May 13, 20193 min read

Oodnadatta to Erldunda

We drove back to Oodnadatta through the Painted Desert. A really strange landscape.

After lunch a the famous Pink Roadhouse in Oodnadatta (Elizabeth I would have to tally name dropped if I had read your comment earlier!!) we headed back up the track because we wanted to see a remarkable bridge. The old Ghan railway runs along the Oodnadatta track so there is evidence of it everywhere. Decaying sleepers slide off the raised line. There are rusting bridges and water towers dotted along the track. In one campground all of the amenities buildings were built entirely from old sleepers with a a tin roof. We camped by the dry River Neales, underneath the largest and most well known bridge and explored it in the morning.

Now I have to tell you more about the bridge and it is going to be useful for a trivia night one day in the future. Yesterday my Grandpa would have turned 100 and he would have loved all the facts I can find about this bridge so in memorium:

- The Great Northern Railway was built from 1878-91

- The Algebukina bridge cost 60,000 Pounds

- It is 587.8m long (51ft 6 in for Gramps)

- it is constructed from 19 spans of 30.9m (101 feet).

- it is the largest single bridge in South Australia

- in 1926 it was strengthened to carry heavier rail traffic.

- 352 people worked on the project.

RIP Ellis Richardson 12/5/1919-27/10/2013

You can't walk right across it as the sleepers are too degraded so a metal grid path has been laid along a bit of it. Zoe found it particularly intimidating to walk and kept trying to carefully step over the gap in the underlying sleepers. Underneath it was perhaps a 10m drop onto the rocky river bed but it wasn't in any way dangerous!

From the Neales River we headed to Dalhousie Springs. Now we have learned so much about the Great Artesian Basin and the way in which the springs bubble up from it so I'm going to share that knowledge with you via Zoe's diagram:

These springs were huge - like a 50m pool. And hot - up to 43 degrees in the hottest area and sitting about 40 degrees in most of the pool. There was a cold wind outside so each time we went for a swim (we were there for 2 nights) we were very reluctant to leave the water. Each swim was about 2 hours long! We were amazingly lucky. This campsite is usually busy as it is a popular place to visit coming off the Simpson Desert but as much of Queensland remains flooded the roads, the Birdsville track is closed and the campground was nearly empty so e had paradise all to ourselves! We had some great photos of this on Zoe's waterproof camera including a steamy morning swim but when we went to download them there was only one picture of a purple toy panda. Hmm. I do have this to give you a feel for it:

From there we headed west back towards the Sturt Highway. We stopped a night at the geographical centre of Australia. There was a flag there are some gross long drop loos. We made damper to go with our soup which was a fun activity that turned out well.

(ED) An idea of the roads here; see below. The kids were happy on these quite bumpy roads

Until they kept bumping for ages and ages and ages:

We have paused for a day at a comfortable caravan park to do some homework and blogging and life admin before we head off to see the big ticket items. The landscape in the centre is much more beautiful because of the dramatically red soil. I particularly enjoyed these fluffy caterpillar grasses yesterday (the botanical name, I'm sure).