On camels, salt lakes, and more food angst

When we arrived at a certain community, we heard that the phonelines, ATMs and eftpos were all down and had been down since the previous week. The store hadn't bothered opening because nobody had any money to buy food.

Some people had managed to catch a kangaroo or goanna, or dig up some maku, but most people were pretty hungry. A bunch of kids came knocking on our door looking for food that night.

There are lots of camels out there at the moment. That's about the only wildlife we saw apart from lots of birds and all the lizards I tried to dodge while driving. When I lived out there, nobody would hunt or eat camels. I was told it had something to do with the camels being the mode of transport the first invading whitefellas used. Australia is now the only country in the world with a wild camel population. Saudis buy camels off us.

A few years ago the government decided there were too many camels and started a big cull. I've heard that a few people have started eating them and the meat is pretty good. There have also been attempts at mobile abattoirs etc to turn the meat into dog food - what else to do with all those camel carcasses that will otherwise just rot the waterholes etc? I wonder if that's why all the camp dogs are that much healthier than I remember them being?

We were right near a giant salt lake called Lake Hopkins- at least that's what the whitefellas call it. We were taken out there a few times. After a big rain you can walk out into the middle of the lake, across dried and crunchy mud flats, and be rewarded with knee-deep muddy water to cool off in. It's salty, though, so take fresh drinking water with you.

There is also a tributary creek running through the salt pan that apparently is always full- even in drought.

The country round there, they call it tali (sandhill) country. It's beautiful, and seems to change every couple of hundred metres. Steep red hills with beautiful rock formations punctuate the miles and miles of rolling red sand dunes covered with spinifex and desert oak. There is water, if you know where to look.