The Varied Desert

I thought the desert was going to be boring but worth the experience of long straight roads through flat nothingness. But it's so varied. We started off through scrub and small trees for about the first 50km then we past our first dried white lake beds and suddenly the small trees stopped and the horizon opened up. Scrub continued in its gorgeous blue green colour, so did the dead kangaroos (one being chewed by a fox) and the dead cows. We saw quite a few of these, their carcasses collapsing from the inside and their hides drying in the beating heat of the sun. Imagine hitting a cow! No thank you!

The land is not completely flat. There were a few lengths of road that were, where the sky was a complete dome of blue with a lonely sun high in the sky and 360 degrees of desert all around. But then you'd drive over a ridge that you didn't even see was there and suddenly a new undulating view would present itself complete with mesas and vast salt pans where lakes try to exist but fail.

We stopped for lunch in a place called Woomera. There aren't many places to stop anymore. I think we came through only 2 places that could be considered habited or maybe one was just a petrol station/ bar in the 300km we drove today. Woomera is a military town, I didn't like it much. It was just full of displays of missiles and the park where we ate our preprepared sandwiches was supposedly a bird sanctuary. Just poor sad parrots in small cages. Not so nice.

We have stopped for tonight in Glendambo. Basically just 2 petrol stations, a motel/bar, a caravan park (we're one of only about six people in this sand carpeted park!) and apparently a race course. BUT there is a little swimming pool at the motel and we had a lovely dip and since there is no food shop we've had to eat in the bar. Outside the window the Stuart Highway stretches north and south. Huge road trains (big trucks pulling up to three container trailers) storm past and our little tent is warming up at the back of the campsite in the early evening sun.

Tomorrow we rise early to ride to Coober Pedy, where opals are mined and people live underground.