Driving in Oz

We clocked up about 4500Km in our 8 day round trip to the Red Center and back. I'll never complain again about a quick trip to Dublin and back again. The distances involved here are phenomenal, although with a 130kmph speed limit (none existed until recently) you can make short work of the kilometers. We only drove during daylight (7:30am - 5:30pm) - Once the sun sets all the kangaroos come out onto the road looking for food.

Huge road trains about four trucks long motor along the highway. You'll spend long portions of your journey driving on the right overtaking theses monsters. They take about half a kilometer to stop sometimes ... hence the amount of road kill on the highways here. There's no point in a road train stopping for a kangaroo on the road, and since they're build like tanks it only feels like a bump. Driving in the morning you'll see lots of freshly dead kangaroos still in rigor mortis (sorry for putting that beautiful image in your head).

When we rented the car for the red center we were restricted to driving on sealed roads only (boo hoo), I'll have to wait a while to see what the 4WD tracks are like ;-).