The road curves north into the sun, and the glare off the rocks has me searching for my sunscreen. The goop makes a nice base for the dust. Late in the day, my skin and everything else turns rosy, including the town of Oodnadatta. Thereâs a pink phone booth. And a pink canoeâno, two pink canoesâparked in the dirt outside the Pink Roadhouse. I roll to
a stop and a kid sitting in a pink canoe greets me with, âI say, old chap.â Tilly is her name. She says I can get a shower at this, the best roadhouse yet. Itâs 120 miles from the pavement, yet thereâs real coffee, not instant. Oodnaburgers, too, which a sign claims are âThe choice of the discerning palateâand they taste good, too.â
Owner Lynnie Plate, a mother lode of brains and charm, leaves the office open for my exclusive use. I try to get the phone to connect, working into the night. I canât get a line out of the country. Failure, and thereâs nothing to do but yawn and rub my eyes and see taped to the wall a poem whose final stanza reads:
The best place is in a bloody bed,
with bloody ice upon your bloody head.
You might as well be bloody dead,
in Oodna-bloody-datta.
Then Lynnie comes by and offers me a bloody bed for the night.
Â
MORE ROCKS, MORE SAND. Ten miles out of Oodnadatta and the headwind is drying my eyeballs. Ten miles and two hours farther, I bog down in the sand. When I stop pushing there is only the sound of the wind and the possibility that I may not make it to Lake Eyre. Iâm not going to die out here, a picturesque sprawl of bones. But if by midday no vehicle has passed and Iâm not halfway to the water cache arranged by the Pink Roadhouse, Iâll have to turn back.
No trees, no clouds. This is the gibber desert, a pavement of varnished wind-sculpted stones. When the sun is low and behind me, the gibbers glow like burnished copper, but now theyâre black as charcoal briquettes. Poking up through the gibbers are skeletons of saltbush, quivering in the wind. I push on, chattering across the rocks, plowing through the sand, crossing a basin of dried mud aglitter with half-buried gypsum crystals.
Itâs the sand that kills me. When Iâm stuck again I lay the bike down and take a quick and furious inventory of my stores. The harmonica I deem essential, but I sincerely want to fling the blasted computer onto the gibbers. That I wouldnât have a job without it makes no difference at
the moment. I canât eat it, wear it, drink it. An appropriate term comes to mind: dead weight .
Dead weight cursed the earliest effort to cross this desert, the 1860 Burke and Wills Expedition. They aimed to be the first non-Aborigines to cross the arid heart of the continent. Alan Moorehead tells the story, in Cooperâs Creek , of how they set out from Melbourne with a âfatal luxury of supplies.â Twenty-one tons of equipment for fifteen men, distributed over twenty-three horses and twenty-five camels. Thirty-seven firearms and, inexplicably, twenty camp beds. And, in event of flood, life preservers for the camels. They fretted over the camels, but an expert from India promised that âall would be well if a certain amount of rum was added to their rations.â They brought sixty gallons.
The rum proved popular. Soon the male camels were fighting over the females. The camp cook was hitting the bottle. When others joined in, Burke ordered the rum abandoned.
Sobriety didnât help. The creaking wagons fell apart. Overloaded, addled by bad weather and worse organization, they trudged into the desert east of Lake Eyre and set up a base camp on Cooperâs Creek.
Four men, now traveling light, pushed on to the northern coast. When they shambled back into base camp four months later, having eaten every morsel of food including their horses, they discovered that the others had given up hope and left that very morning. The explorers couldnât followâthey
a stop and a kid sitting in a pink canoe greets me with, âI say, old chap.â Tilly is her name. She says I can get a shower at this, the best roadhouse yet. Itâs 120 miles from the pavement, yet thereâs real coffee, not instant. Oodnaburgers, too, which a sign claims are âThe choice of the discerning palateâand they taste good, too.â
Owner Lynnie Plate, a mother lode of brains and charm, leaves the office open for my exclusive use. I try to get the phone to connect, working into the night. I canât get a line out of the country. Failure, and thereâs nothing to do but yawn and rub my eyes and see taped to the wall a poem whose final stanza reads:
The best place is in a bloody bed,
with bloody ice upon your bloody head.
You might as well be bloody dead,
in Oodna-bloody-datta.
Then Lynnie comes by and offers me a bloody bed for the night.
Â
MORE ROCKS, MORE SAND. Ten miles out of Oodnadatta and the headwind is drying my eyeballs. Ten miles and two hours farther, I bog down in the sand. When I stop pushing there is only the sound of the wind and the possibility that I may not make it to Lake Eyre. Iâm not going to die out here, a picturesque sprawl of bones. But if by midday no vehicle has passed and Iâm not halfway to the water cache arranged by the Pink Roadhouse, Iâll have to turn back.
No trees, no clouds. This is the gibber desert, a pavement of varnished wind-sculpted stones. When the sun is low and behind me, the gibbers glow like burnished copper, but now theyâre black as charcoal briquettes. Poking up through the gibbers are skeletons of saltbush, quivering in the wind. I push on, chattering across the rocks, plowing through the sand, crossing a basin of dried mud aglitter with half-buried gypsum crystals.
Itâs the sand that kills me. When Iâm stuck again I lay the bike down and take a quick and furious inventory of my stores. The harmonica I deem essential, but I sincerely want to fling the blasted computer onto the gibbers. That I wouldnât have a job without it makes no difference at
the moment. I canât eat it, wear it, drink it. An appropriate term comes to mind: dead weight .
Dead weight cursed the earliest effort to cross this desert, the 1860 Burke and Wills Expedition. They aimed to be the first non-Aborigines to cross the arid heart of the continent. Alan Moorehead tells the story, in Cooperâs Creek , of how they set out from Melbourne with a âfatal luxury of supplies.â Twenty-one tons of equipment for fifteen men, distributed over twenty-three horses and twenty-five camels. Thirty-seven firearms and, inexplicably, twenty camp beds. And, in event of flood, life preservers for the camels. They fretted over the camels, but an expert from India promised that âall would be well if a certain amount of rum was added to their rations.â They brought sixty gallons.
The rum proved popular. Soon the male camels were fighting over the females. The camp cook was hitting the bottle. When others joined in, Burke ordered the rum abandoned.
Sobriety didnât help. The creaking wagons fell apart. Overloaded, addled by bad weather and worse organization, they trudged into the desert east of Lake Eyre and set up a base camp on Cooperâs Creek.
Four men, now traveling light, pushed on to the northern coast. When they shambled back into base camp four months later, having eaten every morsel of food including their horses, they discovered that the others had given up hope and left that very morning. The explorers couldnât followâthey
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