We had to be up at a ridiculously early time this morning to prepare for the long day in front of us, so early in fact that I hadn't previously been aware that such a time of the morning existed. On the way out of town on the coach, we passed probably the most optimistic tourist attraction I've ever seen in my life, in terms of initial cost against any possible return - the so-called Min Min encounter. Opened in April 2000, this ultra modern attraction set somebody back a staggering 1.8 million dollars and is literally the only thing to do for hundreds of miles in any direction - nevertheless, it somehow manages to pull in a couple of hundred visitors every day, usually people who are just passing through and decide to stop for a drink and to see what Boulia has to offer. I really can't imagine anybody from even the nearest town getting up in the morning and saying to their family "I know what we can do today, we'll have a day trip to see the Min Min encounter in Boulia. Let's all get in the family car and start driving, and by sunset we might have arrived just as it's closing!"

Each room, I'm told, contains a different scene depicting one of the many apparent sightings of the Min Min lights. Each is acted out by animatronic waxwork figures staring at an electronic sky onto which the lights are made to appear and dart around using a combination of high tech fibre optic wizardry and projection. Moving from room to room is apparently quite eerie in itself as everywhere is dark and silent, and when the waxwork robot figures start to move, point at the sky and relate their tales of magical lights it's enough to scare the pants off anyone. The Min Min encounter is clearly designed to be something of a modern theme park style attraction, and after spending forty-five minutes in dark rooms being told ghost stories in hushed voices by moving waxworks, any small children who have not already died of fright are subjected to a "ride" through the history of the Min Min in which they can have their own encounter with the lights and come out of the building shaking with fear. The irony is that the Min Min encounter apparently makes the lights seem like something out of a science fiction film, far more frightening than they could possibly be if you saw them in real life. If I was driving along a lonely dirt track late at night and saw a bright light darting around in the sky, I'd probably be really happy that I could tell everyone I'd seen the Min Min lights. I can imagine that I'd be far more excited than frightened by the experience, and the only thing likely to change that would be if one of the lights forced my car off the road, landed in front of me and opened up to reveal an army of little green men waving anal probes in my direction. For all the money spent on this modern marvel, the Min Min experience doesn't even seem to have a website. I did, however, doing research for this book, come across one particular review of the attraction which sums it up rather nicely as providing " a good example of the art of outback bulls***"... and I think I'll leave it there.

Today has mostly been an exercise in getting from one place to another. Between Boulia and Alice Springs we're talking about a distance of almost five hundred miles, almost all of it totally barren desert with nothing to see other than the occasional mirage. Along the route, most of us came pretty close to slipping into a coma on several occasions through lack of activity, and if anybody thought they saw a car heading towards us from the distant horizon then we would all race to the front of the bus and press our faces up against the windscreen in the hope that we might get to see some sign of life. Ok, so I'm exaggerating just a little, but we really didn't have a lot to do today other than lay back in our seats and try to catch up on some sleep.

Other than for our lunch break, the coach stopped three times along the way. The first was in the middle of nowhere so that the driver could really rub it in about how remote and harsh the area was - we all piled off of the coach into the steaming hot desert and stood in the middle of the road which stretched for seemingly hundreds of miles in a perfectly straight line in both directions. We stood around for a bit, drunk about twelve gallons of water each from the tank the driver had stashed in the luggage compartment, took it in turns to take photos of each other standing on the road to nowhere, walked up and down the road and then got back on the bus. This was described to us as a "nothing walk" and was clearly designed for no other purpose than to really make it clear to us that outback Australians live in one of the harshest environments on Earth and that us pampered pommies wouldn't know hardship if it smacked us in the face. Australian coach captains like to make sure we know this, from time to time. Our particular driver was also quite keen on pulling onto the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, turning the engine off and getting out muttering something before raising the bonnet and peering myopically at the engine for a while in disgust. He would then get back on and tell us that he'd heard a knocking noise and that we were just going to let things cool down, but not to worry as tour groups almost never ended up getting stranded in the middle of the desert and found several weeks later as skeletons.

Our second stop was equally exciting, on the border between Queensland and the New Territory. I'm not altogether sure why this would be considered such a monumental thing - I'm pretty sure that a coach trip from London to Cardiff wouldn't involve a stop at the welsh border for us to get out and step back and forth across the line for no apparent reason - but our driver seemed to be excited about the idea, so we humoured him. The border consists of nothing more than a giant sign welcoming visitors to "Australia's Nature Territory" as though they don't have any nature in the rest of the country. Interestingly, considering this was the only sign for hundreds of miles and the road sign makers hadn't exactly had too much to do, they still managed to spell "Territory" with three Rs - Terrritory. Now, it really does take a staggering level of stupidity to design a sign, have it printed, cart it out into the middle of nowhere, stick it in the ground and stand back to survey your work without noticing that you've got too many Rs. But then, I suppose that after travelling all that way just to put a sign in the ground, you're probably going to be more inclined to just pretend you haven't noticed the mistake rather than going back to the factory, printing another sign and doing the journey all over again the next day.

