A little town called Kimba

Legs like jelly this morning. A record-breaking 104km push yesterday saw us trawl along the ever-dimishing Eyre Highway between Wudinna and Kimba. Either side of an undulating road the countryside turned vaguely British, sheep and horses stared at me as I glided by and I half expected an olde English pub around every corner. Instead, Dim ran up to me holding a dead lizard by the tail, the driver of a ute tailgating me (yes, ute tailgating skateboard) stuck a chubby middle finger up as I pulled over to let them pass - I nearly hurled my water bottle at the passing goliath. A woman drove by waving a five dollar note out of the window and then panicked as two cars appeared behind her. She threw the note which, being paper, didn't gain any velocity and flapped around in the wind until I caught up with it. I was video blogging at the time and looked at the camera grinning, "apparently word has gotten around that I must be crazy to be doing something like this, too crazy even to talk to."

David Attenborough's audio book 'Life on Air' has kept my left ear company for the past few days. The man has led a fascinating life and today, as I listen in to Disc 8 of 17, he talks about flying to Nairobi with a co-cameraman to film a certain Lioness, who was reared by a German Baroness in northern Kenya and whose subsequent story became known as Born Free. The lioness was called Elsa, and Attenborough recalled the moment when he woke up from a siesta with the hairy, sweaty underside of a big cat's jaw looming over him. "If I had sat up with a joly," he recalled, "my head would have collided with her."

I looked down at Elsa, the one who keeps my feet company everyday and bares the name inspired by this wildly-tame lioness from Kenya, and tapped her with my left toes. "That's my girl," I said, and pushed on.

We are now three days of empty country away from Port Augusta, from there we head south, through Clare's wine valley region (don't get any funny ideas) and into Adelaide. We're barely a week away from there now. Our second city on this board-inspired adventure is fast approaching, and as I write from a small computer library in Kimba, which claims to be Halfway Across Australia, I thank my lucky stars that although the road ahead is a long and tiring one, we are not yet even halfway to Brisbane.