I got the tyre pressure wrong after all the fucking around, or if we were just really unlucky. I’m picturing the jerks we saw in a Jucy Camper Van zipping along, no problems at all, good day out in the country, when here I am, spare parts for just about everything and spares for those and rules of thumb for everything from tyre pressures to bulldust, and I’m the one whose vehicle gets beat up today.
5.15pm and we’re leaving again. Just enough time to get to Coober by dark. And there’s a weiner dog in the road.
Two things we were told before starting off.
1/Don’t set up camp after dark, particularly with this camper trailer that we don’t know how to work
2/Don’t drive after dark. Dangerous. Animals and shit all over the road trying to run into your car.
We’ve done both in the first week. We did both today. And we found other rules of thumb that no one mentioned.
Don’t drive west on off-road tracks late in the day. The tracks are well known for lulling you into a smooth 90kph before throwing some sharp angry rocks and divots at you, and unfortunately you cannot see any of this, or only just barely, if you’re driving straight into the late afternoon sun.
And don’t make it all worse by having a windscreen full of dirt and bugs.
To boot we’ve also got to now pack the trailer up early tomorrow to get it in the shop, so there goes our ‘cushy’ two day overnight in Coober.
I don’t know if I can keep this up.
It’s clear from my words that Marree to Coober Pedy was a grind. A hard one. I started writing fuck again and shaking my digital fist at the people in the Jucy Camper. But the hard stuff is what you sign up for in the Outback. The wonderful thing about it is that for everything that breaks, possibly requiring you to MacGyver together a fix on the fly, you’ll get random desert art. For everything that goes wrong, you’ll get a mysterious 3 kilometre tall drawing of a man, and a hot tub.
I also wouldn’t have to worry about keeping things up for much longer, because things were about to go completely pear shaped, leaving us stranded in one of the oddest places we would come across during our entire trip, Coober Pedy.
Enjoying the ride Luke.
Another perspective on Kati Thanda https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-04/lake-eyre-impact-of-gas-development/101486164