Adelaide

How'ya doing?!
We have reached Adelaide today, after 10 days on the road and a few thousand kilometres travelled on trains, a bus and a car.
We set off from Darwin on the "Ghan", the train that crosses the country from North to South through the centre. It was named after the Afghan cameliers who were the first to travel this route. the portion of the track from Alice Springs to Darwin, which we took, was only opened in 2003. It just so happens that this fascinating experience is also the cheapest way to get to Alice Springs, as the prices on the coaches have risen dramatically, so we bought ourselves two cheap tickets, and it was still pretty much luxury travel! We had reclining seats, a hot shower, a lounge car, and air con (which was turned up so high we had to wear our fleeces to avoid getting a cold!). It seems to be a strange irony that we got too hot on a train in Siberia and too cold on a train in Australia!
We got to Alice Springs and spent a day visiting the Mac Donnell Ranges, to the west, where we encountered a few black footed rock wallabies. The scenery there is very pouplar with artists, as the colkours are amazing, ranging from the red of the earth to the blue hills in the background, with stunning milky white gum trees somewhere in the middle.
From there we hopped onto a 4 wheel drive bus which took us through the desert to Perth, on the west coast. It was a fantastic three days driving along the gravel road and the red dust of th Great Central road, and camping under the stars at night, after our guide, a seasoned bushman, told us numerous stories of his experience of the place sitting around the campfire. By day we saw hundreds of wild camels, and wonderful scenery, slowly changing as we got closer to our destination.
Reaching Perth we got quite a shock : coming back to civilisation, and traipsing around town with our bags, unable to find a place to stay... 20 odd backpacker's hostels later we found two beds for the night... in two different hostels! It seems that with the flooding on the east coast everyone has decided to visit Perth instead...
Anyway that made us want to go somewhere else, so we hired a car and went off to visit the small South western corner of Asutralia where you find wineries and rolling hills and windswept coastlines... it was definitely worth a visit, even though the green hills were very dry and chapped, and thye creeks mostly had been reduced to a few muddy puddles... the water situation seemed quite bad. We climbed up a 70m tree, and came close to running over a snake, an old wrinkly lizard and an emu! No time to get bored. The last night, as once again everywhere was full, we ended up having to sleep in our hire car!
After that we got onto another train, eastwards this time, called the Indian Pacific, after the two oceans it links (the train goes on to Sydney). It was a three day journey across the nullarbor plain, a flat empty space where they built a straight section of track for nearly 500km! We witnessed a spectacular thunderstorm, with black skies and white lightning, and the colours of the sunset showing through the gaps in the cloud.
After two nights on the train we have reached Adelaide, where we are enjoying th cool weather (36 degrees C in the shade) to do a bit of laundry, before we get on yet another train, this time to melbourne. Let's say for now we are just quite looking forward to sleeping in an actual bed tonight!