Long Desert Drive South

DAY 6: COOBER PEDY - PORT AUGUSTA (550 km / 342 mi)
Team Ethanol greeted the dawn of yet another gleaming desert day in Coober Pedy. We’ve been incredibly lucky with the weather this trip. Sure it’s been quite hot in some parts, but no storms and just a few spots of rain. Despite this the Telstra Next G phone has been very handy for weather updates. You can find current weather and four day forecasts for any town in Australia, just by keying in the name or postcode. So we always knew what sort of weather we were driving into…a must for this type of trip.

Had to wash the filthy Saab first thing, because there was a public display and community breakfast organised for this morning. The breakfast of course featured the inevitable sausage sizzle…after this none of us will be able to look a sausage in the eye for at least 12 months! This was by far the best public attendance we’ve had on the whole trip, in numbers, enthusiasm and intelligent questions. We handed out lots of promotional material about the car, ethanol and the Mackay region. And aside from doing my daily cross for ABC Radio, I also did interviews for both the Coober Pedy newspapers…I didn’t know this tiny town even had one newspaper, let alone two!

When the display finished some of the team went on an underground mine tour and were fascinated by the diversity of opals mined and the equipment used. It was pointed out that less than 20% of miners scratch out a living from the opals they find and less than 2% actually strike it rich. Most of it is back and heart breaking toil for nothing.

When we arrived at the official refuel point, we had a chat to the event officials. I had to chuckle when they told us that some of the other teams had been served written warnings about driving too slowly and creating a traffic hazard on the highway. One more breach and they’re disqualified. It’s just a pity that they got away with it for so long.

Today’s trip was just a medium 300 mile drive to Port Augusta, so we stopped for lunch at Glendambo, the midway point. We came across a busload of German tourists at a stop before Glendambo, did a sales job on them for the Saab, ethanol and Mackay and unloaded some more promotional material.

After lunch we took the Saab into Woomera for some photos at Rocket Park, which has a permanent display of jet aircraft and rockets from Korean War vintage onwards.

Now that we’re into the final couple of days we needed to organise Dyno and emission testing for ULP in Adelaide. It could only be done Saturday morning so we had to get special permission to refuel early tomorrow morning before the official time. We really need emission tests fhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifor both fuel mixes (ULP & E85) to give us a good standing in the final results.

Craig at CSR Ethanol has really come through with the goods as far as giving us incredibly detailed carbon footprint data for both fuels and now we need to correlate that with the car emissions. No praise is too high for CSR Ethanol, because apart from this the company is also a major financial sponsor of the team and they also supplied the E85 fuel. This is just the sort of corporate support that enthusiastic community groups like us desperately need, but so rarely find…thanks heaps guys!

Early night tonight for an early start tomorrow, again! Last leg into Adelaide for the ceremonial finish tomorrow afternoon.

Getting Sirty in SA

DAY 5: YULARA (near Ayers Rock/Uluru) - COOBER PEDY
(700 km / 435 mi)
Finally got going at 7.30 am for the big run down to Coober Pedy. Getting 11 people and four vehicles moving is no mean feat and now I know why drovers have dogs. From Ayers Rock we had to backtrack to Erldunda to get back onto the main highway south. One of our companion vehicles is a huge campervan in the Winnebago style. During that leg it had what is called an unsavoury incident with the on-board chemical toilet…suffice to say it’s the sort that wrinkles the nose, waters the eyes and creates an automatic gag reflex. Is that close to too much information? When this was reported to the rest of the team it prompted a whole raft of shall we say “crappy” jokes, which filled the CB radio airwaves between the other team vehicles. I thought I had the prize won when I suggested that we rename the campervan “The Grand Poobah”, but I was well and truly trumped when Megan, our youngest team member, christened it “Winnie the Pooh”. This was now getting kinda dangerous, because I was laughing so hard by this time, I nearly ran off the road.

The team had a “wee” break at Erldunda and then headed down to Kulgera for the official refuel stop and lunch. We started to catch up to some of the slower solar cars. They had a day off in Alice Springs when the Greenfleeters went to Ayers Rock yesterday. We passed the dog fence just out of Coober Pedy. This is the longest fence in the world at well over 4,000 miles and was erected many years ago, to keep dingos out of sheep farming country.

Coober Pedy is the home of the famous black opal and opal mining has been called the most heartbreaking job in the world, mainly because opals form in clumps, rather than seams and there appears to be no rhyme or reason as to where they can be found. You can see ample evidence of this, as the surrounding landscape is littered with a haphazard conglomerate of huge conical piles of dug and discarded dirt, as far as the eye can see. They leave the resultant deep holes uncovered as well. A rough life attracts a tough breed…this is a place where men are men and women wish they were somewhere else. There’s an old Coober Pedy saying “don’t walk alone at night and don’t walk backwards”. Sound advice on both counts.

Took the Saab out several miles to the Breakaways and got it absolutely filthy, but it was worth every speck of dust. This naturally sculptured work of art by mother nature is the result of the sedimentary crust eroding over many millennia, leaving huge outcrops of harder silcrete looming out of the dusty floor like long forgotten sentinels with multi-layered uniforms. Great backdrop for some publicity photos with the Saab.

Still waiting for the Dyno and emission test results but in the meantime we had a quick look at the fuel economy figures. We’ll need to check this properly, but it would seem that the best we did on E85 was about 10.4 litres per 100k and so far on ULP 8.6 litres per 100 km.

Tomorrow we’re off to Port Augusta, which is the penultimate leg before Adelaide.