Back in 1995, my coach tour of the country headed through South Australia on its way towards the red centre and Uluru - and many of the small towns we visited on the way are worth mentioning here before I move on to Adelaide. The following account of the journey from Berri to Coober Pedy is taken from my diaries of the time, and updated for this book.

True to his word, our driver - Mike - got us all to introduce ourselves to each other on the coach as we headed for our overnight stay at Berri. He had Lisa, our tour rep, go around the coach with a microphone, sticking it into each of our mouths in turn and insistingthat we give a speech. The whole thing was just a tad on the embarrassing side, and you could see people desperately racking their brains for anything interesting to say about themselves before the microphone reached them, but at least after it was all over we had a rough idea of who we all were. Believe it or not, it appears that at least seventy percent of the people on the coach had flown in from Canada, and this started to become something of a joke as more and more people introduced themselves - Lisa got to the point where she was simply handing the microphone to people and saying with a sigh "Just tell people your name and which part of Canada you come from". Nicola, the resident glamour on board the coach, had probably the most unlikely job you could possibly imagine for somebody who looked as though she'd just walked off of a catwalk, and I think it's safe to say that it took us all by surprise. We were expecting her to announce that she was a model or a TV presenter or something along those lines, but instead it turned out that she was a funeral director - and not just any old funeral director, but a funeral director in charge of embalming people. Now I don't know about you, but I really find it hard to look at a woman who seems born to be on the cover of a magazine and picture her standing over a dead body while chatting casually with her colleagues and filling it with embalming fluid. I don't think people quite looked at her the same after that, although it certainly didn't stop all the young men on the coach chatting her up at every opportunity. Nevertheless, I'm sure it must have crossed a few people's minds that, if they were to ever get anywhere with her and she ended up seeing them lying naked on a bed, her first thought may well have been to wonder where she could find a scalpel...

We were very much heading through bush country at the moment. Towards the end of the day, our coach decided that it was going to have a bit of a strop and we limped into the tiny town of Renmark on the banks of the Murray River with a busted suspension. When I say that this place was small, I'm not kidding - the population must have been about three (actually, it's more like 8000 - I was obviously making a point about how small the town seemed when we stopped there). As it turned out, however, this unscheduled stop was something of a godsend as the town had a beautiful lake on which people were water skiing. As soon as they saw that they had an unexpected audience, the skiers immediately started showing off and doing acrobatics, turning cartwheels, holding on with one hand and standing on one leg, you know the sort of thing - there was something quite surreal about turning up in such a small town and finding that one of its major pastimes was water skiing . Another thing which I found particularly strange about Renmark was that they had a drive through liquor store - something which seemed wrong to me on almost every level! To be honest, it was a bit of a shame when Mike somehow managed to patch up the suspension enough to get us to our overnight stop and we were forced to pile back on board and get on our way. I expect a bus stops in Renmark once in a blue moon - it's probably one of those things they go home and tell their other halves about in disbelief at the end of the day.

Our hotel in Berri seemed to me at the time to be out of this world. Of course, I've stayed in many more amazing places in Australia since - my hostel in the rainforests of Northern Queensland, for example - but at the time it seemed as though staying at the local golf course motel with views across the outback was just like being in paradise. Our patio doors looked out onto the green, and since nobody was playing golf by the time we arrived in the evening we had unobstructed views across them to the outback beyond. At night, we were told that we could leave the curtains open and expect to see the dark shapes of creatures which we couldn't quite identify coming up to sniff the glass before wandering off into the bush. I didn't get much sleep that night, keeping an eye out for wandering kangaroos that might feel like knocking on the window at dawn or having a quick game of golf with their Dingo friends while nobody was looking, but I was to be disappointed.

Probably the biggest tourist attraction in Berri is the Big Orange. This is one of many "big things" scattered across the continent, and I've already gone into some of the others elsewhere - but the Big Orange at least manages to be a little more than just a large out of place object stuffed in the middle of the outback in order to make passers by crash their cars in surprise.

At 15 metres high and with a circumference of 12 metres, the Big Orange is not only the largest of the big fruit of Australia, of which their are several, but also contains a shop, cafe, observation platform and 360 degree panoramic display. The observation platform allows visitors to look out over the river, although this is only a curiosity and clearly hasn't served as enough of a lure to bring people to the attraction in their thousands as had been hoped. As of 2008, the Big Orange is in the hands of liquidators once again, and given the current economic climate, it doesn't look good for a sale. One of the ideas being put forward at the moment is that the attraction could be repainted and rebranded as the Big Golfball, and then used as advertising space for sponsors. I don't even know where to start on that one.

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.