We have a long drive today, penitance for our long stop off over the last three days. Adelaide is 500km (300m) away, and the car needs to be there by 10am tomorrow. It's dark at 6pm, so we shouldn't be driving later than this, to avoid wildlife on the roads. Despite this, we are lazy, and don't check out until 10am.

We decide to visit Flat Rock en route, or Gulgara Manja, a site of Aboriginal art. It's marked on the map as an unsealed road, which technically we shouldn't take our car down, but we ignore this. Bad idea. The road is much worse than we expected, the map is vague, and the tracks aren't signposted. We're driving on sand thrown onto rock, which hits the suspension pretty badly. The car isn't enjoying this and neither are we. After some guesswork on direction, we find a car park (with a couple of 4x4s in it) and a sign saying 500m to the site. We walk around 750m, guessing where the track goes, leaving marks on the ground so we can find our way back (we're not as talented as the Aborigines). Another sign says 500m, which we follow. We find a precipice of flat rock (!) with a great view over the plains. It has a caged area (I guess vandalism would be a disaster) with childs' hand-prints, and drawings on. They used ochre on their hands to paint. The origin and meaning of the pictures is lost, and the date is unknown. It's humbling to think they could be thousands of years old. We sign the visitors book, and review other peoples' entries; occasionally intelligent but mostly "awesome!!"

There's nobody else here, we're not totally confident of our way out of here, and it's a vast place. For the first time I begin to get an idea of how big Australia is. Ros has been telling us this for weeks. Once we get into the Outback next week I might start believing her.

Suffice to say our Scouting skills save us (nice alliteration there), and we make it back to the car for midday. We still have 444km to go. On the same road. Which is straight. When I say the A1 from Edinburgh to London is more exciting, you may begin to get the picture. In five hours we:

• Change drivers every hour
• Overtake a lorry approx every 5km in a passing place
• Move half onto the hard shoulder every time a double-trailer lorry comes the other way and threatens to blow us off the road
• Pass through many towns with grain silos, selling tractors
• Change the CD four times
• Stop for lunch
• See a helicopter
• Sort our CDs into alphabetical order by artist
• Cross state border from Victoria into South Australia
• Change time zones by -1/2 hour (that bit actually was exciting)
• See two emus
• Stop for fuel
• See many signs saying "drowsy drivers die" and "if you drink and drive you're bloody stupid"
• Sort the sorted CDs into alphabetical order by artist and album name
• Ensure all the sorted CDs are upright and straight
• See coloured markers indicating where people died/were injured in road accidents
• Find out that Victoria has better roads than South Australia but a lower speed limit (100 kph, vs 110 kph)
• Overtake the same caravan twice (we stopped to swap drivers)

Boy, I'm really looking forward to driving through the desert later this week.

We get to the Adelaide Hills at 5.30pm. This is a huge long downhill stretch through some blasted away mountains. Glad the brakes are working, it's a long way down. It's like a road I've been on in the UK, but can't recall where. Might be Bath, or somewhere else down south.

We drive to the airport to drop the car, which is pretty uneventful, except it's rush hour, which isn't fun as we're tired. Budget don't seem to notice the previously white car is now covered in orange sand.

There is an hourly bus to the centre, which happily is due 2 minutes after we require it, and will drop us 2 minutes' walk from the YHA. We get a double en-suite (actually a room for five, which is nice and spacious). The hostel is big, and has excellent facilities, including seven PCs, to Iain's joy.

We're tired, but we go out to eat. There's an all-you-can-eat Indian marked in our guidebook, so we head to that. Through the red light district. It's a Hare Krishna centre. Whoops. Well, the curry was okay, and at $7 (2.50UKP per person) we're not complaining.

We spod, write the diary, fail to upload photos, and sleep at 10.30pm, exhausted. That's starting to sound like a daily theme.