Naracoorte to Adelaide

I was awoken early this morning but had a good nights sleep, the majority of the door were with a tour group and were up at 6 to leave at 7:30am. I let them all get up and run around before getting up and then went to shower in the strange washroom which was built in a huge converted watertank. Jeroen was up now and the owner made us both a coffee (but not from the grotty kitchen!) and then we walked around to the garage where his car was being stored. It did not look good the mechanic suspected the engine had seized but needed to check further so I left Jeroen with my number and went of to see the caves. The Narbrook caves were made thousands of years ago and are unique when water seeped into the limestone rocks and then formed channels underground, eventually holes appeared in the roofs of some of the chambers and animals fell in, these animals then died down in the caves and became preserved as fossils the sink-holes eventually sealed up with silt and detritus which also fell in resealing the caves until they we found by people in the 1800's searching for bat guano. The cave systems are huge and not all of the systems have been fully explored but large areas have been opened up to the public and guided tours are done through parts of them. The Victoria show cave that I went into is explained by a very knowledgeable guide who took us around different parts of the cave system and even had a seated area where we were given specially selected fossil bones to handle and projected images of the sorts of animal that were found in the remains. The tour took about an hour underground and when I got out I got a text from Jeroen to say his car had died and he needed a lift to Adelaide. So I went back into Naracoorte and met him at the library where he was pricing up a new vehicle on the internet. We called back at the garage to get some of his bags (The garage agreed to let him leave it there till Monday when he was going to return to get the rest of his kit – I couldn't fit a surfboard in my car!)
So we set off for Adelaide, the drive took about 4 hours and it was really good to have some company as this stretch of the route was fairly boring with huge great stretches of flat prairie land and dead straight roads. We chatted about all sorts and put the world to rights, politics, religion, traveling you name it! We did stop about halfway for a snack and stretch at a small one hore town I have no idea of the name but it did have a railway halt of sorts and I got some pictures of the tracks disappearing in the the horizon. Eventually as the road neared Adelaide it became a Motorway and started a long steep decent down to the city, down a winding cutting through rock faces and all of a sudden the town was in front of us. We called in a McD's to use the Wifi and find some hostels for Jeroen, he had brought a Sat Nav with him from his car so we used that to locate the Hostels in the City centre and at the second on he found a bed so I dropped him there and we said farewell.
i drove on out the the city to find a campsite Jeroen had found me in a guide book he had. (He needed to visit the vehicle hire places in the morning, I had no such needs to rush around!) It took me about 30minutes to navigate my way out of he city and find the right road to the campsite but 10 minutes later I was set up on the campsite and gave my old friend Ian Loxton a ring to arrange a meeting for the following day.