Author: Gekko Safari

I run tours, so you’d expect me to say book one. I’ll try to be fair about it, because plenty of people self-drive out there and enjoy it. It really does depend on who you are and what you’ve got.

Self-driving makes sense if you have a capable 4WD, outback experience, the right recovery gear and flexible dates. You set the pace and you save money. But the outback doesn’t forgive mistakes. Distances are big, phone coverage is patchy, and a breakdown a long way from help is a serious problem.

Where a guided tour earns its keep

• Someone else deals with road conditions, permits and fuel
• You get local knowledge: stories, history, where to stop and why
• You can look out the window instead of watching the track
• If something goes wrong, there’s a plan

Where self-drive wins

• Total freedom with your time
• Often cheaper if you already own the vehicle and gear
• You can linger where you like

If you’ve never done remote driving before, a tour is the lower-risk way to find out whether you love it. Plenty of people do a tour first and self-drive on their second trip.

Every trip, someone turns up with a brand new pair of white sneakers and a very small bag. Every trip, someone else turns up with three suitcases. The sweet spot is in between, and it’s mostly about layers.

The outback swings hard. Mornings can be properly cold, especially in winter, and afternoons can be hot enough that you want to sit in the shade and not move. Sun is the constant. There’s very little cover out there, and the salt reflects light back up at you.

The list I’d actually follow

• Layers: a warm jacket or fleece, plus light long sleeves for the sun
• A wide-brimmed hat that stays on in the wind
• Sunglasses, because the salt is bright
• Sturdy closed shoes you don’t mind getting dusty
• Sunscreen and lip balm, more than you think you’ll need
• A refillable water bottle
• A camera or phone with plenty of storage, and a power bank
• Any medication you take, with a little spare

A small daypack beats a big bag for the stops. And leave room in your luggage, because most people come home with a few things they didn’t plan on buying.

I’ll say this up front: Dalhousie Springs is remote. It’s in Witjira National Park, up near the Northern Territory border, and it’s a long way past where most Lake Eyre trips turn around. But if your itinerary stretches that far, it’s one of the best things you’ll do all trip.

The springs are fed by the Great Artesian Basin, and the water comes up warm, somewhere around the high thirties Celsius. After a few days of dust and heat, floating in a warm pool surrounded by reeds and date palms, in the middle of one of the driest places on the continent, is a bit surreal. The largest pool is big enough that you can properly swim.

Before you go

• It’s a long, remote drive, so a 4WD and proper preparation are essential
• A park pass is needed for Witjira National Park
• The water is warm all year, so a swim feels best in cooler months
• Respect the springs: they’re culturally significant and ecologically fragile

Most people won’t make it this far north, and that’s part of the charm. If you do, it’s the kind of stop you’ll still be talking about years later.

People ask me all the time whether they should combine the Flinders Ranges with Lake Eyre. My honest answer is yes if you’ve got the days, and here’s why. The Flinders is where you get mountains, gorges, and wildlife like yellow-footed rock-wallabies. Lake Eyre is where you get scale and emptiness. Together they show you two completely different faces of outback South Australia.

Wilpena Pound is the centrepiece. It’s a huge natural basin ringed by quartzite ridges, and the Adnyamathanha people know it as Ikara, which is often translated as meeting place. From the right lookout, the shape makes sense: a great bowl of country surrounded by a wall of rock. The ranges themselves are very old, formed from sediments that are hundreds of millions of years old.

Planning it in

• Allow at least a full day and night at Wilpena itself
• The walk to Wangara Lookout is manageable for most people and gives a great view
• Spring and autumn are the most comfortable times to visit
• The drive from the Flinders up to Marree and Lake Eyre makes a natural route

If you’re tight on time, pick one. If you’ve got a week, doing both is one of the best ways I know to see what South Australia’s outback is really like.

The first time I stepped into a Coober Pedy dugout in January, I walked out of a 43 degree afternoon into a room that felt like a nice spring day. That’s the whole point. A lot of the town’s residents, roughly half by most accounts, live in homes dug straight into the hillsides, because above ground the summer heat is hard going.

Underground, the temperature stays fairly steady all year, somewhere in the low-to-mid twenties, without much need for air-conditioning. The rock is soft enough to dig with relatively simple equipment, and the opal miners who started the town had the tools and the skills already. Many early dugouts were just mining tunnels that people moved into.

What a dugout is like

• Cool in summer and mild in winter, with no need for heavy climate control
• Very quiet, and very dark if the lights go out
• Ventilation shafts bring in fresh air, since there are no windows in the main rooms
• Several underground motels and B&Bs let visitors sleep in one

If you’ve got a spare night on the way to or from Lake Eyre, sleeping in a dugout is a genuinely memorable stop. Pack a torch anyway. You’ll want it at 3am.

The Oodnadatta Track runs for roughly 620 kilometres of mostly unsealed road, and a big chunk of our Lake Eyre travel follows it. What surprises first-timers is that it’s not empty. It tracks the route of the old Ghan railway, and the leftovers are everywhere: collapsed stone sidings, rusting bridges, fettlers’ camps.

