We packed up our things on Saturday morning
and headed down to ARB to get the truck fixed. We got there a bit early and
peeled off the ridiculous amount of duct tape holding our plastic window in
place (I will try to find a picture to post later so you can see how much tape
was actually involved). We handed over the keys and started to stroll down the
street to try to find a fun way to kill an hour. About 5 minutes later we
bumped into one of the guys from the shop who had come looking for us because
the cap on the back of the truck wasn’t the brand we thought it was so the
replacement window he had for us wasn’t the right size and we were back to
square one.
Luckily the people at ARB were super
friendly and super helpful and put us in touch with another company in town
that might be able to help us. We headed to an auto glass place just down the
road and met a man who had been waiting on our arrival. He tried what he could
to fix our truck but unfortunately was unable to do so. Thankfully he was also
incredibly nice (all of the people in Alice Springs were, it was one of my
favourite places we visited) and asked where we were headed next and made a few
phone calls trying to find a place for us to finally get things sorted. We
retaped up the plastic over the smashed window and left frustrated but at least
we had a lead.
We spent the next hour or two checking out
a few things in town we had missed over the past few days and grabbed a quick
bite to eat before hitting the road. Our goal for the day was to make it to
Coober Pedy, an opal-mining town, so we could camp underground, but with the
day’s setbacks I didn’t think we would ever make it that far. Jesse was
determined to spend the night underground so he may have sped just a little and
driven for a little longer than he wanted but since we crossed the border into
South Australia where the clocks are an hour ahead giving us an extra hour of
sunlight we managed to make it to town just before dusk.
We headed down a dusty dirt road to the
campground only to find that it would be closed until January. I was on there
website the day earlier and hadn’t read anything about the grounds being closed
so I was a little annoyed. We made our way back into the town centre and found
an underground hostel. The man running the hostel wanted something like $35 for
a dorm bed which was a little steep for my liking so unfortunately Jesse was
not going to be able to fulfil his dream of camping underground that night.
Instead we found a lovely caravan park that also happened to be the cheapest
place we had camped thus far. We pitched our tent, cooked up some sausages and
called it a day.
The next day we headed into town to do some
exploring before hitting the road again. We both wanted to check out some
underground buildings and I had read that there was an underground church that
was open for tourists to check out so we made our way there. We both thought it
was strange there were so many cars in the parking lot, surely this underground
church wasn’t the biggest tourist attraction in town, but it wasn’t until I was
about to walk through the door that I realized it was Sunday. Whoops. There was
a service going on and we almost crashed it. Not wanting to interrupt we made
our way back to the main street to check out some of the shops selling opal.
The first one we went in was dingy, all of
the lights were off, and the man working made me uncomfortable so we left
fairly quickly. The next shop we went in doubled as an underground café and the
main reason we went was just so we could check out an underground building.
This shop was clean, well lit, and the man who worked there was very friendly.
I can’t remember his name but he was from Yugoslavia and was very passionate
about his job. As well as opal this shop sold traditional didgeridoos that had
been hallowed out by termites and we were given a quick lesson on how to
properly play the instrument, however the cheapest one was around $300 so we
didn’t buy one. Jesse did buy a lovely piece of opal though which is probably a
little more exciting than a didgeridoo anyway.
Once we were all opaled out we hit the road
again. It was a fairly uneventful day and we made it to Port Augusta around
4pm. We hit up the grocery store to stock up on supplies before finding a campground. We were finally in a place where the
temperature dropped enough at night to make sleeping comfortable. We even needed
to use blankets to stay warm. It was wonderful!
The plan for the next day was to make the
short journey to Port Lincoln where we were hoping to get the truck fixed. Stopping
every few hundred kilometres to add more tape to the plastic window was getting
annoying, so was not being able to easily get stuff out of the back of the
truck so I really had my fingers crossed our problems would be solved when we
got there.
No comments:
Post a Comment