KM 3044 to 4600 – The Outback: Lord of the flies and a town underground

Nothing. Loads of it. Loads of fucking Nothing. Loads of blue Nothing in the sky and loads of red Nothing on the ground. That’s basically the Outback, fascinating at times, but mostly just big and wide and red and endless and, well, lots of Nothing.
And in between the blue and the red Nothing: flies. Loads of them. Loads of fucking flies of the supernasty kind, the kind of “I’m getting on your nerves until you either completely freak or until you reach a level of patience only achieved by the wisest and oldest Buddhist monks”-flies.
But apart from the flies there’s not much to distract you from the Nothingness and the Vast-ness of the Outback: Going down hundreds of kilometres you still can count the cars passing you on one hand and the street’s also everything but entertaining, with hundreds of kilometres of pure straightness, only sometimes interrupted by a slight curve (that the guys planning the road actually just put there to make the road less boring, like a according sign told us later on).
Except that the only sight in this vast Nothing are gas stations every couple of hundred kilometres and “towns”. That is, if you really wanna call a place with 300 people, a “historic site” and a tourist information a “town”. Seriously, who lives here? Or even worse, who moves here? I mean, there’s no almost literally no infrastructure except running water and electricity (and I’m not a 100% sure on that one), probably no jobs, hardly any other people, no entertainment except TV and incest.
That goes also for the town of Coober Pedy, Australia’s “Opal capital” (which is kind of true, with almost 2/3 of the world’s opals being mined here) and a perfect example for the above mentioned “town”: Situated literally in the desert, inmidst of just dust and opalmines, with a landscape similar to that of Mars (Seriously, there’s even been a newspaper article on it, we’ve seen the pictures and it really IS damn similar!), it’s depressing to just imagine living here. The fascinating thing however is, that half the town exists literally underground: churches, bars, apartments, hotels are actually dug into the rocks because this offers a sort of natural airconditioning. It’s probably the only way to live here in the boiling heat of a summer day and the freezing cold of a winter night here and not go nuts.
So, yes, the Outback is sort of fascinating for some time, however, after about a thousand kilometres of Nothing now, we’re definitely for what we’ve really come for: Uluru.