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South Australia


Trees. There wasn't a sign to actually welcome people to South Australia so I didn't realise when I took th... Two touring cyclists. Part of me wonders if I should have tried cycling across Australia instead of ... I don't think I've ever seen a little finger post like that for a place which is over 400 km away be... This echidna isn't as cute as yesterday's koala. I don't think it was keen on the documentary about ... Flat scenery. Sheep in the haze. Cows too. Mirage. The road ahead. Another camper van. Wheat. Hay. An abandoned house and an irrigator. Trees. A tree. Snails on the back of one of the roadside reflectors. This town seems to be called Kingston SE. I think there might be more people playing tennis here than at the Australian Open. Houses with a sea view. Boats on the sea. Kingston SE. Kingston SE. Kingston SE. The terms of hiring this van said that I should check the oil and coolant every 500 km, which on thi... Cape Jaffa historic lighthouse. When it was operational, it was on a reef 15 km from here. People filling a vehicle with something called "diesoline" The Big Lobster. I thought one truck kept following me until I realised that a lot of trucks round here look like thi... Trees. Salt Creek. The first oil well in Australia was drilled nere here in 1866. The replica rig. The accelerator pedal in this van is so high off the ground that it's uncomfortable to keep my foot ... About half of a large group of pelicans which flew over the road immediately after I had decided not... Part of a long muddy lagoon. The sea is beyond the spit of land in the disance. By the lagoon. The lagoon. The road in Meningie is so wide that I didn't know which part of it I should be driving on. Meningie. Somebody doing something with a kite on Lake Albert. This is a monument to John Peggotty, South Australia's only bushranger, which is the Australian equi... The edge of Lake Albert. A salt flat. Some motorcyclists. I heard an interesting bit of advice from mathematician and motorcyclist Timandr... Sheep. I don't know if those are all in use or if they're for sale. This is a big primary school. I can't see a number on it. Perhaps numbered schools are peculiar to V... The phone coverage in Australia continues to surprse me. I've got a good 4G signal even in a small t... Tailem Bend station. A steam engine in a playground near the station. Tailem Bend. There were more pelicans hovering over the river near here but they didn't come out ver... The modern bridge at Murray Bridge. A farm. In the suburbs of Adelaide. Adelaide, seen from the queue for traffic lights. Waiting at more lights. This is the hotel which I booked earlier. It was after five o'clock when I booked it. What I didn't ... Adelaide is very busy because of major cycling event, the Tour Down Under. The racing starts tomorro... Cyclists in the Adelaide sunset. Adelaide. Adelaide. You get a good view into these people's balconies. Adelaide. Adelaide. More cyclists. Adelaide. I think the presentation of the cycling teams has finished but now there's some kind of DJ act going... Adelaide. The cycling festival, properly known as the Bike Expo. There's my hotel. Bike Expo. Bike Expo. Bike Expo. Adelaide. Adelaide sunset. More of the same. Official cars of some kind. More. I was surprised that I was allowed to take my bike into that hotel near Melbourne airport a couple o... I've never been to a non-integer time zone before. Look, everybody else agrees that it's five past b... I think this might be the official hotel of the Tour Down Under. There are posters for the Tour here... The window of my room faces straight onto the hotel's tennis court. What's happened to my hair?... This hotel is terrible. Even if I did pay less than the normal room rate, it's still more than most ... This is the brochure from the hotel booking agency through which I booked the hotel in Bathurst wher... One of the cycling teams is using some of the rooms on my floor. The lobby. Outside. Cyclists. A bike outside the hotel. Adelaide is pretty quiet this morning. Cyclists practising for the races are almost the only people ... Adelaide. A bike and a thing. Adelaide's Chinatown. Adelaide. I'm back at my van, where I managed to check the oil and water levels pretty simply, having had some... An icon, seen through the door. Adelaide's CBD is a grid of streets measuring about 1.5 km by 2 km. It's completely surrounded by th... Knitted flowers on a gate. The airport is unusually close to the city centre, only just outside the belt of parkland, so there ... Part of the University of South Australia. The university. A posh hotel. The state parliament building. The main station. Adelaide. Behind the parliament. The Adelaide Festival Centre. Two types of cyclists. I don't know where that bridge is going to go. I couldn't see any similar work on this side of the r... Adelaide. Adelaide. On the river. The Tour Down Under doesn't really seem to be what I would think of as a tour. Rather, it's a series... The race circuit. Adelaide. Adelaide. A stadium under construction. Some bikes. St. Peter's Cathedral in North Adelaide. A big screen. A tree. Food vans at the race circuit. "Can't Locate?" More riders. Oh, cycling isn't the only sport here. The river. The race circuit.... This is a better view of the cathedral... ... which is what that camera is here. This bird was making a fuss. I wasn't the only person who stopped to take a picture of it. In the park. These buildings are a bit more monolithic than some of the others. Seen enough yet? Dame Roma Mitchell, Governor of South Australia from 1991 to 1996. Adelaide. Adelaide. Adelaide. Adelaide. The South Australian Museum. In the museum. People using interactive displays in the museum. Boomerangs. There wasn't really very much that interested me in here. A meteorite. The art gallery. Architectural details. Adelaide. Part of the University of Adelaide, whose buildings are considerably older than those of the Univers... The big metal thing in front of the tree is a giant sculpture of a cockroach. According to the sign,... Shops. Balls. A statue of some pigs. Adelaide. This road has a covered pavement like in many other towns, but wider. Adelaide. I don't think I would get many people staring at my bike here in a city which is full of expensive-l... Another view of the station. What on eart are Polites? I keep seeing signs for them. This is a monument to Colonel William Light, the Surveyor-General who fixed the site of Adelaide in ... The two that you can't see say "if". An unidentified flying object and an identified one. These flats and garages have settled pretty firmly on one colour. I'm now back in the van. A long section of the main road is closed though so I'm having to follow th... Machines at work recovering salt from a large, slightly pink salt pan. You can see a ridge of salt p... The village of Lochiel. A distant chimney. Scenery and the road. The highway. I'm starting to see vehicles labelled as road trains now, although in the whole day I would only see... Guns & Ammo. Scenery. This rest area next to the railway has a lot of old railway equipment. Port Pirie. I assume TV reception must be difficult here. Port Pirie. Port Pirie. Bushfires caused by last week's heat have been the main story in the news across Australia for the l... Smoke. I'm not sure if this is the same chimney that I saw in the distance earlier. Port Pirie. An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Australian walked into a bank... What's a shipping butcher? Port Pirie. Port Pirie. That's a restaurant. Scrubland. A pipe, with the smoke on the ridge in the background. A valve on the pipe. An off-road cycle track. This is Nectar Brook station. It doesn't have any buildings or a platform or anthing else. The railway. The railway, my van and Spencer Gulf in the distance. This pipe follows the same route as the road and the railway. The pipe. Railway and pipe. The shore of Spencer Gulf near Port Augusta. The shore of Spencer Gulf near Port Augusta. An unusual load. Looking across Spencer Gulf towards the vast Western part of Australia, which I have now come to thi... The bridges between Dog and Cat. The front of a long train. Like the one which passed me when I was driving, it looks like it has one... Bridges. A view from the old bridge. So diving is allowed but jumping isn't? The fine orange dotted line running almost the whole way across the middle of this picture beyond th... An old boat. The receptionist at tonight's motel gave plenty of useful advice about crossing the empty thousand o... This must be one of the most important road signs anywhere. It's at the point where the 1687 km long... Port Augusta doesn't have proper signs for its street names. They are just written on any available ... Outside a school. A procession of ants. The old water tower. View from the tower. View from the tower. The bridges. The tank which used to hold the water. These steps are a little bit scary, especially as there's quite a strong wind. Two types of birds. I don't know what that animal is but it doesn't look very happy. My receptionist recommended this hotel for dinner. Like