Varied interests

Sometimes my interests coincide. Proof?

Bottle-nosed Dolphins when I was chasing up the Matthew Flinders story at Port Augusta.

A beautiful salt lake at Locheil (and the Loch Eil Monster) when I was chasing a geocache.

Sadness at the amount of the weed Patersons Curse when we visited the old Ghan railway station at Quorn. It might look pretty but ...

I used to be a cemetery walk guide and old isolated graves like that of Jimmy Finn in Pitchie Ritchie Pass are hard to resist. Never seen one like this before.

Unexpectedly a bearded dragon in a senna bush when we were checking out an old rural school site near Port Germain.

At the School of the Air in Longreach we discovered that Southern Cross windmills have three legs and Comet windmills have four. So we've counted windmill legs ever since and pondered on the importance of artesian water in the outback.

Following the Ghan south

In Alice Springs we sat at a railway crossing on Larapinta Drive while the Ghan slowly pulled into the station -  22 carriages and somehow looking very majestic. We could see passengers eating lunch, chatting to each other or watching Alice Springs pass by. I wonder if any of them got on at Marla. I wonder if any realise that the countryside is blooming.



Further down the Stuart is the opal town of Coober Pedy where, to escape the heat of summer like all sensible desert creatures, the humans live underground. Only the vents indicate their presence. In theory. Actually mullock heaps, rusted machinery, take-away shops, signs to attract tourists and a convoluted street system are also very much in evidence.



Late this afternoon we drove out to the Breakaways - unexpectedly beautiful and the flat, flat horizon a reminder that this land is big. And even in this distant place there is room for political graffiti.