Day 7

Our pre retirement trial trip- day 7
295 km Wilpena Pound Resort to Farina SA

The aim today was to travel further north than we have been before and commence our journey into outback SA following the Old Ghan Railway Heritage Trail from Hawker to Farina 🚊. Job Done✔️

Leaving Wilpena we headed into Hawker for fuel and to top up the water 💦, then onto the Outback Highway to commence our journey along the old Ghan railway into outback SA, passing through Parachilna, Beltana, Copley and Lyndhurst.

The 1200km railway operated between Port Augusta and Alice Springs from 1878 to 1980🚊

We took a short detour off the highway to Beltana, a state heritage listed town. It’s the town were the RFDS first began, camels were first brought to Australia 🐫🐪 and the first Afghan settlement. A large number of the stone buildings remain and are currently being restored by locals.
We popped into the Royal Victoria Hotel which is being lovingly restored and learnt a lot about the town and the Hulls that had owned the pub for decades.

We had hoped make the turn onto the Stzelecki Track at Lyndhurst to Talc Alf, to meet the Dutch talc sculptor, but the heat ☀️☀️☀️(38 degrees) had us continuing on our way to Farina.

Our journey was mainly uneventful despite the heat, except for an alarm on the tyre monitor for raised temp 🛞. We didn’t identify any obvious issue and took short stops to allow the temp to settled back down.
Oh and the road from Lyndhurst to Farina, is the worse made road we have travelled so far with more potholes than Vic roads 😳

Arrived in Farina and made our way to the campsite. Too hot to explore until sunset and wow, it looked amazing 🌅
Farina started life as a government dug well in 1870, and is now abandoned except for 6 weeks of the year when the underground bakery opens and volunteers work at restoring the stone buildings. Unfortunately the bakery want open at this time 😥

The sky put on a fabulous show 🌌for us which we shared with a trillion flies, moths and bugs 🪰🦟🪳Time for bed 🛏️

Our home for the night is the Farina Campground, accessed via a dirt road.
$20 donation, with showers and flushing toilets. . Camp fires allowedLue lisää