Nullarbor Part 2 - Disaster Strikes

Location: Darwin
Weather: Hot n'Humid

After buying a few bits and pieces in Port Perrie and visiting the very friendly Information Bureau woman. I took a bit of a detour along a B-road to see some of the famous Flinders Range area. I visited several very small country towns - Gladstone(which had a jail you can actually stay the night in), Laura (bought a 2nd hand book about Winston Churchill here...and what a great name for a town, haha) and Wirraburra. Stopped at Melrose and considered climbing Mt Remarkable, but it was 12km's return and it was extremely hot, so I went on a fruitless 4km walk to try to find some mines instead. Most stuff in this area was only accessable by 4WD or you had to walk miles to get there, so I missed out on a few good things (oh for more time) such as Alligator Gorge and Wilmington Forest. Anyways, after heading back onto Highway 1 I made it to Port Augusta! Goal Uno of my journey achieved without problem - Port Augusta was a big dot on the map - it is also a crossroads to the famous outback mining town of Coober Pedy (where I had considered taking a detour to, but at 850km's I decided not to). Had quite a few shops and supermarkets, so I stocked up on food, water, beer and camping gas for my stove. Interestingly the price of petrol was now starting to climb. In Adelaide it was around $0.99 per litre, it was now about $1.059 per litre by now, no indication of what it would rocket to later. BUT the countryside was very pleasant and largely yellow wheatfields. Also there were a couple of huge salt flats outside Pt Augusta, I recall something about Donald Campbell breaking the landspeed record around here.
After spending in total a day and a half in Pt Augusta, it was time to move on. I drove all the way past Iron Knob and to the town of Kimba. A quick look in town revealed it was a regular reasonably sized country town.
OK, people who I've told about this trip, the time is here to TELL THE TRUTH! because you lot wouldn't have been able to handle the truth at the time!
I head out of Kimba in a most good mood. I am on schedule, it is still light at 7pm and I have even got the stereo in the car working (a minor miracle). Then DISASTER! one second I'm looking at the road and all is fine and dandy, the next I'm careening half way off the road, next the car is seriously out of control and skidding on the gravel and I dunno what on earth is going on or what to do, it did actually cross my mind that the car might flip over, but I guess for the 2nd time this year (see ski-ing earlier) I went into survival mode and after doing a 360 degree spin the car ground to a stop. Before the adrenaline had time to hit me, I got out and took a quick look. Upon inspection the only damage was to the back tyre that was letting air out at a rapid rate. It also struck me that it didn't actually matter for once if I had dented the car, because it wasn't really of the same condition as my Peugeot at home. BUT then I got a bit terrified when the beast refused to start. Luckily it turned out it was only because I wasn't in Park, so once I changed gear things were ok! PHEW! It was then I discovered that there was no spanner to undo the spare tyre with. doh! but some nice people driving to a country & western festival in a 4WD gave me a great help and swapped the spare tyre, these guys were well prepared and even had a tyre inflator! Now I've been in a fair few car crashes over the years, but this is the first one where it could possibly be attributed to me(of course I personally blame the road and the car, anything but myself). I think the reason I actually lived is because I was going quite slowly at the time, maybe 60kms(40mph), but I am still quite proud of the skid marks on the road! just look at them:

To be honest the only positive out of all this is that I got to stay the night in my own room in the excellent local pub/hotel and I got to see TV and sleep on a real bed for once. I also got to do my laundary for free! To be honest the damaged tyre became a bit of a pain and I'll comment on that later.
But I escaped this incident unscathed and ready to continue!

By JamesReed on 21.12.04 @ 06:45 AM GMT