Painted Desert

"All this while we were advancing at a rapid pace. The country we had reached was already nearly a desert. Here and there could be seen an isolated farm, some solitary bur, or Icelandic house, built of wood, earth, fragments of lava—looking like beggars on the highway of life. These wretched and miserable huts excited in us such pity that we felt half disposed to leave alms at every door."

We recovered Jen's bag and proceeded down the Stuart. We spent the night at Marla before setting out for the painted desert. We stayed on an isolated cattle station, Arckaringa Station . We had a bit of dirt to camp on, a tin shed with a toilet and shower, and a large nicely set out communal camp fire. We  bumped up the road to the painted desert which is a piece of spectacular bad-lands. We set up chairs and had a beer overlooking the plains at sunset with no-one for miles, magic. We came back and settled next to the camp-fire. You meet many different people around camp-fires. We met an interesting young photographer who had some personnel mission to go and photograph all the landscape affected by the nuclear tests at Maralinga. He had his Kiwi mum with him who plainly had had enough of outback living. Then another couple joined the fire who had just come up from the Roxby Down protests. They had firmly held beliefs and some concerning information about the Olympic dam mine, but interspersed it with too many conspiracy theories for our liking.