The real outback

Having followed the news for awhile it looked like we had to take action. Staying in Australia seemed trickier as states announced they were either closing their state borders or thinking about it. We did some hours of research and, after quite the hassle with airline websites being seemingly overloaded, we booked a flight connection back to Europe. Now we can only wait to see if it goes.

Mining towns are interesting to be in. While you might not expect it, it's all about mining. Most people you see wear fluorescent mining uniforms and drive around white pick-up trucks with a company number on it. You sometimes wonder if there are any women.

We continued our infinite drive south. The next town would be 420km away. The landscape on the way was once again much greener than we had expected in the outback. There were even some lakes with pretty green grass around which the cows seemed to enjoy. While being entirely different, it did remind us a tiny bit of the Netherlands.

Even though we have now driven a whole lot in Australia, we came across a new thing today. Suddenly there was a car coming towards us signaling heavily with a 'oversized load ahead' sign on top. It was aggressive, basically pushing us of the road. Soon we realized why. The oversized load was very oversized in this case: it needed both lanes and maybe a bit more. Remember the picture in the previous blog of Machiel being dwarfed by this haul truck? Now we know how those are relocated. Throughout the day this became kind of norm. Every one's in a while we had to make space for trucks transporting heavy machinery to the mines in the North. We tried to capture it with the camera but it never seems to show the actual enormousness.

On the way we also drove by another pink lake like we've seen on the west coast. We had to climb over a fence to get near this one though. We also ended up overtaking our first roadtrain! Took a while to find one that drives slower than us.

We camped on a camping in the middle of nowhere where we were apart from one other caravan, the only people. By the way, while the flies haven't been that bad lately, not even in Karijini, they have been on their worst today. They really swarm you entirely including your legs etc.Read more