Letho's Blog

April 06, 2011

After a relaxing, but cold night in our tent (luckily not in the car being stuck on the Sleaford-Wanna-Dunes track .. you read the preceding article, right? ) the first thing that came to our mind was most likely: “A warm cup of coffee and a nice slice of toast!” Imagine our disbelief when we looked at this:

To you it may just look like an ordinary hole. To us it was a clear proof of an unwanted visitor in the LandCruiser: a mouse had shamelessly raided our food stash! You may think: “Idiots, next time better lock the car.” But we will answer: we do so every night. Meaning: the mouse must have slipped in while the car was still open the previous night or it came in even with all doors being closed. Even more pressing was the question: is it still in the car or did it get out?

Nevertheless we headed to Port Lincoln to repair the LandCruiser after last day’s tortures. The car fired up immediately without any troubles, but you guess it .. still ran like “a bag of nuts”, as we would say in German. In Port Lincoln the RepCo guys were very helpful and I replaced the distributor cap including rotor, the ignition cables and all 6 spark plugs. It cost us 100$, but afterwards the poor old LandCruiser ran like a charm again! Hooray!

In the afternoon we headed back to the Lincoln National Park and used the remaining daylight for a short visit. We ended up on a 4WD track to Woodcutters Beach, but after our recent traumatizing experience we refused to continue and returned to the main track. Thus we drove up to Cape Donington. The lighthouse is so ugly up there that we are not even showing you a picture of that.

Subsequently we drove to Fishermans Point, a beautiful bay with a somewhat crowded campsite, but with a fantastic view of the bay and the ocean. In addition to that you can build up your camp directly besides the (not very high) cliffs.

That was pretty much it for the day. We returned to Fishery Bay for the last night and made warming campfire.

April 05, 2011

After a cold night at Fishery Bay we paid the library in Port Lincoln a quick visit. On our way back we decided to head straight into the Lincoln NP and go along the Sleaford-Wanna-Dunes track as long as there was daylight available. This track is strictly 4WD only .. but after our experiences in the Outback so far we thought this should be doable for us. What a disastrous enterprise this would become …

When we entered, it was 3pm. Enough time to do the track in roughly 1.5-2 hours and get out safely. So we thought. And off we went!

You can probably imagine by these pictures that the sand on the track was really soft and sometimes deep. It is not an exaggeration to compare it to Sahara-like sand dunes. Enough to get easily bogged every now and then, and if not that, at least it will slow you down tremendously…

Get a better idea of it:

We first stopped at Salmon Hole and met only a couple of fishermen trying their luck. The coastline was impressive, so was the undamped surf of the Pacific.

The dunes were getting bigger and bigger, the track was only to be found by following markers which are placed here and there – if you are lucky…

Still no problem, we thought and happily drove deeper and deeper into the track .. and deeper and deeper ..

Occasionally we met some locals on the way. No camels, however, but a herd of emus.

We drove on and on, facing more and more obstacles on the way, i.e. sand hills, that were increasingly harder to surpass.

We had heard that you should lower your tyre pressure in deep sand, but never actually were forced to that so far. Furthermore we had neither a deflator nor a compressor on board to check and refill the tyres after getting out of the sand. But until now we still were able to continue, although we had to try 3-4x times more often to pass a hill. Poor LandCruiser .. rev’ing that high in your old age.

We still enjoyed our adventure very much, stopping here and there and catching a glimpse of the fascinating landscape:

Maybe the locals knew what was about to happen .. judging from their baffled looks:

Enjoy the last pictures we took before dusk .. yeah, dusk with us being in the middle of nowhere.

To those of you light-hearted: stop reading now. We survived it, or how could we have written this, eh?

To those of you being more brave, or just curious how it ended – read on. But I warned you, right?

We finally came to a sand hill that seemed just too high. We had already been driving roughly 13-15 kilometers into the track, that means the end must have been pretty close, but it still wasn’t in sight!

After taking a lot of tries with a lot of force (during one I accidentally rev’ed the engine so high that the needle got stuck at the end of the red scale – imagine an engine breakdown here and now!)  we decided to let the tyres down as a last resort. What we thought to be a reduction of 15 psi turned out to be just 2-3 psi when we refilled the tyres the day after – completely useless!

By now it was seriously getting dark, and we still couldn’t get over the hill. In addition to that, we hadn’t seen anyone else doing the track all day .. it was now that we noticed the engine seriously getting hotter and hotter. Since we had some water on board, a refill of coolant seemed easy. Do you remember what it usually says on radiator caps? Right: “Do NOT open while hot!” However, we had done that a couple of times before with no trouble.

Stupid me .. I opened the cap and .. SWOOSH .. the boiling and steaming water spilled out of the radiator in an endless stream .. or so it seemed. After maybe 10 seconds it finally stopped. It had not only covered the engine block everywhere, but also hit us. Luckily we weren’t burned severely! So we stood in the middle of a desert, the radiator almost empty and still no success getting out of here.

After refilling the radiator we restarted the engine, only to be surprised by the next problem: the engine running really bad and rough. Probably no wonder after that hot bath. I opened the distributor cap, only to discover that the graphite-made sliding contact was completely worn. Not just a tiny bit, but so much that there was no contact at all. We had an older, worn cap on board that I fit in, but the engine still would not run acceptable. So we decided to get the proper sliding contact from the old cap and fit it into the newer cap. That thing has a spring underneath – if it would have slipped off into the sand, this totally would have been the end. Did I mention that it was completely dark already? And after refitting our improvised “new” ignition system the engine was still not running better.

