Author: Gekko Safari

This is one of those facts I love dropping on a tour because it genuinely catches people off guard: there is a Lake Eyre Yacht Club. Founded decades ago by a group who saw the vast, flat, wind-exposed salt surface of the dry lake bed and thought — quite reasonably, in an eccentric Australian way — that it would make an excellent place to sail.

Land yachts, essentially sailing rigs mounted on wheels or skis instead of a hull, could reach genuinely high speeds skimming across the hard, flat salt crust when conditions were dry. For a stretch of time, the club held informal meets out on the lake, and it became a minor but well-documented curiosity in Australian outback lore.

Where things stand today

• Traditional owners have asked that recreational sailing on the lake bed be respected as culturally sensitive ground
• Access to parts of the lake is managed more carefully now than it was decades ago
• The history itself remains a great story and a reminder of how creatively people have engaged with this landscape
• Our tours focus on viewing and photographing the lake respectfully, not recreating the old land-sailing runs

I still think it’s worth knowing the history, even if the practice has moved on — it says something about how this landscape has always attracted people looking to do something a bit unusual with a very unusual place.

William Creek is one of those places that sounds made up until you’re standing in it. The permanent population sits somewhere around a handful of people, and it’s often cited as the smallest incorporated town in Australia. There’s a pub, an airstrip, a campground, and not a whole lot else — and honestly, that’s exactly the appeal.

Sitting almost dead centre on the Oodnadatta Track and right at the edge of Anna Creek Station, William Creek has become the natural staging point for anyone heading out to Lake Eyre. The pub itself has been operating for well over a century in various forms, and its walls and ceiling are covered in stickers, banknotes, and memorabilia left behind by decades of travellers passing through.

Why William Creek is part of nearly every Lake Eyre itinerary

• It’s the closest fuel, food and accommodation point to the lake itself
• Scenic flights over Lake Eyre depart from the William Creek airstrip
• The pub is a genuine slice of outback culture, not a tourist reconstruction of one
• It sits within Anna Creek Station, giving a real sense of the scale of outback pastoral land

Most of our multi-day tours build in a night here, and it’s usually one of the trip highlights guests mention afterwards — not because there’s a long list of things to do, but because there’s so little competing for your attention that you actually notice the stars, the quiet, and the sheer scale of the place.

I’ve had a handful of guests over the years who booked a Lake Eyre tour specifically chasing one thing: the pelicans. It sounds like an odd drawcard for a desert tour, until you understand what actually happens when the lake fills with water after a significant flood event.

When enough water reaches Lake Eyre, usually from monsoonal rain far north in Queensland’s channel country working its way down through the river systems over weeks or months, the lake can transform from a dry salt pan into a genuine inland sea. Fish and other aquatic life move in, and Australian pelicans follow, arriving from breeding colonies right across the continent to take advantage of the sudden food supply. In a big flood year, breeding colonies numbering in the tens of thousands have been recorded on the lake’s islands.

What makes this event so rare

• Lake Eyre only floods significantly a handful of times each century
• Pelicans time their migration to arrive once conditions are right, not on a fixed schedule
• The breeding islands are difficult to access, which protects the colonies but also limits close viewing
• Scientists still don’t fully understand how pelicans detect a flood event from so far away

If you’re planning a trip hoping to catch a flood or breeding event, my honest advice is to stay flexible with dates and keep an eye on water reports for the northern catchments — it’s not something you can guarantee, but when it happens, it’s one of the most extraordinary sights in Australian nature.

Most people booking a Lake Eyre tour are focused entirely on the lake itself, which is fair enough — it’s the headline act. But some of my favourite moments on these trips happen well before we get anywhere near the salt. The mound springs at Wabma Kadarbu Conservation Park, north of William Creek, are one of those stops that quietly steals the show.

These springs are fed by the Great Artesian Basin, and the water reaching the surface has often been underground for tens of thousands of years, slowly making its way through the aquifer before finally emerging as a spring in the middle of what looks like featureless desert. Over time, mineral deposits and sediment build up around the outlet and form raised mounds, some several metres high, with a small pool of water sitting on top or nearby.

Why the mound springs matter

• They’re a rare permanent water source in an otherwise arid landscape
• Aboriginal people have used these springs as reliable water points for thousands of years
• They support unique plant and small animal life found almost nowhere else in the region
• Early European explorers and pastoralists relied on the same springs to move stock and supplies

We usually build a short stop here into the itinerary on the drive up. It’s a good leg-stretch, a genuinely interesting bit of geology and history, and it sets up the contrast nicely — from ancient bubbling water to the driest, flattest expanse of salt on the continent, all in the same day.

