the start of the nullarbor

The next phase of the trip is the trek across the Nullarbor Plain from Norseman to Port Augusta, a distance of 1,700 km.

It is said that until you have spent the time making your way across this endless, mostly treeless, plain you have not fully experienced the true loneliness that Australia can provide. It's been driven, walked, cycled, trained, and even skateboarded, and has come to represent everything that is vast and intensely featureless about much of the Australian Outback.

For the next 700km or so we will have no mobile phone/internet coverage, and it will be sporadic for the ensuing 1,000 km...............so thank you Geoffrey for pretending to be mended for the last 700 km and then this afternoon starting to blink the fuel injection failure light again. I guess the piece of insulating tape did not exactly fix the problem.

Our choices are: 700 km back to Perth in the hope the fault can be correctly diagnosed and fixed,

Or: hit the Nullarbor and see how we go ( 2,000 km to Adelaide)

We are going to sleep on it, but I suspect that we will continue with optimistic hearts and crossed fingers. We are 80 km outside Norseman, so will make the decision when we get there.

I guess being towed by a road train would be fun. Or we could just spend the rest of our days living in a broken van at a roadhouse pumping fuel and making sandwiches. We will keep you posted as things develop.