Thursday 19th – We heard dingoes howling several times through the night. Well it was a hard decision but we decided to keep moving, so many wonderful things still to see and experience.
Our neighbours wanted a show and tell on the camper and wanted to see how quick it all packed up, we are getting pretty quick at doing it now. A few km’s up the road towards Mt Dare is the rubbish tip, good idea for all the people coming over the Simpson etc.
Wow oh wow, we called into 3 o’clock creek approx 13kms up the Mt Dare road from Dalhousie. Where there is a water tank that looks like its coming from a bore but they say it’s drinkable. We filled up our jerry can for showers. And there were hundreds a little finches drinking the water on the ground, along the black hose where the water dip, on the trees and fences around the tank, they were every where. We were able to get very close as they came to drink, they were flying all around us, really cute and so tiny. We could of stayed there for hours.
This is also a camping area and from a camping point of view better than Dalhousie but of course it doesn’t have the springs or toilets. But lots of trees and rocky ground so not as dusty but would be quieter and you can camp down by the river.
The road to Mt Dare is pretty typical of the dirt roads out here. It does get quite rocky, big rocks that are pretty harsh and one humdinger of a cattle grid. The stone stomper is earning its keep.
We didn’t need fuel but the price was much the same as Oodnadatta $2.22 L. It’s an awesome pub, big and spacious inside, clean and very friendly people.
The road from Mt Dare to Finke is pretty good, wide in parts, gravelly in sections but pretty smooth and then red sand with some corrugations but not bad. Very dusty though.
Well Finke would not win any tidy towns competition. The road from Finke heading to Chambers Pillars is sandy and very corrugated we were warned by many travelers how rough it was. There is another track that runs alongside the main road, it’s the Alice to Finke Desert race track. When we left Finke we went on it by mistake and it was a better smoother road at first. Fed up of the corrugations we popped back onto it. Boy it had dip after dip after dip, like a rollercoaster, we just about wet ourselves with laughter, we quickly got off it. Ok ok this road wins the worst corrugated road we have been on. We stopped regularly and checked everything with the trailer and ute was all ok. Despite this out CB aerial snapped clean off.
We have seen 11 burnout cars on the side of the road up until the Chambers Pillar and Alice Springs turnoff. At the turnoff the road improved out of sight, apparently it is like that all the way to Alice. We did not feel comfortable stopping on the Finke road so pushed through to Chambers Pillar for the night. The road from the homestead to Chambers Pillar is more corrugated, and sandy, there is also some sand hills. We did arrived quite late after a big day travel.
