Deane & Jack's Motorcycle Trip in
Australia and New Zealand
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Deane & Jack's Motorcycle Trip in Australia and New Zealand |
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April 2 - Port Pirie to Coober Pedy, South Australia 647 km (388 Miles) |
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Tonight we find ourselves in the Opal capital of the world, Coober Pedy, in the state of South Australia. And, we have a motel where we are staying underground in an old Opal mine! The couple who own the motel, a Comfort Inn, got the idea some time ago to build such a unique motel, and have taken several years to clean out the abandoned mine and build rooms for the motel.. And they have done a splendid job. Most of the walls, and all of the ceilings, are still the rough-cut from the solid rock mine, and then the refinement of the walls have knotty pine paneling in a pleasing way. Very well done!!
By the way, Coober Pedy got its name from Aboriginals when they saw the crazy white men digging for these shiny rocks, and they called this place "White Man in a Hole" - Coober Pedy being the way people tried to pronounce and spell the Aboriginal words. Today's ride was quite straight forward - there was only one road so we could hardly get lost. This route took us into "the Bush", starting our with bushes and trees, and then changed several times as we rode along.
In some areas the desert was just flat and barren, with some large salt flats.
We got pretty tired after the 390 miles. The Suzuki V-Stroms are doing quite well, but they are not a Gold Wing on a long ride. We are building up to a ride in a few days of almost 500 miles, so we have to get toughened up. Today we turned over 4,000 miles so far on our trip, and now have "only" 3,000 miles to go!! Wildlife Report We finally have seen some wild life so that we can give the "Wildlife Report"!! Today we saw three Eagles and four Emu's!! Each of the Eagles, at three different places, were eating road kill - carrion. Well, that's what is easily available, and it fills the tummy. One of the Eagles was sitting in the middle of our lane, and he wasn't about to move, and stared us down, so we had to go around him. For the Emu's, I saw the first two, about 15 yards off the road for the first one, and another 10 yards away for the second one. Their camouflage colors were so good against the colors of the desert at that point, that I just saw them out of the corner of my eye as I passed. And their camouflage was good enough that Jack didn't see them. The second set of two Emu's ran across the road, just in front of Jack. There wasn't a threat of collision, but Jack did brake hard to allow them plenty of room. And that brings up the question - Why did the Emu's cross the road?? Temperatures Desert temperatures for riding were not bad at all today, 85 degrees F being the high of the day. The owner of a small filling station & restaurant about halfway in our ride said that the high temperatures had broken about two weeks ago. I was planning on that, when I picked this time of year to ride through the areas we have. I had looked up temperatures of the deserts on the Internet meteorology data for Australia, and had seen that temperatures are starting to go down at this time in their Fall. We will hope that this holds true in the coming desert riding. |
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