We’ve planned this part of the journey as a series of relatively short hops. The main reason for this is the unpredictability of the unsurfaced roads we’re using.
The trip from Marla to Oodnadata, along the Oodnadatta Track is only about 210 km. The road was mostly in pretty good condition. Patches of corrugations were few and far between and the only hazards were the occasional water holes where the road has been damaged when it’s been driven in the wet.
There are cattle grids along the road too and these had to be treated with respect as the steel plates tend to sit above the road surface. Hitting them at any speed and you can really feel the impact, they could probably slice a tyre if you were unlucky.
Other than the hazards above we could easily cover the ground at 80 to 90 kph so we arrived in Oodnadatta shortly after dinner time. Our first stop was the Pink Roadhouse to pay for camping and get our desert parks permit. The camping was easily sorted but it seems that, contrary to the government web site, they no longer sell the permits. We’ll have to see if we can get one at Mount Dare.

The Pink Roadhouse

The camp site isn’t exactly the best we’ve stayed at but it’s functional ! We’ve had a few nights with broken sleep thanks to noise on the camp sites and we were both pretty tired when we arrived so we had a bit of an afternoon kip in the tent both to catch up on some sleep and to evade the numerous flies that were driving us to distraction !
Tomorrow we’ll head north to Dalhousie, another short trip of around 200km. We might continue to Mount Dare if the road is good and we get there in decent time.