Oodnadatta track

The Oodnadatta Track follows the “Old Ghan” (originally OLD afghan) train track which was built around 1890. The last Ghan travelled it in 1980.

After the Painted Desert Road, we started the Oodnadatta Track and spent our first night at North Creek. Algebuckina Bridge was our first sight the next day - a long high rail bridge over the Neale River. 

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The Track is littered with old stone buildings - railway stations and rail sidings, with sleepers, solid iron pins and rails scattered around them.

Unusual black rocks that we thought must have high amounts of iron in them.

Yes, that is Russ!

 After a hundred km of heavily corrugated gravel road, we were looking forward to the 30km of cement -like highway leading up to William Creek, that a fellow traveller told us about. A storm started to build as we were sailing along the lovely just-graded-and-rolled road. We stopped to take photos of the forboding sky, admiring the colours.

The rain pelted down for a few minutes and turned the shiny smooth polished road into an ice rink. The car tracks in front of us had run off the road. Fortunately the driver had managed to get back on the road and was able to continue. We slowed down to better control the car, and then started to slide, in spite of doing 20km/hour in 4WD. Russ said “we’re gone” and we both held our breath, thinking we’d end up a statistic on the side of the road. Fortunately his instinct to speed up on the downhill, mid skid, was good and we managed to ride it out. We then saw crazy tracks ahead of us, as a car coming the other way, had decided to turn around and go back. For the next 10km we both held our breath again, as we tried to drive in the tracks of the previous car, to get some traction.

The mud on the car and caravan was so heavy that we stopped to get rid of some of it.

We passed the lovely Irrapatanna Hills and the road seem good enough for us to stop and take a few photos.

The road improved a bit as it got dark and we decided to stay the night at Strangways Siding , hoping the weather and road would both be better the next day. We listened to steady rain all night. When we ventured out in the morning to have a look at the many birds in the waterhole, our shoes quickly became heavy with sticky mud.

We got back onto the Oodnadatta Track without any problems and assumed that the rain had soaked in and wasn't going to cause us any further problems.

We had considered staying at Strangways until the wet weather had blown over, but figured that we could be stuck there for a couple of weeks if we got several more downpours and couldn't face staying in one place for that long.

However, the road deteriorated after a while and it became a white knuckle ride as we slipped and slid in the thick clay mud and the caravan fishtailed all over the place. After every slip, we were thankful that we hadn't ended up bogged on the side of the road. We knew that if we did slide over to the verge, we would sink in and not be able to get out. We were careful to stick to the middle of the road, so that if we did slide, we would hopefully only slide to the side of the road and not actually slide off the road into the 2-6 foot ditches. If that had happened, we would be stuck there for days or weeks. The main problem was that even in 4WD we struggled to get traction in quite a few spots. The Chevrolet has a wonderful traction control function which came on whenever one wheel was spinning and took power from the spinning wheel. Corrugations were now welcome and polished smooth road was the enemy.

We crossed about 20 or 30 creeks. all running into Lake Eyre for another historic filling of the Lake. Each creek was about 12 to 24 inches deep. Each one was a challenge because we had to go fast enough up the rise after the creek to get up the hill, but slow enough through the creek to avoid hitting bottom and sliding too much. There was a big sigh of relief after each creek as we got to the top of each rise.

Eyre Lake South clearly had a lot of water in it, although we didn't get closer to it than the Track for fear of getting bogged. And because we wanted to get off the Track ASAP!

We continued to struggle on the Track, in thick slippery mud and our blood pressure continued to rise. The Track doesn't look too bad in the photos and we would have been fine in most types of mud. But the combination of clay and water was such a lethal combination and made for very slippery mud that even in 4WD and with  a 6.6 litre engine, the Chev struggled.

We stopped again to shovel off some more mud.

As the weather and the road improved, we had a half hour break at Plane Henge, where a local artist had recycled old materials in his sculptures.

I took a few photos of the road, but not in the worst bits, as I was too busy pushing up my blood pressure, white knuckling the arm rest and holding my breath. 

The photo below shows the storm clouds over some beautiful hills, before more bad weather visited us!

We arrived at Marree, the official end of the Oodnadatta Track, red in the face and shaking. We greeted a couple of fellow travellers who had also just arrived in Marree, from the opposite direction and they were in a similar state of meltdown. A tanker was stuck in the mud just opposite the petrol station/pub in Marree. Apparently the Oodnadatta Track was now closed. That made sense and validated our struggle with the road. We heard that the road to Lyndhurst was much better and hadn’t had much rain so we pressed on, to avoid getting stuck in the next storm looming in the south. The road was amazingly better for some reason. We could get traction on the rocks beneath the mud and it made a big difference. We still slipped around a bit but not as much as previously. Just as the bitumen started, we met a tanker who was about to head up to Marree  and then further north with fuel, but after speaking to us, he decided not to risk the road and turned around and followed us back south.

We were thrilled to be back on bitumen again. We had a problem with our steering but assumed it was due to the load of mud on everything under the car. We got to Parachilna and parked there for the night. Immediately on stopping, we were hit with a putrid smell of burnt oil and the sight of oil spattered on the front left wheel and under the car...couldn't believe there was more, after the extreme stress of the muddy road. Russ spent half the night trying to find the source of the oil and talking to Kurt and his diesel mechanic friend and James from American Vehicle Sales in Melbourne. We were so grateful to them all for taking time to help us, late on a Friday night.

Saturday morning arrived after a sleepless night and we talked to every truck driver who was willing to speak to us, hoping that one of the would know what was wrong with the car. The verdict seemed to be that the smell and colour of the oil indicated it was diff oil.

We drove slowly into Hawker where we met the local mechanical hero, John Teague at the Mobil Service Station. His 50+ years of working on vehicles that were the worse for wear after the various tracks around the Flinders Ranges, led him to conclude that the diff had overheated with the extreme work and blown the diff oil out the little breather hole that is there for it to 'let off steam' in such circumstances.  He was sure it was safe to keep driving.

With rain forecast for the Flinders Ranges for the next week or so, and with such awful recent experiences with muddy roads, we decided not to punish ourselves further with more muddy roads that were also steep into the bargain. We would visit the beauty of the Flinders Ranges in better weather some other time.

We decided to go to American Vehicle Sales  in Melbourne, where we had bought the Chev, to get them to check out the diff and do a service on the car. We called in to see our friends in Mildura and also our friends in Melbourne and had a great time with them all.

After a week of work by AVS in Melbourne, we set off home via Lakes Entrance and Eden.