We left Coward Springs not really knowing where we were going to stop for the night. The first option was an old siding for the Ghan with the ruin of the station and the remnants of a dam which was used for the steam trains.
Seeing the dam and waterway and abundance of bird life was still astounding. The sheer size and volume of the Great Artesian Basin is hard to get your head around. How can so much water be sitting underneath such arid land. Phenomenal.
Although the wetlands were lovely, we decided to push ahead and keep driving to Williams Creek as we had only driven about 20kms. Just before we hit Williams Creek the scenery changed and we had red sand dunes. These were covered in green bushes but normally I think it would be pretty desolate. Also we had crossed the border into the biggest cattle station in the world called Anna Creek Station. 5.8 million acres which is about the size of Wales, purchased by Sidney Kidman in the early nineteen hundreds who reading up on him was an astute business man who worked out early on that in order to make money out of cattle in the outback you needed vast amounts of land. Anna station is so big that he could move his cattle around to avoid drought in one end and so forth.
Driving through the station you can see why you needed so much land to rear cattle as even though it would be considered green currently it was still pretty bare. Just outside of Williams Creek we came across a dried up lake which we could view from the top of the bank. It very much felt like something out of an apocalyptic movie scene.
Williams Creek itself was even smaller than Marree with a pub/fuel station, a camp ground and an airstrip. The feature of the town is its access to Lake Eyre but as we had had such an awesome time at Lake Eyre South we didn’t feel the need to drive out to it again. Plus from this end it is a National Park so Griff was not allowed.
On arrival at the camp ground we found ourselves parked beside a couple we had seen a few times along the way and decided on a pub meal for dinner. We had a walk around the town which took us a whole 2 mins and sat back and enjoyed the afternoon sunshine. We did stumble across the golf course which consisted of 4 100 metre long holes played with 2 greens. We decided it was not sufficient to be considered for the O’Keeffe challenge. 😂
Dinner at the pub was fun and the food was great. We had to go for the early booking but soon after the place was absolutely packed which was not surprising considering the campground by the end of the afternoon was also full. Williams Creek for us was just a short stop and from here we were heading off the Oodnadatta track towards Coober Pedy. S