Travelling across outback Australia is quite unlike anything else I've ever experienced, and never fails to take me by surprise however often I do it. Once your coach leaves one town, it's often hours before you arrive at the next and on the way the view consists almost entirely of red desert, scattered rocks, roadside grave markers and distant mountains. That isn't to say that journeys across Australia are boring by any means - quite the opposite, in fact. The skyline is always filled with something interesting, such as a curiously shaped mountain range, and if you do ever start to fall asleep you can count on the coach captain suddenly waking everybody up to point out some bizarre looking object on the horizon. Occasionally, on long journeys, you'll pass a road train going in the opposite direction - a lorry towing several long trailers with a total length of perhaps sixty or seventy metres, which seems to take forever to pass and throws up a cloud of dust just large enough to ensure that the coach driver can't see the road for ten minutes and drives into a field unexpectedly. From time to time, they'll be a roadside truckstop or cafe where the coach will draw up and refuel while passengers can go in and have a much needed ice cream and cold drink, but before you've had time to sit down everybody is being herded back on the coach - distances are so vast in Australia that there really is no time to waste getting to your destination before nightfall.

We only had a couple of stops on the way to Hughenden. Leaving Cairns, we sailed through part of the Atherton Tablelands, bidding farewell to the last bits of rainforest we'd be seeing in northern Queensland. As we travelled, our coach captain and guide occasionally came on the tannoy to point out a particularly large termite mound by the side of the road or to mention that we might as well turn our mobile phones off as there would now be no signal for the next three days until we reached Alice Springs, but we were pretty much left to sit back and enjoy the scenery. Our first major stop, after only a couple of hours on the road, was in the Millstream Falls National Park near the town of Ravenshoe to the south of Cairns. The park provides very basic facilities, which don't really amount to much more than a simple toilet which looks as though it might fall down at any moment and some picnic tables, but that's pretty much in line with the Australian philosophy of not disturbing the natural environment unless absolutely unavoidable. Big Millstream Falls, the larger of the two waterfalls in the park, lays claim to being the widest single drop waterfall in Australia, and it certainly is an incredible sight to see. When you first see it, it seems as though there are several different falls all lined up neatly, but this is an illusion - because of rocks jutting out at various angles from the top of the cliff face, the cascading water looks perfectly clear in some places and white in others where it gets churned by the rocks as it tumbles over the edge. There are two walking trails ofdifferent lengths which lead up to the top of the waterfall to where lookouts give fantastic views from above, but unfortunately we only had about forty minutes in the park before we had to be back on the coach so we simply raced up the shortest path to the top, snapped our photos and raced all the way back down again so as not to be left behind.

Our next stop was for lunch at the Oasis Roadhouse, which proclaims itself to provide Australia's smallest public bar. As you travel around this country, one thing you notice almost straight away is that the locals seem to love telling you that they either have the biggest something or the smallest something else. The outback is littered with so-called "big things", roadside restaurants or cafes which have a huge plastic model of something outside for no other reason than to get fascinated passers by to stop and have a look. Lets face it, if you've been travelling across the desert for hours and are losing the will to live, and then suddenly out of the heat haze there looms a fifty foot giant plastic banana with a cafeteria attached, you're probably going to stop, if only because you've just gone out of control and crashed your car into an oncoming road train in shock. Some of these strange attractions scattered randomly across the continent are the big Banana, the big Cheese, the big Mango, the big Cherries, the big Crocodile, the big Scotsman and the big Penguin. It's something of an art form. The Oasis Roadhouse, however, has clearly chosen to go in totally the opposite direction by boasting about having the smallest public bar - a fact that I am not going to argue with on the basis that the room was about the size of two average telephone boxes and you could open the bar door inwards and have it touch the opposite wall. Outside, a small table was set up where we could settle down for a packed lunch for a few moments while watching the not so bright local dog as it spent the best part of fifteen minutes, head tilted curiously to one side, staring intently at a small bird sitting on a branch about four feet off the ground, not quite sure what he was looking at. But once again it wasn't long before we were being herded back on board the coach.