The only sign of life on the border was Tobermorey Station, which sounded like a railway terminal for Wombles but was, in fact, the last chance for long haul drivers to refuel for hundreds of miles. However, in a staggering display of lack of forward thinking, the new management has just decided to close both the petrol station and the camp site - so now, drivers on the long road from Boulia to Alice Springs don't have any facilities for refuelling for a distance of around three hundred miles. That might be alright for a coach with a large petrol tank, but I know for a fact that my car couldn't go three hundred miles without filling up. To get from Boulia to Alice Springs, it is now necessary to take your own extra petrol supply along for the ride, in a petrol can.

The Northern Territory, despite being the third largest "state" in the country, is also the least populated with a total population of 215,000. Total land area is only 520,000 square miles, so this means that every single person in the region could stand two and a half miles away from each other. That really is what you call personal space. The Northern Territory, in actual fact, is the only region of Australia which isn't actually officially a state. I'm not one hundred percent sure exactly what difference that makes, if any, but they did have a referendum back in 1998 on the subject of being elevated to full state status which didn't go quite the way most people were expecting. Without doing a lot of tedious research into the Australian political system and falling asleep over my keyboard, I certainly don't claim to be any sort of expert on the subject, but suffice to say that I can't really imagine things changing much. If life continues more or less unchanged in Hong Kong after the handover back in '97, I really can't imagine Australia being shaken to it's very foundations by the Northern Territory becoming the Northern State.

Our final stop on the way into Alice Springs was to take a look at a five metre termite mound by the side of the road, and to take it in turns to have our photo taken being dwarfed by it. This thing was huge, and I've seen some pretty large termite mounds on previous trips to Australia. Termite mounds come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, from the graceful Cathedral mounds to be found in the national parks of the Northern Territory to the great lumpy red blobs which appear all over the outback. The one we were shown today was something of the epitome of a lumpy red blob - but you could see where parts had been added to it over the years in a hap-hazard manner as the colony expanded. Often, termite mounds begin life as small clumps of earth hidden from the sun under a piece of wood or in the shade of a rock. Termites, however, really don't know when to stop and as the colony grows they tend to just build and build until they drop down dead. Let's face it, there isn't much else to do if you happen to be a termite, is there - it's not as though there's ever much to watch on Termite Television or anything. Occasionally, winged termites will leave the colony and go off looking to start a new one elsewhere, but it really does seem as though most of them would rather just stay in one place and add a couple of rooms on instead. Probably the most well known termite mounds in Australia are the so-called Magnetic termite mounds. It is very important that termites maintain the internal humidity of the mound at quite a high level as otherwise the workers would allquickly dry out and die. The Magnetic (or compass) termite's solution to this is to build their mounds to be thicker along the east-west side than the north-south. In this way, they keep the humidity and internal temperature at the right level throughout the day as the sun moves across the sky. Coach captains with a particularly wicked sense of humour have been known to pick on the more gullible (for which read: stupid) members of their group and have them trying to stick magnets to the magnetic termite mounds. Luckily, our driver was slightly less of a practical joker. Either that, or he simply couldn't find anybody quite so thick on our coach.

Upon arrival in Alice Springs, those of the group who just had to be somewhere urgently went their separate ways and the rest of us were booked into a hotel for one night so that we would have the opportunity to get together for a farewell meal and disco down in the bar. Several tables had been arranged along one wall so that we couldn't get away from each other even if we'd wanted to, and a fixed menu had been laid on which contained nothing that looked remotely appetising. It seemed a little like going up to get our school dinners, as we waited for our table to be called and then silently shuffled up to the counter in single file to look over the carefully laid out bowls of not so carefully cooked gruel and wonder what we had done to deserve it. In the end, in a typically Australian display of no messing about, our coach captain simply marched into the kitchen and just started lying out of his backside, shouting something along the lines of "look, this isn't good enough. I've got people out there with dairy allergies, where's the alternate menu?" - and suddenly the handful of us with weak stomachs were being taken care of personally. This had a mixed reaction from others at the table - some wanted to know who we'd had to sleep with to get the good food, and others clearly just looked down their noses at us as they tucked into things that they probably couldn't identify but may well be seeing again by the morning.

It was sad to say goodbye to the travelling gang, but nice to sit down for a meal and talk about the trip before going our separate ways. The next day, many of us were getting on flights to different parts of the country, and one couple were off to NewZealand. As an option, however, our coach captain had handed out leaflets offering us discounts off a trip the next day to Uluru - and, lets face it, this is what we'd come all this way inland from the east coast for in the first place. It did, however, mean getting up pretty early in the morning to catch the tour - nothing new there, then - so after dancing for a bit and saying goodbye to everybody, Eloise and I retired and fell asleep just as soon as our heads hit the pillow. To be honest, after all the early mornings we'd been having lately, it was a real effort not to fall asleep before we even got up the stairs.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.