Morning everyone - a very crisp 10 here this morning! The flies will be slow getting started today. For a while now I have been thinking about things in the heading and I've come up with a few things, hints, if you like.
Many small towns in most states do not have mains power and have to make their own which means that caravan parks (this one included)and other town amenities such as information centres are not set up to cope with the enormous variety of peices of equipment needed to be re-powered constantly - computers, digital cameras, iPods, game boys, DVD's, vacuum cleaners, battery packs, re-usable batteries, satellite phones, mobile phones (which usually don't work and no, CDMA does not work all over Australia) - also if people had a little notebook or phonebook in which they hand-wrote (yes, gasp, with pen or pencil) the numbers they needed (or exercised using the memory in their head instead of their computer/phone) then they wouldn't need their mobile phone. (No, I am not a Luddite by any means and most interested in seeing all these gadgets and how they work but they don't rule my life). It is very disappointing for people who are travelling the Burke & Wills Trip, say,
Innamincka,
Birdsville,
Marree and bush camps in between to find that the digital camera runs out of
battery power just as a mob of camels rushes across the road, or worse still, the memory stick is full and they can't purchase another one until Mt Isa,
Broken Hill,
Alice Springs or wherever.
Similarly, it is not possible to replace gas cannisters used in some cooking stoves - another hint would be to use one before leaving
home to ascertain how many hours of cooking you get from one cannister to work out whether you should pack two. Yesterdays experience for one couple showed 6 days on the road
bush camping and being unable to boil the billy for coffee after only 5 hours of cannister.
Camera batteries, memory sticks, game boy batteries, gas cannisters, fiddly bits for gas cookers, 'o' rings of various sizes, iPods, computers - most importantly of all though is MEDICATION. Very few towns have Pharmacies and very few towns with Hospitals/Clinics have Pharmacies with large stocks of medications.
It is a constant source of amazement that people who
bush camp all the time (without generators) have an incredible collection of electric kettles, toasters, frypans, hairdryers, even vacuum cleaners. How do they manage when they do bushcamp - do they use ironbark or redgum power sources or maybe gidyea.