Adelaide to Perth

After finally leaving Adelaide, we headed up through the Barossa Valley and continued north to the Flinders Range. We camped at Wilpena Pound and spent a few days hiking. The area is really beautiful, with the Flinders mountain range virtually coming straight out of the plains around it. This was the first time we have seen some of the wide open country for which Australia is know. We very very taken with it. Of note, during the few days we were at Wilpena Pound, we had a major downpour. It inundated everything, so we just spent the day in the tent. A couple of days later we head north through the range to Arkaroola and it soon became clear that it had rained much harder in this area. All the roads had been washed out where they went through stream beds. It was really incredible hard going, every few hundred meters you had to ride through a washed out stream bed where there was nothing but huge boulders or lots of mud or in many cases still under water.

Arkaroola was very interesting, they were almost completely cut off. A number of campers were stuck there until they repaired the roads and all of the roads in the area were closed. We just spent the night and then headed back south to Port Augusta, after having flipped a coin on which direction to go. From Port Augusta we headed west after first going south around the peninsula to Port Lincoln. We did get some rain, but no major downpour. Port Lincoln was really nice, our campground overlooked the harbor and the sundown was incredible. Ceduna was the last town before heading into the Nullarbor plain, and the prices had already started to rise. The ride across the Nullarbor was uneventful. With beautiful weather, not too cold and not too hot we took two days to get across. It is a long and some say boring, but I found it very interesting ride. The flat country seems to go forever and living in Europe this sensation is truly exhilarating. More than two days may actually change my opinion, but all in all I really enjoyed the ride. Despite the signs all along the way we only saw a few kangaroos and no camels and no wombats.

Once in Norseman we headed south to Esperance where we spent a few days enjoying the long varied coastline. Visiting the Cape LeGrande national park on one of the windiest days we have seen anywhere was a lot of fun. After Esperance we headed to Albany through a lot of the local national/state parks which gave us a lot of off road experience. Albany had one of the nicest campgrounds we have found anywhere. The beach was 10 meters behind our tent. Here we enjoyed all the local sights including the Gorge, the Blowhole, the Arch, the Gap and so on.