Hi everyone,

We left Adelaide on Friday finally after missing two alarms & the security guard waking us up telling us our bus was waiting! Luckily everyone on the bus was pretty much asleep, so we didn't get too much stick for being late!

We had lunch in Port Augusta and took one last look at the ocean as we wouldn't see it at all in the next week. We all visited the best public toilet in the world, it played music to you and flushed the loo for you!! After lunch we stopped at an abandoned Homestead and saw some Aboriginal artwork on cliffs in the Flinders Range. We stayed in Angorinchina in an old Tb hospital which was reportedly haunted by the former patients. For dinner we had a traditional Aussie barbeque and watched the sun set over the mountain range.

Saturday morning we were up early to carry on our travels. Rose & Lydia hired a bike and cycled 7km down the dirt track to meet the bus. They saw kangaroos and Emus and dodged massive boulders in the road! We visited a coal mine at Leigh Creek and we started to properly see the desert landscape that would be our home for the next few days.b We stopped for lunch at Marree when dark clouds started to appear in the sky. We left pretty quickly and travelled along the Oodanatta Track to William Creek. Before we reached Lake Eyre it had started to rain very heavily, in the second driest place on earth! We stopped for a quick photo at Lake Eyre (although the lake is just a giant salt pan!) once the rain had stopped.

We reached William Creek after driving through a dust storm and heard about a tour that had run out of diesel the evening before 40km south of William Creek. The tour guide and 4 guys on the trip decided to walk to fetch more diesel, the left the bus at 5pm, and made it to William Creek (population - 8) at 8am the next morning in over 30C heat with no water left. They made it along the rest of their journey without too much trouble, apart from a burst tyre in Coober Pedy! We cooked dinner surrounded by flies on the largest cattle station in the world, its bigger than Belgium! We spent the night in the pub with the locals and then retired to our swags for a night of sleeping under the stars.

Sunday morning Lydia & Hayley woke up to mozzie bites from the middle of the night and we drove to Coober Pedy in the morning. The afternoon was spent looking at Opals and we went to the museum and saw an underground home. We spent our evening like the locals, drinking in the underground bar then slept in an underground cave. The temperatures rise close to 40C often, so being underground is definatly the way to stay there!

Lots of love, Hayley & Rose