Port Augusta

So the journey to Uluru begins.....first section was to be a 6 hour 539km drive north to the town of Coober Pedy. After the inital comments of 'it's a lot greener than I thought it would be' and the words road, tree, sky and cloud had been used on a game of eye spy it started to dawn on us that this could be a fairly boring and monotonous journey on what was going to be a very long straight and desolate road. With the air conditioning running to full capacity and the tunes on the ipod blasting we each took our turn on two hour driving shifts.

Then after what felt like being confined to the van forever, trying to avoid the enormous road trains as they thundered by (see pics below) and wondering if there would be a turn in the road we saw the signs announcing our arrival in the outback town of Coober Pedy. Coober Pedy is the largest town on the way to Uluru which means it has pretty much all the things you need. Supermarket, post office, hospital, police etc and of course all the Opal shops you could dream of (the town is the largest supplier of Opal in Australia, possibly the world) it also has a drive in cinema every fortnight, what more could you need?! The first stop was a swim in the campsite pool in order to escape the mind numbing heat of the day. It then dawned on us that we weren't even half way to Uluru and the drive tomorrow was going to be an extra two hours on what we had just experienced. It was around this point that our decision of taking a slight detor via Uluru started to seem a rather strange thing to do.