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Klaus and his camels - Source: Photo supplied by Albert Ehrnrooth -
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The wheels are up and I've just departed Coober Pedy, a famous old opal mining town near the heart of the Australian outback. If you stare at the map of Oz, look directly at the middle then cast your eyes down a touch and that's where I've been.
From this height, Coober Pedy looks surrounded by millions of rabbit holes. But at ground level these holes are a metre wide and thirty metres deep, drilled by the 300 resident miners searching for elusive opals.
We'd come to this, the Aussie outback, to do a story on the nearby Lake Eyre, the largest ephemeral lake in the world. For the first time in decades this massive salt lake basin is now full of water. Floods from the north and rain from above have given birth to spectacular wild life in the middle of the desert and through tourism, the lake is providing welcome economic benefits to surrounding towns.
One such town is Coober Pedy. For a place so isolated, CP manages to attract people from all over the world to settle here. Greek, Serbian and Italian communities have long histories here but the last thing I expected was a Sri Lankan tour guide to show us around.
For a town of 3500 people, Coober Pedy was quiet, very quiet. That's because most people live underground. Modern and unique homes built into mountainous rock to help residents escape 50 degree summer temperatures.
Yanni from Greece showed me inside his underground home - effectively a four bedroom house inside a mountain. The best thing about these homes is that if you need extra space, you just bring in the drill and bore out another bedroom, as Yanni did when his in-laws were about to visit from Greece.
The next day we flew from Coober Pedy to William Creek, the closest settlement to Lake Eyre. With a population of just three, it's reported to be Australia's smallest town.
We touched down on the sandy air strip and in true outback style, pulled the plane up next to the local pub. Even in Australia's most remote places, you can bet there's a place close by where you can get a drink.
Inside, William Creek publicans Bruce and Mim were surprisingly busy behind the bar. They'd only bought the place last November, but what great timing - a full Lake Eyre made for a constant flow of tourists pulling up after a long stint behind the wheel before setting up camp across the road.
William Creek's third resident, Trevor, is the local pilot who operates tourist flights over Lake Eyre. He told me that times were pretty tough when the Lake was empty, but the arrival of water brought with it tourists. He recently had to buy four planes from New Zealand to keep up with demand.
I expected to see strange things in the outback but I never expected to see an old German bloke walking two camels across the continent. Sixty-five-year-old Klaus has been shuffling across the Australian desert with Snowy and Willy for the past eight years. The camels have been pulling Klaus' old Suzuki van packed with his meagre belongings along more than 60,000km of red dirt roads and tracks.
I asked Klaus the obvious question, why? He told me he didn't like the local council telling him what renovations he could and couldn't make to his house in Adelaide, so he sold up and hit the road.
Australia's outback. Not just snakes and sand.
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