From Coast to Coast

Three days' journey.

I work till afternoon, which feels kinda interesting – chatting to colleagues and committing code whilst sitting in a tent in the middle of nowhere. However, I do need to find some gas to have my hot meals, after all. Which is why after 12 (Western time) I take off and visit a few more roadhouses... with the same disappointing result. No gas bottles anywhere at all! Dammit. At least I don't get nearly as many of those locusts that bothered me on my way here, although there's still more than a few to fly around.

It's getting late, so I camp at the same beautiful spot I liked a week and a half ago. No one's around (apart from a couple of German blokes a few hundred steps away), and the views are just as wonderful as they were, and I have all the food and water and gas and mobile coverage I need. The field office is set, and a wonderful sunset caps the day beautifully.

My quiet neighbours.

A lovely sunset.

A little disfigured tree is happy about it, too.

And so are the rocks.

I grow to like this place even more as I spend the next day here, working and relaxing. The temperature is perfect (25 degrees or so); there's no people, no flies, no mozzies; the views are amazing; and it's entirely free of charge. What's there not to like? The only thing that bothers me is my electric setup. For the laptop and the camera charger, I'm running an inverter, which apparently is too powerful for my battery, because it starts to bleep more and more often as the voltage keeps dropping. I try to clip the solar panel wires straight to the isolator/charger, but it barely helps, and I manage to lose one of the bolts in the process as well. Ugh!

The scenery is still gorgeous, though, so later in the day I venture out for a stroll along the beach. It takes some effort to get there: I'm camped on the cliffs, and even they're not as steep as some, one still has to navigate their way down and then find a path across the saltbush towards the sea. There's a lot of sand dunes on the beach, and somehow their golden colour looks surreal between the bright blue waters and the dark green vegetation... which means a perfect opportunity for landscape photography, of course. The sunset is quite pretty as well, and I even work some of the boulders and cliffs into it, too.

The blue, the green, and the gold.

Reaching for the sun.

The sand crust is very firm. So few nutrients.

Lots of interesting little plants like this one.

I love the ripples on the dunes.

The sun is fierce.

The light and the shadows.

Such a unique scenery.

A slightly more abstract take.

More cool little plants!

The day is almost over.

Here goes the sunset!

Layers upon layers upon layers.

On the next day, however, my battery is getting worse and worse. I'm not sure what's going on: is it the inverter being too powerful, or is the battery simply dying from old age and heat and all the bumpy roads? Either way, it looks like I won't be able to stay here for as long as I wanted, because the laptop won't run by itself, after all, will it? Got to get back to civilisation to figure all this out.

With a heavy heart, I take off in the afternoon, and stop at a rest area near Nundroo. Nothing spectacular in terms of scenery, but the sunset is still kind of nice, and the moon looks lovely as well among those thin scattered clouds.

A sunset near Nundroo.

Very wispy!

The hour of the moon.