During the night, one of the couples on our coach decided to give their friends a call in Adelaide just to let them know that they were in the country and enjoying the tour, and their friends immediately leapt in a car and drove nearly three hundred miles just to see them and say hello before we moved on first thing in the morning. There was only ever going to be a small window of opportunity for these people to turn up in Berri and give their mates a hug before we'd have to leave, and then they'd just have to turn around and drive the three hundred miles back home again - but people in Oz seem to be nothing if not accommodating. Obviously, a mere three hundred miles isn't going to be enough to stop someone popping by to say Hi.

As you can imagine, the coach was a little late departing from Berri due to overly long farewells, but in the end we did manage to get underway and headed for our first stop of the day in the town of Burra. I don't know what Mike did with the coach overnight, but it seemed to be in perfect working order suddenly - so either he had managed to find one of the most efficient garages in the country to fix the suspension while the rest of us were all tucked up in bed, or from this point on he was just going to be keeping his fingers crossed that the coach had fixed itself.

Personally, I hoped it was the former as I couldn't think of anything less inviting than suddenly finding ourselves stranded in the middle of the burning hot desert waiting for a replacement coach to turn up. One of the things Australians like to say is "She'll be right", which literally means "Oh sod it, everything will turn out okay in the end" - so it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Mike has done nothing to the coach and is just happy that it's working for the time being.

Burra is an odd place. I don't mean to suggest that all the houses are upside down or anything, but it does seem as though nobody has told any of the coach captains just how rich in history the town is - so they just sail through with nothing but a coffee stop in the town centre and don't bother to show you any of the many places of interest in and around the place... or maybe our driver was just on a tight schedule. My diary at the time describes Burra in one sentence: "our morning stop was in the town of Burra". That's it. That's all I had to say about the place, which is why I was slightly surprised when researching this book to find a wealth of information and photographs about the town spread across the internet, describing Burra as a fascinating old town of historical interest surrounded by other small towns of no interest whatsoever. If there's one place you absolutely must stop on the way towards Port Augusta, the World Wide Web seems to say, it should be Burra.

Burra started life back in the 1840s as a mining town set up to support the newly operational Burra Burra copper mine. Before long, as is often the case in Australia, word of the mine spread and people came flocking in from as far as Britain to get in on the action, forcing Burra to grow to the point where it split into several smaller mining communities known collectively, if not particularly originally, as "the Burra". The Burra Burra mines were discovered at just the right moment: at the time, South Australia had not long been established as a colony and was struggling against hard times. Thanks to the mining operations, Burra quickly became the supplier of 90% of the copper used by the colony and 5% of that used by the rest of the world, so pretty much all of the financial hardships South Australia had been suffering went away overnight and it quickly became a viable colony - so it really is quite hard to understand why AAT Kings didn't think it reasonable that we might like to stop for a while and soak up some of the history.

Obviously, the copper mine eventually dried up and people started to leave, and today the townships of the Burra have once more joined into one and now thrive on tourism as one of the last remaining authentic Victorian towns in Australia. The South Australian government has done a good job of maintaining both the mine and the old buildings throughout the town, so much so that the Burra Burra (also known locally as the Monster Mine) mine was briefly reopened as recently as 1971, with a further 24,000 tonnes of copper extracted over the following decade. A well trodden tourist trail allows visitors to explore rows of preserved miners houses and the dugouts in the bank of the creek excavated by those miners with less money to their names, visit the gaol at nearby Redruth - used in the film Breaker Morant, starring Edward Woodward - and walk among the well preserved mine buildings and chimneys. Some of the old buildings have been turned into museums, and by all accounts a walk around Burra is like a trip back in time - but of course, I didn't get to see anything because all AAT Kings could manage was a brief stop for morning tea. As they say down under, Cheers Mate!

Our next stop of the day was at the Museum of Aboriginal Culture at Port Augusta, a major town on the intersection of roads running North-South and East-West across the country. None of us had been given anything in the way of information about the place and didn't really know what to expect, and opinions ranged from those who believed we would be greeted by hundreds of dark skinned natives with spears and boomerangs to those who were living in the twentieth century. The museum provided a potted history of Aboriginal Culture, but unfortunately those of us who took the time to wander through the rooms and read the carefully written little notices on the exhibits were outweighed by those who obviously wished they hadn't been dragged out of bed at the crack of dawn and were far more interested in stuffing breakfast down themselves in the adjoining cafe.

I think many of us were taking it for granted that we were going to be going out into the real outback over the next few days and coming face to face with Aboriginal culture, and were therefore far less interested in seeing it squished into glass display cases - I thought this was a shame, and found the museum a fascinating introduction to what we would be seeing as the tour continued. It was a shame that we didn't have longer to look around, but one thing which was becoming very obvious on the tour was that time was something we did not have a lot of - getting from one place to another before the sun went down seemed to require Mike putting his foot down at every opportunity and the rest of us praying that he didn't break the suspension again.

While we were all in the museum, Mike and Lisa went off into Port Augusta to collect the final two people who would be joining us on the tour - these turned out to be a woman from Tasmania and her daughter Beth, and meant that for the first time we actually had somebody local to Australia on board. Apparently, it was quite unusual that we didn't have more - the Aussies like to travel around by coach and often jump on board tours that happen to be heading through their town. As we drove further north, we were told, we would be picking up new people and dropping others off - so it was hard to know who I should make an effort getting to know as I was likely to find myself striking up what I thought looked like becoming a lifelong friendship and then waking up the next day to find that my new friend had left the tour.

For our third overnight stop of the tour, we stayed at what the locals liked to call a "tourist centre". In other words, we were now so far from anywhere that there weren't any towns around large enough to warrant any sort of normal hotel - so we were being put up for the night in a sort of makeshift hostelry by the side of the road which doubled as the local animal welfare centre. After dinner in what passed for the restaurant, and which we were told was previously a shearing shed, the owner treated us to an interesting display of venomous snakes and reptiles. This seemed to be the norm in Australia, and was something which I was already finding great about the country - these small towns or stopping points along the road are so small that they have to put on any sort of entertainment they can think of to keep passers by amused. If that means the owner going off, pulling some snakes out of his vivarium and then waving them around in front of terrified visitors, then that's just the way it's going to be! At the end of the show we all took it in turns - sometimes quite against our will - to have a bloody great python wrapped around our neck while somebody took far too long fiddling with a camera to take a photo. Nicola spent much of the show trying to hide behind anything she could find, obviously not being a huge fan of snakes. I had to admit to finding something quite surreal about a woman who was scared of snakes but who didn't flinch at the thought of delving around inside a corpse with a bottle of embalming fluid, but that didn't stop me giving her lots of support, nodding a lot in agreement and stroking my chin thoughtfully in an attempt to get her to notice that I existed.

We weren't allowed to drink the tap water in Glendambo as it was apparently too salty, so there was a hulking great barrel by the side of the road from which we could instead help ourselves to rainwater. I found this interesting on two fronts. Firstly, I wouldn't have thought it would've rained enough in the middle of the outback to keep the barrel full - and secondly, wouldn't this mean that locals could be seen in the dead of night nipping over the road to the rain barrel in their pyjamas for a cup of water with which to clean their teeth?

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.