The stretch between Marree and William Creek has the stops I’d actually recommend. You pass the mound springs, where water from the Great Artesian Basin pushes up in the middle of a dry plain. You cross the gibber, those endless fields of polished stones, and you get a real sense of why early travellers dreaded this country.

Stops that earn the time

• Old Ghan railway ruins and sidings along the way
• The mound springs, a green surprise in a brown landscape
• Lookouts over the Lake Eyre South edge, depending on the route
• William Creek at the end of the day for a cold drink and a bed

Conditions change fast out here. After rain the track can close, and in summer it’s brutally hot, so check road reports before you leave. That’s one of the quiet advantages of going with a guide: someone else is watching the conditions.

People expect the salt at Lake Eyre to be the dramatic bit of the trip. Then they see the Painted Desert at golden hour and quietly rethink things. It’s a run of low, flat-topped hills and breakaways between Coober Pedy and William Creek, on Arckaringa Station country, and the colours are properly strange: rusty reds, creamy whites, soft purples and yellows layered into the rock.

Those bands are old sediment, laid down when this area was under an inland sea, then cooked and weathered by time. The iron in the rock gives you the reds and oranges, and the paler layers are clay and sandstone. The light does the rest. Go at midday and it looks a bit washed out. Go in the last hour before sunset and the whole hillside seems to glow.

Tips from the road

• Late afternoon is the time to be there, both for colour and for the heat
• Take plenty of water, there’s no shade and no shop
• The hills sit on a pastoral station, so follow signs and don’t wander off marked tracks
• A wide lens helps, but your eyes will do a better job than any camera

If you’re only going to add one detour to a Lake Eyre trip, this is the one I’d pick. It costs you a little time and gives you a landscape that looks nothing like the salt flats, which makes the whole journey feel bigger.

Every so often a guest asks me, a bit sheepishly, whether the giant man in the desert is real. It is. In June 1998 a charter pilot flying over the country west of Marree spotted an enormous outline of a figure etched into the ground, holding what looks like a throwing stick. Nobody in the district had seen anyone build it. It was just there.

The figure is huge, roughly four kilometres from head to foot, which is why you really only appreciate it from the air. Standing next to the lines on the ground, you’d struggle to make sense of the shape at all. It sits on country that’s part of the Finniss Springs area, and for years the mystery of who made it, and how they marked out something that size without anyone noticing, kept the story alive.

What’s actually known

• It appeared sometime around 1998 and was reported to the public later that year
• The maker was a mystery for a long time, and the question of who was responsible has been argued over since
• Wind and rain have been wearing the lines away, so it’s faded over the years
• It sits on private and Aboriginal-held land, so access is controlled, check before you go

I’ll be straight with you: the Marree Man isn’t a headline stop on most Lake Eyre itineraries, and the best view is from a scenic flight. But it’s a cracking story to tell on the drive up through Marree, and it’s one of those things that reminds you how big and strange this part of the country is.

Almost every guest who’s done an overnight Lake Eyre tour mentions the stars, unprompted, at some point in the trip. It’s not something I have to sell hard, because the moment the sun goes down and there’s genuinely no artificial light for a hundred kilometres in any direction, people notice immediately.

South Australia’s outback, including the country around Lake Eyre, sits well away from any significant population centres, and the air out here is usually dry and free of the haze you get in more humid or built-up regions. On a clear, moonless night, the Milky Way isn’t a faint smudge — it’s a genuine band of light across the sky, and you can often make out its structure with the naked eye.

What makes conditions here so good for stargazing

• Minimal light pollution from towns or infrastructure
• Consistently low humidity and clear air, especially outside the wet season
• Flat, open horizons with nothing blocking the sky line
• High elevation isn’t needed here — the darkness does the work

If you’re travelling with even a basic camera and a tripod, it’s worth setting aside twenty minutes after dinner to try some long-exposure shots. You don’t need serious astrophotography gear to come away with a genuinely striking photo of the sky out here — the conditions are doing most of the work for you.

Cooper Creek isn’t technically part of Lake Eyre itself, but it’s one of the major rivers that feeds into the Lake Eyre Basin, and its history is impossible to separate from the story of exploration in this part of Australia. Most Australians know the names Burke and Wills from school, but fewer know just how closely their tragic 1860-61 expedition is tied to this exact waterway.

The expedition’s depot camp at Cooper Creek, known to history as the ‘Dig Tree’ site, is where the ill-fated final chapter of their journey played out — a story of missed timing, a buried cache of supplies, and a rescue party that arrived just hours after the depot party had given up and moved on. It’s a genuinely sobering piece of Australian history, and one that plays out against the same kind of harsh, unforgiving country our Lake Eyre tours pass through.

Why it’s worth knowing before you go

• It gives real historical weight to the landscape you’re driving through, not just scenery
• Cooper Creek’s flows are part of what occasionally feeds Lake Eyre itself during flood events
• The expedition’s failures are a genuine lesson in respecting this environment, which still applies to modern travellers
• Some tour routes pass near sites connected to the expedition, depending on itinerary

I bring this history up on tours not to be morbid, but because I think it changes how people look at the landscape. This isn’t just empty country — it’s country with a long, complicated human history layered into it, some of it hard-won knowledge that the traditional owners always had.