The long and winding road to Lake Eyre north... spare a thought for Caroline

I've previously mentioned the drive to Lake Eyre north, especially all those annoying little flies (pretty sure we brought some of them home in the van). The landscape on the journey, though, was amazing. Halfway in, the vista changed dramatically. The area millions of years ago had been a massive inland ocean and the landscape is what is left of the seabed.
Around one curve, the view before us was breathtaking. I think I even said "wow, look at that".

Then, not five minutes up the road, the landscape changed dramatically. We almost felt we could have been on the moon. Or certainly, the last two people on earth after some type of Armageddon.

 

 

And then we made it to Lake Eyre north. Apart from the flies it was pretty daunting looking at this huge lake, where you couldn't see where it finished.

 

 

The grass on the shore was a bit strange.

 

 

But let's pause, just for a minute. This place can be very unforgiving. We had stopped at William Creek just before the Lake Eyre north turnoff (I'm talking only 7km here). It had rained pretty heavily the week before and we were told that a lot of travellers were stranded there for about five days until the fantastic SA road crews could open all the roads.  On the Lake Eyre north road is a memorial. A memorial to Caroline Grossmueller, a 28-year Austrian woman, travelling with her boyfriend. The memorial said that she had perished on that site. Seems they got bogged and couldn't get out, and being an experienced hiker Caroline and her boyfriend had tried to walk out. The boyfriend couldn't go any further, so Caroline pushed on, leaving him with the tent. And she didn't make it. The police officer who later got their van out of the bog let the tyres down a bit more than they had. And he got out with not much difficulty. Thankfully to the crew at Britz we were equipped with a nice, little yellow box in the glove box of the van. A distress beacon in case we got into difficulty. I didn't even give it a second thought when we decided to drive up there. I'm sure many people would do the same thing. In hindsight, I'm not going anywhere in the outback without a beacon or similar safeguard.

 

And this is how we ended that day.