Trish Travels: Arltunga to Jervois

Day 4 - Arltunga to Jervois

Sunday, 9 September 2012

Said goodbye to Arltunga "Hotel", such a curious place. The hotel no longer has a license, but it is hired out for group bookings,$250, not bad , would be a great place for a club night, toilets, showers, kitchen etc, all original old stuff, very characterful. We had a fellow traveller in the camp site. A 77 year old man, travelling with his dog, sleeping in his car. Wife had died 10 years ago, quite sad. He gave us half a dozen oranges from his trees back home. Said he still had half a bucketful!

We set off to find the Cattlewater Pass, hopefully a short cut to the Plenty Highway. Find it we did, not a bad track and was a 100km saving. East onto the Plenty for a while before turning north to check out Boxhole Meteor Crater. No signs, but the map showed a station in the vicinity. Only track off towards the crater took us into the station, Dneiper. Drove in to enquire,thinking there was probably a track leading out there on the far side. The place was deserted, just like the Marie Celeste! A bit strange, we drove round all the buildings, signs of life, but no life! Maybe everyone had headed off to church, or a Sunday Lunch 200km away in Alice :). I didn't want to hang around any more so after lunch we pushed off to Jervois Station, the last fuel stop before heading down the Simpson.

Had been singing Happy Birthday to Ben all day, hoping he would pick up on the vibes that his family hadn't forgotten him and I was delighted that Jervois Station had a public phone (working) so after fueling up we had a chat with the birthday boy, who was 'recovering' from the previous evening with friends and watching the Eagles -so PAV got updated on the score as well.

We camped just over the road beside the dry Marshall River Bed, listening to cows 'lowing' all night.