Day two of our trip up to Darwin did, as our guides had warned, contain a lot of time sitting in the bus watching the landscape slowly change from dry scrub into green tropical vegetation. Our first stop came mid morning when we arrived at Newcastle Waters, a huge but now deserted cattle station that used to be an important meeting point for drovers crossing the outback during the early settlement days. In the 1800 and early 1900s, farmers in Australia employed cattle drovers to take animals over vast distances to sell at market, deliver them to new owners or simply find better sources of food and water during droughts. These drovers would move hundreds, sometimes thousands of cows or sheep huge distances and Newcastle Waters, being fairly central, happened to be a convenient place for ... read more

After packing up our swags for the last time we set off. Our first stop of the day was at Glen Helen Gorge where we sat in a cafe overlooking the dry creek bed and the sheer rock face towering above it. We stopped for about an hour, just about enough time to explore the area and do a short bush walk but once we saw the comfortable sofas we decided to sit in the cafe and enjoy some iced coffees and the view instead. After nine days in the bush we were so overawed with the sofas that it was difficult to prise us away from them when it was time to leave! Next we drove to Serpentine Gorge where we did actually go for a bush walk. We hiked up the steep cliff face ... read more

Day eight started with another early morning so that we could get around King's Canyon before the sun became too intense. Ian had warned us that the beginning of the route was up a very steet 300m incline called heart attack hill that would take us to the top of the canyon wall and from where we could walk around the rim. When we arrived at the bottom, the air already stiflingly hot, we saw why we had been advised to bring a lot of water for the walk. Living up to it's name, heart attack hill was very intimidating. We had to take a couple of breaks on the way up to the top but when we arrived the view was well worth the climb. We were able to look out over the plains behind ... read more

On day six we were up early as we had another day with lots of kilometres to cover. The morning was spent dozing in the bruck, stopping occasionally to refuel and stretch our legs before we stopped at a service station for some lunch. There was a nice patch of grass under some trees for us to sit while we munched away on our sandwiches. The service station was also home to a variety of bush animals that had been rescued from the wild after various accidents or misfortune. In an enclosure a orphaned and blind baby kangaroo shared his home with an emu that the service station owners had taken in after it had been hit and injured on the road. There were also a couple of emus wandering around without enclosures which was a ... read more

In the morning we cooked some breakfast on the fire before packing up camp and finding our way back to the Oodnadatta track. We headed north for a while until we got to a very scenic lookout point over the main section of the lake. There were also some information boards that explained why the lake forms and that it is part of the Great Artesian Basin that covers quarter of Australia, making it the largest and deepest artesian water basin in the world. I had assumed that the lake would be devoid of life seeing as there is only occasionally water in it. However, we learned that there are a variety of fish, lizards and frogs that call Lake Eyre home. Some of the fish are able to survive in the dry salty ground without ... read more