This section started not in Adelaide, but Serviceton. We hadn’t really considered wether we’d visit Adelaide, in the end we decided to skip both it and Port Augusta. We’d spent the night in a rest area just south of Mambray Creek, in between those last two cities of size before Alice Springs. We had a schedule (Alice in eight days, with only five of them being driving days), we hadn’t planned any intermediate stops, only those ‘avoids’.
When we started off that morning I typed our destination into ‘Maps’. Since we had no other fixed plans it was ‘Alice Springs’. The miles don’t really register on this trip, but it was nice to see that it reckoned on only twelve hours of driving and we had 3-6 days to do it. I say the miles don’t register, but as we cleared Port Augusta and left the Augusta Highway behind, our friend in maps announced: “Stay on the Stuart Highway for the next 549 miles”. We both laughed, we had never before heard anything like that. The vastness of this land is absolutely incredible. It is easy to forget that this is not a country, but a continent. This Stuart Highway, which is only a section of the road from Melbourne to Darwin, is probably twice the distance of all the roads that join the southernmost tip of England to the northernmost tip of mainland Scotland.
It was maybe only another twenty miles when I realised that in our determination to avoid Port Augusta, we’d forgotten to top up with fuel. We had a good bit over half a tank, but we’d been advised to carry extra fuel and even a satellite phone. Sure enough every rufty-tufty land cruiser and off-road caravan that passed us had at least two jerry cans, two big fat antennae, and two spare wheels. We had reasoned that as we were sticking to surfaced (mostly ‘main’) roads, we surely wouldn’t need all of that. Besides we had nowhere to hang a jerry can on the outside of our already inadequately provisioned DHL delivery van. The idea of a big can of smelly diesel in our ‘bedroom’ just didn’t appeal. Still half a tank of fuel and the rufty-tuftys that kept passing made us feel quite naked.
Still driving we hurriedly tried to add a fuel stop. Only thirty miles away, phew! Except that it involved us making a u-turn. That street name on the first suggestion was in Port Augusta. We tried four of the other suggestions - all Port Augusta. Surely there must be something between here and Alice Springs. Try Google Maps - exactly the same. I’ve had plenty of misdirections from mapping software in the past, but this one was just bizarre. The algorithms for two different platforms making the same ‘mistakes’. It was nonsensical, even if we had a full tank we could never have made Alice Springs.
We knew there ‘must’ be a roadhouse between here and Alice, but I couldn’t convince myself that that ‘must’ would be within the range of the fuel we had. We were already looking for somewhere to make the u-turn when we saw a ‘Roadworks’ sign. I hoped there would be someone there and so there was - a wonderfully ebullient Australian who rhymed off the next three filling station on the Stuart Highway. I felt sure he was going to rhyme off every station to Darwin, but Pimba at just over 100km away would do us just fine.
I had forgotten just how friendly Australians are. I’m sure that even if we had run out, any one of the rufty-tuftys that passed us would happily have filled us out of one of their jerry cans without any hint of a lecture.
Back on the road!