Among the small number of Earth features that astronauts and satellite imagery can pick out clearly from orbit, Lake Eyre holds a spot — its scale and its stark contrast against the surrounding desert make it one of the more recognisable Australian landmarks visible from well beyond the atmosphere.

Why It Stands Out So Clearly

From orbit, Lake Eyre’s brilliant white salt surface creates an extraordinary contrast against the deep red-brown of the surrounding desert country. This isn’t unique to satellite imagery — it’s exactly the same effect that makes the lake so visually striking from a light aircraft during the scenic flight, just observed from a vastly greater altitude.

The lake’s genuinely enormous surface area — around 9,500 square kilometres at its fullest extent — means it registers clearly even in imagery covering huge swathes of the continent, unlike many smaller landmarks that require much higher resolution imagery to identify.

What Satellite Imagery Reveals

Satellite monitoring of Lake Eyre has become a genuinely useful scientific tool for tracking flooding events. Because the lake is so remote and difficult to monitor comprehensively from the ground, satellite imagery lets researchers track water extent, movement, and evaporation rates across the entire lake system in a way that would be impractical using ground-based observation alone.

This kind of monitoring has substantially improved scientific understanding of how flood events develop and recede over time, and it’s part of how organisations track the water flowing down the Diamantina, Cooper Creek, and Georgina systems long before it reaches the lake itself.

Astronaut Observations

Various astronauts have specifically noted Lake Eyre among the Australian landmarks recognisable from the International Space Station, alongside other major features like the Great Barrier Reef and Uluru. It’s a distinctive enough shape and colour contrast that it doesn’t require specialist knowledge to identify from orbit — it simply looks unlike anything else in the vicinity.

A Different Way to Think About Scale

There’s something worth sitting with in the fact that a place you can stand on the edge of, hear the silence of, and photograph up close is also large enough to be clearly identifiable from several hundred kilometres up in orbit. It’s one more way of grappling with the genuine scale of the lake — an experience that’s difficult to process at ground level, and somehow equally difficult to process from the opposite extreme of altitude.

Seeing It From the Air, If Not From Space

While we can’t offer the orbital view, the scenic flight included in our Lake Eyre tours gives you the closest thing most people will ever get to appreciating the lake’s genuine scale from above. Get in touch to find out more about upcoming tour dates.

People are curious about this more than you might expect — once the excitement of booking a scenic flight settles in, questions about the actual mechanics come up. Who’s flying the plane? What kind of aircraft is it? How experienced are these pilots in conditions this remote? Fair questions, and worth answering properly.

The Aircraft

Scenic flights over Lake Eyre typically use small, light aircraft carrying between four and six passengers plus the pilot. These aircraft are chosen specifically for their ability to operate from short, unsealed outback airstrips — the kind found at William Creek — and for the visibility they offer passengers, generally with high-set wings that don’t obstruct the view down toward the lake.

These are not commercial airline-style aircraft. They’re smaller, lighter, and give a noticeably different flying experience — closer to the ground in terms of feel, more responsive to air movement, and offering a much more direct visual connection to the landscape below.

Who the Pilots Are

The pilots operating these flights are commercially licensed and hold specific endorsements for the aircraft they fly, along with extensive experience in outback and remote-area flying specifically. Flying over genuinely remote terrain, sometimes with limited navigation reference points given the flat, uniform landscape below, requires a different skill set from flying over more conventional, feature-rich terrain.

Many of the pilots working these routes have spent years flying in outback conditions specifically, which matters more than general flying hours alone — reading weather patterns specific to this region, understanding the particular challenges of a featureless salt lake for visual navigation, and managing the practical realities of operating from remote airstrips with minimal infrastructure.

Safety Standards

Australian aviation safety standards apply fully to these operations, regardless of how remote the departure point feels. Aircraft undergo the same maintenance and inspection regimes required of any commercial aviation operation, and pilots are subject to the same licensing, currency, and health requirements as any other commercial pilot in Australia.

Weather Decision-Making

Pilots operating these flights make conservative decisions about weather conditions, and it’s genuinely their call, not the tour operator’s, whether a flight proceeds on a given day. If conditions aren’t suitable — wind, visibility, dust — the flight is delayed or rescheduled rather than proceeding with unnecessary risk. This is part of why we’ve built some flexibility into our itineraries, as we’ve discussed elsewhere regarding weather delays.

