18th February
There are going to be some days crossing the central south desert area of Australia where nothing really happens, where the scenery doesn't change for hundreds of miles, where my thoughts become diluted by the mindless and unrelenting effort to pedal in 44 degrees centigrade which crushes all original thought. Such heat is like inhaling something damaged. How it perpetrates into the body is almost an obscene act. After a short time, and I rode for 10 hours every day, the body just gets hotter until it's too hot to think. The heat makes you want to cry because there's no reason to be here except to cross it to get to another place. Whereas the heat of the afternoon can create 'unreason, fantasy and lust', here it gives so much less than that looking out across this treeless karst.
The Explorer Edward John Eyre crossed it in 1841 and summed it up by saying, "it's a hideous anomaly, a blot on the face of Nature, the sort of place one gets into in bad dreams". The road is named after him, so called the Eyre Highway connecting Norseman in Western Australia with Port Augusta in South Australia, a distance of 1675 km.
John Edward Eyre
There are places to hang out around every 200 kms.
And so the end. It is an international challenge for any cyclist particularly at the height of summer.
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