A 5m high mound of sand-eating termite poo


Yes, a solar powered phone booth in the middle of nowhere


2864km of driving straight into the outback on dirt roads in only 3 days! My road trip from Cairns to Alice Springs was awesome, I had a ton of fun. It was really nice to get away from the touristy east coast. I am now in the middle of the desert, never again to see an Aussie beach... well for a while anyways. The last 3 days were some of the longest of my trip, getting up at 5am each day, and driving for 12 hours a day through nothing. I think we passed through 2 towns on the way, and quite a few cattle stations (ranches). Unfortunately due to flooding, we had to bypass porcupine gorge, and backtrack down the east coast a ways before heading west into the desert on the first day. We stayed the first night at a little pub in one of the 2 towns between here and Cairns, played a ton of pool. The next day we stopped to check out some aboriginal art in a canyon on the way, and stopped in town number 2 at some point. We spent the night on a cattle station... hotels and hostels are a bit scarce out there. The cattle station was only a small one, at 40,000acres, some of them are a million acres out there. I was attacked by a black sheep trying to get to the bus, as soon as I walked out the gate he put his head down and took a run for me, and head-butted me right in the thigh, it hurt. There was a cow licking my leg as I was eating dinner and a kangaroo laying next to me. Up at the crack of dawn the next morning, for our last and longest leg of the drive, we left at 6am, and arrived at 7pm, and passed through zero towns on the way. Nothing but red sand, red kangaroos, and heat exhausted cows. My thermometer read 46C where we stopped for lunch, so a bit toasty. It is really hard to breath in that heat, each time you inhale the hot air evaporates the moisture in your airway. The heat was a bit more bareable than the coast since it was a dry heat. So after an exhausting trip, the whole sleep-deprived bus met up for a night of partying at the hostel bar last night. I won another didgeridoo playing contest there, and got a t-shirt. Apparently I am a pro. Now I have 2 days to explore Alice Springs before taking off for 3 and a half days to see Ayers Rock and some more of the desert.