What This Means for You

The scenic flight is in genuinely capable, experienced hands. The pilots flying these routes have chosen to specialise in exactly this kind of flying, and their judgment about when and how to fly safely over Lake Eyre is something we trust completely as part of how we run our tours.

A section of the route our tours travel follows, roughly, the corridor of the Overland Telegraph Line — one of the most significant infrastructure projects in nineteenth-century Australian history, and one that fundamentally changed how quickly information could move between Australia and the rest of the world.

The Problem It Solved

Before 1872, sending a message between Australia and Britain took weeks or months — as long as it took a ship to physically carry mail across the ocean. For a colony increasingly involved in global trade and politics, this delay was a genuine limitation. The solution was an overland telegraph line connecting Adelaide to Darwin, linking into an undersea cable that connected to the rest of the world via Java.

The Scale of the Undertaking

Construction of the Overland Telegraph Line ran from 1870 to 1872, covering approximately 3,200 kilometres through country that was, at the time, almost entirely unmapped and unsettled by Europeans. Small teams worked through desert, scrubland, and tropical country in the Top End, erecting poles and stringing wire across some of the most challenging terrain in Australia, largely without the benefit of established roads or reliable water sources.

Repeater stations were established at intervals along the line to boost the signal over such vast distances — several of these station sites, including ones near the route our tours travel, became small settlements in their own right, some of which persisted long after the telegraph line’s original purpose became obsolete.

Why the Route Matters to Our Journey

The telegraph line’s construction crews relied heavily on existing knowledge of water sources across the interior — many of which had been used by Aboriginal people for countless generations before European survey teams arrived. The mound springs along parts of the Oodnadatta Track, fed by the Great Artesian Basin, were critical water points for both the original telegraph construction teams and the settlements and pastoral activity that followed.

What Happened to the Line

The telegraph line operated for decades, gradually being supplemented and eventually replaced by more advanced communication technology through the twentieth century. Physical remnants — old poles, repeater station ruins, historical markers — can still be found at various points along its original route, offering a tangible connection to an infrastructure achievement that’s easy to underestimate now that instant global communication is taken entirely for granted.

On Our Tours

Our guides talk about the telegraph line’s history as it becomes relevant along the route — it’s one of the layers of human history in this landscape that sits alongside the much older Aboriginal history and the more recent stories of pastoral settlement and mining. Understanding it adds real depth to what might otherwise look like empty country.

Everyone who visits Coober Pedy knows opal is central to the town’s identity, but fewer people understand what the actual mining process involves. It’s more physically demanding, more uncertain, and honestly more interesting than most people expect.

What Opal Actually Is

Opal forms when silica-rich water seeps into cracks and voids in sedimentary rock and gradually solidifies over millions of years. The specific conditions required — silica concentration, water movement, geological timing — are relatively rare, which is part of why opal deposits are concentrated in a small number of locations worldwide, with the Coober Pedy region being one of the most significant.

Finding a Claim

Opal mining in Coober Pedy operates on a claim system — miners peg out a defined area of land based on geological indicators and existing knowledge of where opal-bearing seams tend to run. Unlike gold, opal doesn’t reliably concentrate in obvious, predictable patterns, which means a huge amount of opal mining is genuinely speculative. Many claims produce little or nothing. This uncertainty is part of the culture of the town — everyone has a story about the find that changed everything, and everyone also knows people who dug for years without significant reward.

The Actual Digging

Modern opal mining primarily uses mechanical equipment — blowers to remove loose material, and specialised drilling and tunnelling machinery to excavate through the sandstone layers where opal seams typically occur. This is a significant shift from the hand-digging methods of the town’s early twentieth-century history, though the fundamental uncertainty of the process hasn’t changed.

Miners work through layers looking for ‘colour’ — visual indicators in the rock suggesting opal might be present nearby — and follow promising signs through tunnels that can extend considerable distances underground.

Grading and Value

Once opal is found, its value depends on a combination of factors: colour intensity and range, clarity, the pattern of colour play across the stone, and size. A small, exceptional stone can be worth significantly more than a larger but duller one. This grading process is genuinely skilled work, and it’s part of why opal valuation isn’t as straightforward as simply weighing a stone the way you might with gold.

Visiting a Working Mine

On our Coober Pedy stop, we visit sites where you can see the actual mining process and underground conditions firsthand, along with an opal cutting demonstration that shows how a rough, unremarkable-looking stone is transformed into the polished, colourful gem most people picture when they think of opal.