many businesses in Australia, it doesn't loo... The junction at sunset. I feel like standing here and applauding all the passing lorry drivers for having completed one of t... A rather poor photograph of the first few hundred metres of the mighty Stuart Highway, the one which... The Stuart Highway. Sunset. This is the strangest shower yet. Morning sunshine at my motel. The Moon, upside down. At the motel. The pieces of paper around the map are another copy of the distances to other settlements. This remi... Breakfast. A road train making its big decision. That's big, whatever it is. I was following the road out of Port Augusta, thinking how the traffic was much lighter than I had e... A road train. The rest areas are certainly big enough. My van. The road. Now we are moving into arable farmland but the trees continue along either side of the road. A field. A mast serving the town of Kimba. Kimba claims to be halfway across Australia. It isn't if you start at Melbourne. The Big Galah. Pipe. Rest area with pipe. Somebody washing the windscreen of his road train. The Australian Farmer statue at Wudinna. A microwave link to somewhere. The road. Seeing this Fisheries boat surprised me because in my mind I'm now in the middle of a continent. Thi... The first three-unit road train I've seen. They wouldn't be as common as I had expected along the de... I couldn't find a picnic table for eating the lunch I just bought from a petrol station so I thought... You see things like this occasionally. A few days ago, I drove past a farm whose front fence had hun... Scenery. There are power lines running along the left side of the road. They don't look to be particularly hi... Penong seems to be famous for its wind pumps but I can't work out which ones are actually doing some... Penong, the last village on the road. From here on, there are no villages so these signs count down the kilometres to roadhouses. A roadho... Two cyclists. Over the two days which I would spend on the Eyre Highway, I would see one solo rider ... Driving the road will show me that if I had chosen to do it on a bike in this direction over this we... From the amount of luggage they had, I would guess that all the cyclists I would see were carrying t... This is Nundroo, the place which was 65 km away from the marker which appeared a few photographs ago... Nundroo. Inside the roadhouse. Old telephone equipment. Because a roadhouse is the only building in a settlement, it has to contain... I think it's funny how these trees only have leaves on the top. Where I come from, when a tree has l... The road. I'm now approaching the Nullarbor Plain, the vast treeless region. Shrubs. Ah, here it is. Today's whale count: 0. They don't come to the shore at this time of year. The Nullarbor Roadhouse, 93 km from the previous one and 192 km from the next. Camels? A road train with its cab removed. Petrol is getting more expensive as I move into this remote area. Between Melbourne and Adelaide, it... This is one of the sections of road which can also be used as an emergency runway by the flying doct... The coast of the Great Australian Bight. The edge of Australia. Flat. Every 100 km or so, there is one of these emergency telephones. There always seems to be a big mast ... Sea and sunlight. Similar. A bit more of the coast and a warning about the checkpoint at the state border. Earlier, when I pass... The checkpoint at the state border, which I won't be crossing today. The border roadhouse. The Big Kangaroo. If you thought Adelaide time was weird, just look at this. The local time here is used along a 350 k... No fires are allowed anywhere at this time of year. A strange collection of vehicles. The guest information booklet makes interesting reading. I don't think I've seen a guest information booklet with a sction on "mice" before. Also, ... The motel. The parking area at the roadhouse. Sir Mixalot would love this. I really do which I was cycling now. The dinner here is about the size that I would want it if I had... The only lights anywhere near here are those which are linked to the generators at the roadhouse or ... The roadhouse by night. Another view of the sign. Lorries. This morning, I'm totally confused about what time it is. I can't work out how long ago I woke up, h... A road train with all sorts of stuff on it. One entrance to the roadhouse, giving distances to other places along the road. The Nullarbor Links claims to be the longest golf course in the world and is probably justified in s... And if you go from here to any of those places on the right, the most thorough checkpoint search you...