During my time in Adelaide I managed to squeeze in a trip to the Flinders Ranges, the ancient mountain range in South Australia. I was stumped by a lack of car and driving license so was looking for towns that were relatively accessible. On Alan’s recommendation (and nowhere else, he insisted, really captured the heart of the Flinders) I decided to head up to Arkaroola, a wilderness sanctuary in the Northern Flinders. We quickly bought a tent and food supplies (enough for weeks of being lost in the outback) and in two days I was ready to go.

The bus took me up to Copley, where I found a campfire and the milky way. Copley (pop. 104) is probably a typical outback town, but since it’s almost the only town I’ve ever been to in the outback, I can’t be sure. It’s tiny but the streets are huge and wide; there’s a caravan park, a filling station and mechanic, a shop and a pub, all in a line, but each one so far from the next there is no sense of town at all. Everything is centred around the train line which used to take coal to Adelaide, but that train stopped running a few months ago and now the campers have started using the railway sleepers as firewood. On the platform was a group of boys and their dogs hanging around, just sitting there, not waiting for anything.

In the morning, as I was packing up my tent, a woman came and invited me over for a piece of sourdough bread she had baked in her caravan the night before. She and her husband were some of the “grey nomads” who escape the cold winter weather and head for sunshine. And then in the caravan park café I got talking to a photographer who had just returned from Arkaroola and he bought me coffee – everyone was just so generous and helpful!

Originally I had planned to hitch a lift from Copley to Arkaroola with the mailman, but in the morning I was told that a delivery man had come to collect $9000 worth of meat from the caravan park, so instead I squeezed into the refrigerated van with an enormous puppy who sat and licked my face. Roger, the driver, was a fan of Scottish islands and history and we talked more Brexit; he told me about the geology of the landscape and Arkaroola’s removal of the sheep and cattle to restore the landscape, and just as we turned to look at one particularly interesting mountain formation, we drove into a signpost.

We passed some aboriginal villages advertising aboriginal cultural tours, and took a detour to visit an abandoned homestead. Roger compared the invasion of Australia and introduction of sheep to the Highland Clearances, which gave me a new perspective on the barrenness of the landscape (and great-grandfather Bob’s 13 sheep stations). But while the landscape might have been very different several hundred years ago, it was still extraordinarily green from all the rain and full of life.

150km later we arrived at Arkaroola. The geology is amazing and enough to turn anyone into an amateur geologist. The earth looks soft and malleable as it is squashed and pushed upwards and oozes and spills over. Each layer of rocks is about 9000 years, and they say the landscape is 2 billion years old, whatever that means.

Part of Roger’s job at Arkaroola is to act as a kind of ranger, and he invited me night spotting that evening. When it got dark he drove round in an open buggy and we set off down a track. It was only once he’d turned off the headlights and switched on the torch that I saw the great rifle on the mattressed bonnet. A voice in my head piped up (it’s only now, when the power cuts out completely, that this voice appears – the first time this trip): what are you doing in the dark getting into a car with a strange man and a gun?

Most people who come to visit never think of going out at night but it’s one of the best times to see wildlife, and they don’t seem to mind the light. We saw lots of kangaroos (or euros, common wallroo) and huge numbers of yellow footed rock wallabies, which were once endangered but are now so common at Arkaroola they’re considering introducing a predator. Suddenly Roger tensed and became very still: a rabbit, spawn of the English devil (along with cats). He picked up the rifle, took aim, and the rabbit ran away. We drove after it through the trees and bushes, but never saw it again.

I don’t think the folk at Arkaroola are used to people who don’t have their own car, and they don’t get many English people either. I was extremely lucky: not only did I get staff meals to warm me up, but I was even offered a free scenic flight. It was just awful luck it was to wrong place at the wrong time. And they said I should go back and work there!

Besides bushwalking, the main attraction of Arkaroola is the “world famous” ridgetop tour along an old mining track. They specially designed 4 wheel drives for this which can fit ten people in the back; we all had to hang on as we drove up and down the mountains along red mud tracks, which got so steep at points that they had been turned into staircases. Our driver had brilliant stories and nuggets of geology, but it was very difficult to concentrate on something so academic when we were hurtling around precipices and my fellow passengers were screaming.

At the top was an absolutely fabulous view across the mountains, and we were given lamingtons and milo (I imagine this evokes nostalgia for Australians) as the sun set and everything glowed red.

At night time the temperature really fell. The first morning at Arkaroola I got out of my tent to find it steaming like a haystack. The second morning I reached out to unzip the door and felt a solid wall, hardened by a layer of ice. But I was saved by my merino, yet again.

I’d been promised a lift back to Copley with someone. It turned out to be a convoy of six 4wds heading around central Australia and across the Simpson desert. They were pretty serious about it: they’d been planning the journey for 12 months and had got their cars specially fitted out with extra storage and adjusted suspension for the corrugated roads. Each car had one long aerial for radio communication (so they could let the cars behind know if there was a bumpy creek coming up or an emu in the road) and another long aerial which turned into a 3m long sand flag. It rather puts an end to my dreams of crossing the outback, just as I was getting a taste for it.