Pack up camp and discover that the broken mounting clamp on the front pannier actually should be holding something on! Investigate further and find a couple more pannier bolts that have shaken loose on the corrugations and gibbers over the last 3000 km.
The manager of the Innamincka Trading Post was fantastic, cheerfully drilling out a couple of 40 mm hose clamps to replace the broken fitting and provide a spare. Tightened other things up, used a tube of SupaGlue as a make-good Lok-Tite substitute, and then away. I was feeling good and there isn’t much in Innamincka to make staying another day worthwhile.
A chat with the National Park ranger (he and the guy from Dalhousie Springs between them are the guys-on-the-ground for over 1% of the Australian land area) about the history of Innamincka from the incompetent Burke and Wills to the incompetent Geodynamics geothermal power plant fail in 2010.
Geodynamics wired up the whole of Innamincka to run on mains power to come from their deep hot rocks geothermal power plant. When that well exploded and the money ran out Geodynamics still had to tidy up the site. In true bureaucratic fashion Geodynamics has to remove all the town power poles and wires to leave the site – all the South Australian government has to do is put half a million dollars in to a solar / battery power plant and the town would have permanent cheap power. Instead the infrastructure will be removed, the townsfolk will run expensive private diesel generators and in a decade the state will have to rebuild the power system again!
Then to Burke’s grave site on the Cooper, before grinding out to the Dig Tree.
The main road out to the Queensland border was a mixed batch of polished smoothness and corrugated rocky horribleness. Basically a standard outback road populated by moving drilling rigs, road maintenance crews and tourists flogging their 4WD in the rough.
Queensland showed their interest in capturing the tourist and mining transport markets and financial strength by starting the bitumen from a few hundred metres from the border fence. Beautiful!