It’s one of the more genuinely hands-on educational stops on the whole Lake Eyre journey — a real working industry, not a museum recreation of one.

Coober Pedy’s landscape is strange enough in person that it’s not surprising filmmakers have repeatedly used it to depict places that are supposed to look alien, apocalyptic, or otherwise not-quite-Earth. If you’ve watched a certain kind of Australian film and felt like the landscape looked oddly familiar after visiting Coober Pedy, there’s a good reason for that.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

The most famous connection is Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), the third film in George Miller’s post-apocalyptic franchise, which used Coober Pedy and the surrounding landscape extensively as a filming location. The town’s stark, arid, otherworldly terrain suited the film’s vision of a devastated future Australia perfectly — no set dressing required, the landscape did most of the work on its own.

Locations around Coober Pedy, including areas resembling the Breakaways, provided the desolate backdrop for several key sequences in the film, and the connection remains a point of local pride and occasional tourism reference decades later.

Pitch Black

The 2000 science fiction film Pitch Black, which introduced the Riddick character later developed across several sequels, also used Coober Pedy and the surrounding outback as a filming location. The alien planet the film’s characters find themselves stranded on drew directly on the genuinely otherworldly quality of this landscape — proof that you don’t always need a studio backlot or CGI to create something that looks like it belongs on another planet.

Why the Landscape Works So Well

Coober Pedy and its surrounds have a specific combination of features that make them so useful for these kinds of productions: minimal vegetation, dramatic and unusual geological formations (particularly at the Breakaways), a colour palette that shifts from ochre to near-white depending on the mineral content of the soil, and an almost complete absence of the kind of infrastructure that would visually anchor a scene to contemporary Earth. It genuinely looks like somewhere else.

Other Productions

Beyond the two most famous examples, Coober Pedy has featured in various documentaries, television productions, and smaller film projects over the decades, largely for the same reason — a landscape that does a lot of visual work without requiring extensive art department intervention.

Seeing It for Yourself

Whether or not you’re a fan of the specific films, there’s something genuinely worth experiencing about standing in a landscape that’s convincingly stood in for another planet on screen. It’s one of the more unexpected layers to a Coober Pedy stop on our Lake Eyre tours — alongside the underground homes and opal mining history, there’s also this odd little chapter of film history sitting in the same red dirt.

Every so often on the drive up toward Lake Eyre, someone in the group spots a camel wandering the scrub well away from any obvious enclosure and asks the obvious question: what is a camel doing out here, completely wild, in the middle of the Australian desert?

It’s a fair question, and the answer is a genuinely interesting piece of Australian history.

How Camels Got to Australia

Camels aren’t native to Australia. They were imported, starting in the 1840s and continuing through the late nineteenth century, specifically to help with exploration and transport across the arid interior. Camels handle heat, distance, and lack of water far better than horses, which made them invaluable for opening up central Australia to European exploration and settlement.

The camels were imported primarily from British India and Afghanistan, and along with them came experienced handlers — the Afghan cameleers we talk about when we stop in Marree. These men and their camel teams supplied remote stations, built early telegraph and rail infrastructure, and made outback exploration genuinely feasible in country where it otherwise wasn’t.

How They Became Wild

As motor vehicles and rail networks expanded through the early twentieth century, the working camel industry declined rapidly. Rather than being systematically removed, large numbers of camels were simply released into the outback as they were no longer needed for transport work. With no natural predators and country well suited to their physiology, camel populations grew steadily over the following century.

Just How Many Are There?

Australia now has the largest wild camel population in the world — estimates have placed feral camel numbers in the hundreds of thousands across central Australia, spread through Western Australia, South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Queensland. It’s a genuinely striking fact: more wild camels roam Australia’s outback than anywhere in the Middle East or North Africa, where the species originated.

Why This Matters Ecologically

Feral camels have a real environmental impact — competing with native wildlife and livestock for scarce water and vegetation, and causing damage to fragile desert ecosystems and culturally significant sites like waterholes and mound springs. Management of feral camel populations is an ongoing challenge for land managers across the regions our tours pass through.

What You Might See on Tour

Sightings aren’t guaranteed, but camels are occasionally spotted from the road, particularly around dawn and dusk when they’re most active. If you do see one, it’s worth appreciating the strange fact of what you’re looking at — a species from the other side of the world, thriving in a landscape it was never native to, now more populous here than almost anywhere else on Earth.