The Outback II (part 1/2)

Next day we rode to Mount Elvire homestead, John said something about over 500 kms so no time to stop for pictures, because otherwise we would run out of time and I thought "is he really serious about it?"
I remember doing around 450kms offroad and it being quite exhausting but having ridden some wide gravel roads in the last days where you could easily do 200km/h on them, thought he knew the track conditions and besides being a long and exhausting day it would be alright and a plan B or a shortcut would make part of the plan.
We left the campground at around 7:40am and shortly after would be doing around 60 kms deep sand ("Comporta like" on a sunny day by 34C degrees, for the ones that have ridden there) on a car wide track, regardless of terrain difficulty when ridding a Varadero with 19' front wheel, it was really fun but all this time I couldn't take my eyes of the track and didn't notice that my GPS support had gone loose and by the time we stopped it was hanging around and a screw was already missing, that was it with GPS for the day. I placed it inside the tank bag to save the track but later realized that it had no reception in there. Besides that I forgot my camera on the campground, fortunately today's smartphones have cameras, and as I had misused the ram mount to hold the GPS, I know could use it for the video cam, set to automatically take pictures every couple of seconds :-)

Back on route the ground changed to solid mud, gravel then rocky with stretch of sand at least every 500 or 1000 meters and the color was constantly changing.
Tank refill in the middle of nowhere.

After the refill, John let me go first to have a chance to see some wild life, no turns or crossings for the next 25 km, the next pictures should give you an idea how the soil color keeps changing.

Then we stopped at a mine camp to get some extra rain water for the way.

Now, by looking at the pictures, I see that the soil seams pretty solid but the reality is quite different, the weight of the Varadero breaks the thin layer and below it's all sand and keeps surprising your feelings.

Stop at the first crossing to wait for John and Neal.

Lake Barlee, only salt no water ;-)

Mount Elvire homestead, half way done and already over 200 km done and another rain water refill, the day is going to be long.

 To be continued ...