5 FINKE TRIP FAVOURITES

01 OPAL CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

Supplying most of the world’s gem-quality opals, Coober Pedy is an interesting place to visit, where a lot of the population live underground to escape the scorching summer desert heat. It’s said that your average ‘three-bedroom cave’ known as a ‘dugout’, costs the same as an above-ground house, but without the cost of running air-con. The local landscape is pockmarked with more than 260,000 mine shafts and entrances, and is not the place to wander around in the dark.

02 APATULA/FINKE

The remote indigenous NT community of Apatula (previously known as Finke) is 139km east of the Kulgera Roadhouse, south of Alice Springs. It has steadily grown in sporting notoriety as the target point of the Finke Desert Race from Alice Springs, Australia’s premier off-road event. Once known as Finke Siding when the Central Australia Railway pushed through around 1925, Apatula today holds on to its former railway heritage as a point of interest along the Old Ghan Railway Heritage Trail. Oh, and it’s also the farthest populated area from the sea in Australia, while the nearby ephemeral Finke River is said to be oldest river in the world.

03 GEOGRAPHIC CENTRE OF AUSTRALIA

Also close to Apatula is the Lambert Centre of Australia monument, representing the geographic centre of the Australian continent. Named in honour of Dr Bruce Lambert, a UN expert on geodesy and cartography, the monument is a scaled-down replica of the flagpole design that sits atop Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra.

04 OODNADATTA TRACK

It’s roughly a 200km trip from Coober Pedy to Oodnadatta and it’s famous namesake Track that runs 620km from Marree to Marla (on the Stuart Highway). Doing the track has become a sort of ‘rite of passage’ for serious 4WD tourers to tackle at least once in a lifetime. The Track follows a traditional Aboriginal trading route, with Oodnaddatta a major rail head on the Old Ghan train line to Alice Springs. Highlights along the way include The Pink Roadhouse, of course.

05 CHASING TRAINS

The Old Ghan Railway Heritage Trail spans 1300km from Quorn in South Australia to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. For our journey we linked up with the Trail at Oodnadatta, and again at Apatula/finke after detouring via the Kulgera Roadhouse on the Stuart Highway.