Australia
“Australia is a continent pretending to be a country.” Duncan Fraser of the Adelaide tourism office says it almost in passing over lunch. I note the line down – it sounds like a joke but reads to me like a riddle. And it will not let go of Annette and me for eight days.
Gigantic salt lakes like shards of broken glass, mysterious human figures kilometres long carved into the earth, echidnas laying eggs, bizarre Gondwana rock formations straight out of a Salvador Dalí painting, brightly coloured birds – all this and more is South Australia.
Adelaide is green, friendly and manageable – and then the other Australia begins. On Kangaroo Island an egg-laying mammal waddles through the leaves, and above the outback a Cessna reveals two salt lakes of a scale nobody thinks possible.
Rust-red dirt roads, termite mounds, boab trees – and somewhere deep in the outback, a breakdown that turns everything upside down. A Jeep journey along the infamous Gibb River Road. A blend of adventure and the millennia-old Dreamtime culture of the Miriwoong Aboriginal people.
Western Australia – a complex symbiosis of extreme nature, isolated farms and human adaptability – from dusty gorges and remote caves to the turquoise blue ocean in Broome.