G'day from The Alice

One postscript to the Nullarbor crossing: The van has, as most vehicles do in Australia, a manual transmission – and NO CRUISE CONTROL.
To those who are using the “comments” button, thanks for the feedback. We look for those every time we upload a posting. It’s good to see that someone is reading this stuff.
Anyway, we spent a couple of days down on the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia. Weather was nice, but too cool to go in the water, so more sight seeing than beach time. Have included a couple of photos: the beach at Venus Bay (looks and feels like a Nfld outport – seemed like quite a nice spot. Lots of that coast looks like much of the Canadian coastline. Still beautiful.) Also included the rocks called Murphy’s Haystacks.
We have dealt with a lot of high winds while driving the past month. These are particularly difficult to deal with with the high top van. Haven’t been blown off the road yet, but into the opposing lane a couple of times – happily when there was no road trains approaching.
A thing you will notice if you drive in the Outback – most vehicles you meet will wave when meeting you. Having grown up in Burns Lake, with a similar practice, I had no trouble accommodating the custom.
I must put in a note about the time zones. If you look, it would appear that Australia has three time zones. About the same size and shape as the USA, which also has three, so that makes sense, right? Well, not quite. The Eastern States (Qld, NSW, Vic, and Tas) all share a time zone, at least on Standard Time. Then, Northern Territory and South Australia have the next time zone, but only a half hour behind the Eastern States (kind of like Newfoundland), and then Western Australia straightens things out by being 1 ½ hours behind it’s two Eastern neighbours. Sort of. You will notice, heading East across the Nullarbor, that there is a mini time zone in SE Western Australia, forty-five minutes behind SA, and forty-five minutes ahead of WA. Kind of strange, but not many people live there, so guess it doesn’t really matter. To top it off, Qld and NT do not recognize daylight savings time. So, currently, there are six time zones. Mostly we don’t know what time it is, but as long as we get to the ferries and planes on time, we should be okay.
Anyway, we headed North once more, as planned. We overnighted in Port Augusta, after they had had a day of torrential rain, streets were flooded and all that. They don’t get much rain there, so didn’t really seem to mind. Mount Gambier, a bit South of there, set a new rainfall record for the month of November (100+ mm) – by the fourth of the month. Anyway, that same storm swept through the Red Centre, and the front page pictures of Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) were with creeks running all down it, and purple in colour, where it is normally red. The locals urged us to go see this unique situation, but the weather was still showery when we got to Erldunda Roadhouse, where one turns off ot Uluru, so we carried on to Alice Springs, where we currently are. It looks to be quite nice here, and the weather is fine, so far (looking for a high today of 26, and it is normally hotter than a FPBG). So we may spend a couple of days here, then head back down to Uluru. We have booked our ferry trip to Tasmania for Nov 18th, so have to get to Melbourne for that trip.
On the way North, we spent a couple of days at Coober Pedy, the opal place (again, the weather was cool for there, but quite pleasant). Of course, we acquired an opal while there. There are three ways of acquiring an opal legally in CP. One is to get a license and go fossicking (that is underground mining, with a pick) the second is go go noodling – which is digging around in piles of dirt (tailings piles) left by other miners. That may need a license as well. The third way – preferred by the locals – is to do the tourist thing and acquire your opal from one of the many local shops, using a credit card as your only tool. We utilized the third method.I have enclosed a photo of the stone, another of a field of opal mines, adjacent to CP, and the third one is of an underground dwelling: 70% of the local population live underground.