I took a detour to see Lake Eyre, there is a 70km dead-end track taking you to Lake Eyre North, the largest and most spectacular of the salt lakes. The track is rough and corrugated and ends at a well designated camping spot on the shore of Lake Eyre with a toilet block. This is Aboriginal land and you pay $10 for a camping permit at the start of the track in the self-pay drop box. The track was rough indeed and took me a couple of hours driving to reach the lake.

Lake Eyre is a barren spectacle, as you arrive you see can see the lake stretching out across the landscape vast and flat. At first it looks like a massive frozen inland sea, the salt is so white it looks like ice! This is indeed a barren place, I was the only person there and had the campsite all to myself, there was nothing here apart from the vast quiet lake and the continuous wind &ndash; no wildlife, no land features&hellip; just the vast empty lake.

The Lake Eyre basin is massive in its extent and stretches over most of central Australia and up into the Northern Territory from Wndorah in the West to Alice Springs in the East, any water falling in this basin will end up here eventually but the lake is dry almost all year round apart from a brief spell each year when it comes alive and water fills the lake. Suddenly you have shrimp and moths amongst the flowering desert plants and all sorts of wildlife then it quickly evaporates away leaving more salt and the eerie quiet. When the lake is empty the surface is 12m below sea-level.