Alice to Katherine.

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What a gorgeous five days on the road. This is what I had dreamt it would be like. Got our CB radios working finally, so we can now both listen to music and talk to each other when we want as we ride. For the last 1200 kilometres we’ve been taking one to two hundred kilometre hops from one petrol station/bar/restaurant/campground “oasis” to the next, across beautiful, dry, almost “empty” (of people) countryside, past amazing rock formations, skeletons of historic telegraph stations and chest high termite mounds that look like friendly locals waving to us. We’ve passed many, many dead kangaroos (also flattened cows and wild pigs) hit at night by the thundering road trains (most cars and all 4WDs have giant bumper “roo” bars for night driving protection . . . we only ride from about 10:00 Am to 3 PM daily), and signs of scrub fires, (some still going unchecked). Until Helen did a wash tonight, we smelled of smoke after stomping out a small fire down the road from the campground we stayed at last night. Weird; no one else there seemed concerned about all the propane tanks in their camper vans except us.

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