Birdsville to Kulgera Day 24 - Dalhousie to Bush camp west of Kulgera

Day 24 - Wednesday 26/6/02
Start - Dalhousie
Stop - Bush camp west of Kulgera
Trip Odometer - 386.6 km
Stopped time - 2 hrs
Moving average - 69.1 km/hr
Moving time - 5:35 hr
Max speed - 105.3km/hr

This is a very enjoyable drive and quite an easy day's drive. From Dalhousie to Kulgera, we travelled to Finke via Bloodwoods Bore. The road to Finke is via Mt Dare, but this lesser used route is generally easier and more scenic. There's lots to see, such as the old bore and yards plus you continue along more of the Old Ghan route and pass directly by the Abminga Siding Ruins, which is plainly not overvisited.

Past Abminga Ruins you come from the east and meet a North/South crossroads. At this point you are 56km from New Crown, 203km north of Oodnadatta and 87km east of Finke. We turned north along the track towards New Crown and Finke and here the track narrows down to just a basic station track. Towards the border this track varies from wide and stony to narrow faint wheel tracks and then in places has some long sandy corrugated sections.

The road from the border to New Crown is wide, red and firm over a graded sand base. The homestead is quite large but it didn't appear to offer a stop for tourists so we kept going towards Finke. The road from here continues to be wide, graded firm red sand as is obviously well travelled by supply trucks and station traffic.

Finke hasn't changed since we passed through last but the motorcycle rally came through last week so there were still quite a few flags and signs laying about. There seemed to be an aboriginal cultural week with an art display but after driving around town we couldn't work out where it was housed. We didn't really have time to stop so it was probably a half-hearted effort and we didn't make any enquiries but just headed out on the road to Kulgera. The track passes the turnoff to the Lambert Centre - the centre of Australia. It's a 12km one-way diversion and since we have been there before we didn't go out there again. We were more concerned about whether someone had remembered to take our shocks off the bus as arranged with the roadhouse.

The bus was expected to make its drop off at 1.30pm and we arrived at 3.30pm and thankfully everyone knew all about it and knew who were were before I even asked if our package had arrived. We simply collected it over the counter and went to a bush camp to fit them.