Beyond the oasis roadhouse, the highway builders had clearly given up and the vast majority of the remaining journey was along unmade roads full of pot holes and unexpected dips which would cause us to be thrown suddenly across the bus at awkward moments, such as when we were just starting to nod off to sleep. Luckily, we didn't have too long to wait for our next stop, which was at Porcupine gorge, a place which was proudly described to us as Australia's secret Grand Canyon, a place where time stands still and the miracle of nature can be observed it all its glory. Can I just be clear on something here? I've been to the Grand Canyon. This is not it. Porcupine Gorge isn't even the little pointy bit in the bottom left hand corner of the Grand Canyon that nobody ever sees. Clearly, whoever decided to describe Porcupine Gorge as the Grand Canyon of Australia was, to use a popular British expression, having a laugh. That's not to say that the gorge isn't spectacular and breathtaking in every way, far from it. In fact, after driving for miles across arid desert, it comes as something of a shock to suddenly come across something so beautiful and seemingly out of place in its surroundings. Perhaps Australia isn't known for it's volcanoes, and the vast majority of them are long extinct, but nevertheless ancient lava flows have had a say in carving out many of the geological peculiarities in Queensland and the east coast and Porcupine Gorge is the result of lava flowing across the rocks and forming a hard basalt crust which protected much of the land from weather erosion. Where the volcanic crust was thin and has worn away, however, or in areas where the lava never flowed, the softer sandstone underneath has eroded to carve out the gorge and the wind and rain has gone on to create caves and magnificent pools which have become home to local flora and fauna. It is, of course, hard to imagine the weather being able to gouge out such a huge canyon on its own, but you have to remember that it's had millions of years in which to do it. Porcupine Gorge is still being shaped by the weather today, and in millions of years may well be twice as large again - we just don't get to see it happening. Wedo, however, get to stand on the platform at the lookout point and gaze around in awe at nature at work. The gorge, apparently, is full of wildlife and one of those places you see in nature documentaries where you could set up a camera by a trickling brook and capture the residents coming down for a drink while birds of prey soar overhead screeching wildly. Given more time, it's exactly the sort of place I'd like to explore. But unfortunately time was not on our side as the sun was starting to look as though it might want to set, and we needed to get to Hughenden for the night.

Hughenden is just about half way between Townsville and Mount Isa, both of which I stopped at on my previous visit to Australia. On that occasion, however, I was taking a scheduled bus service from one to the other and we sailed through the small town of Hughenden without stopping - and sail through is pretty much what you do with most Australian outback towns. Blink and you miss them. So, you might be asking, what exactly makes Hughenden so special that people on the long road west take the time to stop and have a look around, apart from the need to refuel? Well, mostly it's the dinosaurs. No, really it is. I promise I haven't spent too much time in the sun and gone totally insane - Hughenden's main claim to fame is the fact that the not-so-well-known Muttaburrasaurus, an entirely new species of dinosaur previously only dreamt about by strange little men in museums and palaeontologists, was discovered just down the road. And when I say "just down the road", you have to remember that this is Australia so I'm talking about two hundred kilometres away.

Muttaburrasaurus really does sound ridiculously Australian, doesn't it? Other dinosaurs get to be given cool names which have actually been stitched together from classical languages, like the Triceratops (from the Greek "Three horned face") or Tyrannosaurus Rex (literally "King of the tyrant lizards" - I'm pretty certain T-Rex would be quite happy to be referred to by such an auspicious name). Some dinosaurs even get to have silent letters in their names for no other reason than to confuse small children trying to learn how to pronounce them, like the Pterodactyl. Meanwhile, the poor old Muttaburrasaurus just has to make do with a name which sounds, well, ridiculously Australian. There is, however, method in the madness. Muttaburra is actually the small town in Queensland where the Muttaburrasaurus was discovered, which proudly claims to be the geographical centre of Queensland in the mistaken hope that anybody cares. In 1963, a guy called Doug Langdon was riding his horse along the banks of the Thomson river when he stopped to let the animal take a drink. Getting down, he tripped over a strange looking rock which was sticking out of the ground and didn't look as though it fitted in with the environment. He thought it might be something new, so he contacted experts at the Queensland museum, and before anyone knew what was happening lots of people in white coats with little dusting brushes had turned up and excavated the second most complete dinosaur skeleton ever found in Australia, from an era when Australia was breaking away from the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana (1). That's another wonderful thing about this continent, and something which the locals are more than happy to admit - the place is so huge that there are still large stretches of the outback which nobody has ever walked on. Given this astounding fact, there is clearly much to be discovered out there and the chances of somebody just stumbling over a complete dinosaur skeleton that nobody has noticed before are remarkably high. You've just got to love this country.