We finally decided to go back all the way, car breakdown or not – we just had no other choice! Oh well – we thought about staying there for the night, but with no food and proper water that option was just the very last one to be taken. However, what was pretty straightforward at daylight turned out to be a major problem at night: we often could not find the right tracks or were simply unable to locate the markers along the way. We ended up driving circles every now and then or driving into dead ends. One time we drove up a steep hill when I suddenly realized that there were no other tyre marks leading up there. In the last moment on top of the hill I stopped and got out of the car .. only to find nothing but a deep abyss on the other side!

We drove on and on with our severely battered truck, always hoping to make it out eventually, knowing what obstacles were still waiting since we had passed them already. And we did, slowly but steady, after a 3 hour drive in the dark (remember: not more than 15 kilometers) – after 9pm we passed the entry gates and drove back to our camp. Being quite a bit traumatized, but without major harm.

 

April 04, 2011

We woke up in the LandCruiser near Cowell very .. very .. very early. What do you do when probably everyone else is asleep? Right, you head back to Lucky Bay and stroll along a 4WD tourist drive!

Well, it wasn’t that hard. A bit of soft sand. We would face some real hard obstacles a few days later .. after a bit of shaking we drove back to Cowell and prepared breakfast.

Not bad, eh? Yummy bacon and an original Australian Easter Bilby – they probably where short of bunnies? Don’t worry, it was made out of chocolate. Meanwhile we could watch a lot of oyster fishers and their trawlers arrive and depart from the nearby boat ramp. Indeed the whole of the Eyre Peninsula is just crazy about fishing – be it salmon, oysters or anything swimming in the sea.

Next stop was Arno Bay. Here we finally got to do a few walks again, e.g. the Mangrove Boardwalk which is designed to showcase the diverse and pristine beauty of the Arno Bay Estuary and its Mangrove habitats. We went to the beach as well, finding again surprisingly massive amounts of seaweed ..

After that we stopped at Tumby Bay. Yes, another bay. It’s unbelievable how many beautiful bays lie next to each other on this peninsula, perfect for swimming, surfing or fishing. Similarly unbelievable is the fact the Eyre Peninsula was not even mentioned in one of our travel guides – at all! Not a single page. What a shame ..

On our way to Port Lincoln in the Boston Bay we left out Port Neill and Louth Bay. Sorry, guys – maybe next time. The first short stop in Port Lincoln was the “Axel Stenross Maritime Museum“. However, we did not enter it as it was too late anyway, but just took a look at the boats.

It was getting late by now. Ok, actually it was only around 4:30pm, but after the time shift to winter time in South Australia it got dark at .. 6:30pm. We had decided that from now on we wanted to be on time to find a suitable campsite and to erect the tent in the last sunlight. So we followed an advice from the local Information Center that there’s a free campsite (with toilets – woohoo!) at Fishery Bay. Sounded perfect .. off we went.

On the way to Fishery Bay we got a first glimpse of what would await us in the Lincoln National Park – e.g. the gigantic sand dunes in Sleaford Bay.

There is a 4WD track leading from Sleaford to Wanna called the Sleaford – Wanna Dune Track .. and oh, you guessed right. We were so wanting to do that ..

Arriving in Fishery Bay, we were eager to set up our brand new tent for the first time. We had bought a 4-person dome tent with a lot of space – 210x240cm. But that was well filled by our brand new air mattress – coming in a size of 200x150cm. Gone were the times with a crappy futon mattress in a lousy little tent!

Our spot even had a fire area prepared for us. This looked like campers’ heaven, or not? It would get even better when we walked down the 100 meters to the beach whose waves had already made an impressive sound ..

We concluded the day with a fantastic campfire and prepared a couple of oh so tasty burgers – Inka had one, I could not resist to eat 3. A cold beer helped a lot to make us believe that our second night restarting our travels would be much better than the first one ..

 

April 3, 2011

We left Mount Pleasant – finally -  in the afternoon of April 2, 2011. On our way to the Eyre Peninsula we stayed at a house of a friend’s friend and arrived in the dark. Hence the next day was our first day of actually traveling again .. hooray!

We woke up to a relaxed atmosphere and – after a lot of cold and rainy days in the Adelaide Hills – to a bright blue sky and a warming sun!

The little Doggie now known as Eric belonged to Inga and was a really cute little bugger .. we quickly became big fans and played around with him all the time.

Our first sight to visit was Telowie Beach. There we went to the wreck of the “York” lying on the beach rotting to pieces ..

Telowie Beach itself is a lonesome and idyllic place. The mangroves are growing close to the shoreline and you can see Weeroona Island in the background.

On our way back we came across this brown fellow:

You better not tease this one because it is most likely venomous. I could not recognize clearly if it was actually an “Inland Taipan” – it if was, it is the most venomous snake on the planet. *shudder*

Afterwards we went back on the road to Port Augusta – again! Must be a curse or something, we end up here every now and then. Some shopping and refueling later we took the Eyre Highway and then the Lincoln Highway. Passing Whyalla we decided to stop in Cowell for the night. We found no private spot to erect our shiny new tent, therefore we had a pretty uncomfortable night on our LandCruiser’s seats… not the best restart for our travels, but things will hopefully get better!