Heading out through Wilmington village in the morning we encountered peak hour - five cars went by before we could turn onto the highway! Passing through the north end of a range of hills called the Remarkables with extraordinarily gnarled eucalypts, we bypassed the chemical factories of Port Augusta and finally felt that we were heading 'outback'. A sign on the Stuart Highway heading due north announced that Alice Springs was 1221 kms away and almost at once ...

For a change we woke to clear skies and no fog, unlike the last couple of days. But that was short-lived and fog settled down on us around 9. We thought that the country around Mildura would be all orchards and grapes and food-growing but to the west it was not so. Dry flat land with stands of Mallee reached all the way to the South Australian border. Signs along the road demanded that we eat our fruit or throw it out and that failure to do so would incur dir...