Dinosaur names are usually formed by combining Greek and Latin words, so it is slightly odd to say the least that one should be named after the place in which it was discovered - correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no MiltonKeynesosaurus. In fact, the full name given to Doug Langdon's discovery is the Muttaburrasaurus Langdoni, so he even got to have his own name immortalised. Also, as I mentioned earlier, the driving distance between Hughenden and Muttaburra along the cleverly named Hughenden-Muttaburra road is a little over two hundred kilometres and would takesomething like three hours to travel as the road isn't fully sealed all the way - so the more astute of you might ask exactly why Hughenden gets to take the credit for a dinosaur that was discovered nowhere near it. To put this in perspective, it's a little like Manchester taking the credit for something discovered in Cardiff. The answer, unfortunately, is that your guess is as good as mine - it seems to be something unique to Australia. Perhaps Muttaburra is considered too far off the beaten track for tourists to want to just pop in, and Hughenden is the nearest town on the main road which can shout about dinosaurs to passers by. Certainly, the fact that the Muttaburra website attempts to draw you in with a flash animation and then proceeds to be more of a community site which mentions in passing that visitors can expect to find a rest area with showers and toilets probably says a lot about why Hughenden, on the main road west, is a better choice for capturing passing trade. On the Muttaburra homepage, there is a search engine which allows you to find somebody you think might be buried in the town cemetery. The place really does sound like a barrel of laughs.

To see a reconstructed skeleton of a Muttaburrasaurus in the Queensland museum, or displayed proudly in the Hughenden dinosaur museum really does give you a sense of scale. Unfortunately, the fact that we were just passing through prevented me from seeing the skeleton in person, but photos are available on the internet and they pretty much say it all. Once you've seen the size and the completeness of the "Mutta" you can't quite get your head around why nobody had stumbled across it before - and for once you can actually understand how they have been able to work out so much about the way it lived. Previously, I've never really been able to understand, as a layman, how it is that palaeontologists manage to keep a straight face while describing the lifestyle of these huge beasts which, less face it, nobody has ever seen. In most cases they have nothing like a complete skeleton to go on, and yet are able to somehow point out to fascinated children in museums that the something-or-other-saurus strode about on two legs, used a special thumb half way up it's back to push trees out of the way, had a set of feelers so it could hear what was coming and only ate vegetables on the third Tuesday in March. The Muttaburrasaurus is different - you can see every detail, and all you've got to do really is imagine it with skin on and you can picture it stomping about in Gondwana.

Our little band of travellers were staying for the night at the Grand Hotel, the absolute epitome of a traditional Australian pub/hotel combo. This gigantic building, on the corner of Grey and Stansfield streets and taking up most of the block, has large open verandahs on both the upper and lower floors and seemed, at the time we passed through, to be the main destination for backpackers and anyone else stopping off in Hughenden. The upstairs verandah ran all the way around the outside of the building, and at night-time you could find many of our group sitting around it onwhite plastic chairs at white plastic tables playing cards or drinking and looking out at the town over the railings. The view, however, was slightly less traditional. About fifty feet from the front of the hotel, standing in the middle of a small patch of grass which probably would've otherwise been the village green and inhabited by happy local children playing ball games, was a full size plastic replica of Hughie the dinosaur. Quite honestly, if I hadn't seen it for myself I wouldn't have believed it - but one by one, we all slowly lost our grip on our sanity. Throughout the course of our evening at the Grand hotel, the vast majority of us took it in turns to wander out the front door of the hotel and stand in front of a giant plastic Muttaburrasaurus and carefully hold on to it's little plastic hands in what we hoped would be a cute pose while somebody took a photo of us. No, really we did.

