Australia day 14

10 July

We woke up in Coober Pedy after dawn. We have a morning routine by now. Living out of a caravan is taking on a pattern. Yet we went about this routine without urgency and only hit the road at 10:15 AM. We've often started out earlier, but today we discovered that most of our neighbors have their own patterns and we were in sync with them for a change, as they all vacated the campgrounds about the same time we did. I couldn't help noticing this morning that there are rock pigeons in Coober Pedy. I don't remember seeing these elsewhere in Australia. Alice Spring's pigeons were very different, with a pointy topnotch of feathers and a habit of flaring their tail feathers when confronting each other. Coober Pedy's pigeons are the kind I recognize (and have come to loathe) from everywhere else I've been in the world (I call them "feathered cockroaches!").

Today's countdown of kilometers to Port Augusta led us through some beautiful outback landscape. Wide sweeping vistas transformed into parkland that had bluish-green bushes and evenly spaced tall trees that looked very much liked they belonged in a Japanese bonsai garden, due to their sparse crowns and graceful limbs. The dappled cloud pattern to the south perfectly complemented the dappled terrestrial patterns of bushes and trees. The grasses and low perennials that filled in the empty spaces among these with pale tawny beige and yellowish green completed the entire effect. The drawback was that these grasses sustained gregarious flocks of small birds. I suspected they were Zebra Finches. As I drove along, flocks of these little birds flew up from the grasses and crossed in front of the caravan. Sometimes their deft aerial acrobatics save them, but several times there were some that collided with our caravan with delicate but fatal little thuds. It saddened me that I had probably killed these little birds. I couldn't prevent them from passing in front of my vehicle.

After we had travelled some time in the direction of Port Augusta I needed to get out and stretch. We stopped in an area that was treeless to the horizons, and the vegetation was no higher than my knees. I heard the distinctive nasal calls of Zebra Finches. I know their calls because I had kept a pair as pets for years in Beer Sheva. I used to imitate their calls (albeit poorly) and interact with them at home. I walked out into this outback landscape a ways from our caravan and eventually had another of my bucket list experiences. Zebra Finches were calling to each other in every direction I turned (Zebra Finches in surround sound). I had hoped to find these familiar friends in their native habitat and here I was in their midst.

This empty-looking landscape, devoid as it was of any relief, was where we saw several free-range emus in family groups of two or three near the road. This certainly was exciting! There was quite an abundance of road-kill kangaroos along this stretch of the highway. Road-kill is a useful indication of what lives where. There was a stretch of highway closer to Port Augusta where a number of cattle carcasses in different states of decay festooned the highway's shoulders. Rarer were the camel carcasses. I saw some dead foxes, and some dead rabbits, too, but the abundance of dead kangaroos alarmed me. I hope to never suddenly encounter a live kangaroo directly in my path, but someone must have had this misfortune if kangaroo carcasses were so plentiful.

A couple of other stops along the route either served as fueling stations or as leg-stretching stations. Among the former was Glendambo. It proudly boasted of populations of 22,500 sheep, two million flies and 30 humans. We have a photo of the sign that testifies to this. 

Among the latter, we stopped by a lake that ordinarily is dry, but this season it was filled. It was one of many such immense lakes in an otherwise arid outback. We marveled at its appearance. Its extent could not be determined from our vantage point. Where we parked to admire this, someone had left a flat red rock on a picnic table with a "Magen David" hexagram and the initials "H D" (House of David?) engraved into it (the rock). We photographed this unusual "archeological relic" as well (it's on film in Razelle's camera).

We finally pulled into Port Augusta – our outback-crossing odyssey complete. Ahead of us lay a new Australian landscape yet to be discovered. Port Augusta was to be our caravan's port of call for this night.