Roads can be described on a sliding scale, starting from the very popular and generally smooth “freeway” and ending up at the less popular, less traveled, and nearly always rough, “track”. In between there are various degrees of road including streets, toll ways, secondary roads, development roads, tourist trails and so forth. The track however is unique, its description simple and concise, it’s a “track” and as such is ideally suited animals like emus and kangaroos, and wayward Boy Scouts in search of wayward Girl Guides.

It’s a sad fact yet true that to arrive anywhere in the outback of Australia worth seeing you need to put up with the “track” and we should know we’ve put up with a few.

Now that’s cleared up let’s look at the pictures of the Painted Desert on the Oodnadatta Road, sorry, “track”. Oodnadatta? Who comes up with these names? I’m sure half the time the local indigenous persons make this stuff up so they can have a laugh when we try and pronounce names like “Jaminjung”, “Ngaliwurru”, “Ngarinyman” and “Wurlayi” and these are just peoples names. It’s all sounding a bit Welsh to me except the letter “L” has been replaced with a “G” or an “N”. So the good old Welsh name, “Llewellyn”, would become “Nnewggyn“. See now it starts to make sense. The Welsh now have even more explaining to do (apart from Tom Jones that is).