You couldn’t find a bigger difference, driving on Bali one day and then Western Australia the next. Gone are the narrow winding roads, hundreds of vehicles, overloaded motorbikes, rustic villages, potholes, verdant jungles and average speed of 25mph. Say hello to endless and immaculate straight highways with the occasional huge road-train passing and often a half hour between vehicles, an enormity of empty desert scrub on all sides, and an average 110mph kept up for hour after hour.
Road trains are particularly enormous lorries, with three trailers strung together behind them. Every few hundred kilometres there is a road station; a petrol station with a shop and cafe. Now and again the skeleton of an unlucky kangaroo on the wide dirt verge. That’s pretty much it.
Oh, and we’ve seen our first Australian mammal, the wallaroo. It looks like a kangaroo, but is much smaller and closer in size to a wallaby. So really it has an astonishingly sensible name.
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