The hotel itself provided everything you would expect from an outback stopover, which is to say only the very basics. Most of the lower floor was a pub, which was clearly the main destination for everyone living in Hughenden and was usually pretty full of colourful characters filling the air with colourful Australian language. Upstairs, it almost seemed as though the rooms had been tacked on as an afterthought. The main part of the upper floor was a giant open plan area which seemed to fulfil no purpose at all other than being somewhere you had to walk through to get from one place to another. The management had placed a couple of heavy immovable seats around the place, but they were so far from each other in the wide open space of the room that it was impossible to sit on one and have a conversation with somebody sitting on any of the others without screaming at the top of your voice at them. Mainly, we used this area as a meeting point or stood around in it chatting while waiting for our friends to emerge from the communal bathrooms and shower block. The room we were staying in had bunkbeds , although we had it to ourselves as the hotel wasn't full. It wasn't much larger than a small cupboard, and was a little dusty and damp, but this didn't bother us in the slightest as we were experiencing the "real" outback. It was incredibly hot, however, and we had a ceiling fan which didn't look as though it had worked since real dinosaurs were roaming the village green - but to be honest, this might have been something of a blessing as there wasn't really much clearance for anyone to get up or down from the top bunk without having their heads sliced clean off. I'm guessing they don't have the same stringest health and safety regulations in the middle of nowhere.

The owner of the Grand Hotel had been trying for a long time to take things to the next level and plonk a modern motel down on the site of the 100 year old building, but in February 2008 he finally admitted defeat after it had been pointed out to him several times that the building is heritage listed and the only way he was going to get any sort of go-ahead with the motel was if he spent around a million dollars restoring the Grand hotel to its former glory. At the time of writing, therefore, the magnificentGrand Hotel is closed for business. I'm sure he would disagree with me on this and say that what Hughenden really needs is a high class motel rather than a typical Aussie pub/hotel combo, but as far as I'm concerned anything that prevents a quaint Australian town from suddenly being overrun by tourists flocking to all the bright new facilities can only be a good thing. Given the choice, I'd rather stay in the damp upstairs room of the Grand hotel and feel like I've gone somewhere rustic any day.

One thing which outback Australia has in common with America is that even the smallest towns like to do things on the largest scale. In the USA, it isn't remotely unusual during a coach trip from one place to another to stop for lunch at a place calling itself a "drug store" in a town with a population of two hundred - but this so-called drug store will not only sell everything under the sun except drugs, but it will be the size of a small town itself and have enough seating capacity to easily accommodate several hundred people at once in its restaurant. A similar thing happens in Australia. I'm not one hundred percent sure if we were actually in Hughenden at the time, on the way to Hughenden or had just left Hughenden, but along the route we definitely stopped off for lunch at somewhere calling itself a bakery. I remember entering a small building which looked quite innocent from the front but which opened up like a TARDIS on the inside to reveal something more reminiscent of a factory than a bakery. To get to where we could sit down and eat our Danish pastries and croissants in peace, we had to march from the front of the store through a production area containing glass windows behind which machines were whirling around in the process of making large amounts of bread for the small amount of local inhabitants, emerging into a big room which would put even the largest restaurant to shame. Here, we got to order our pastries from a menu on the table and sit for fifteen minutes with only a handful of the rest of the group for company in a room more suited for use as an aircraft hangar than a small town bakery cafe. It's strange experiences like this that break up the monotony of travelling for hundreds of miles across barren desert from one place to another. That and counting the roadside gravestones.

(1) Gondwana consisted of what we know today as Australia, India, Antarctica, Africa and South America. The continent had started to divide around two hundred million years ago, but Australia was stubbornly the last to leave, finally breaking away a mere 40 million years ago. The only other dinosaur found in the country which was more complete than the Muttaburrasaurus was the Minmi, also named after the place it was discovered, Minmi Crossing.

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.