Contrary to popular belief, orienteering skills are not an important part of hitchhiking across Australia. Having found the Stuart Highway out of Sydney we simply went straight on across the Blue Mountains and the miles of desiccated, lizard-baking wasteland that is bizarrely known as ‘The Accessible Outback’ of South Australia.

Two weeks, and 1,500-miles, later a sign outside the Kulgera Pub advised us that we had finally reached ‘The Real Outback.’ This was the Northern Territory and any self-respecting ‘Top Ender’ will tell you that any other part of the Outback is strictly for Sheilas.

First-light is referred to in the picturesque Outback slang as ‘sparrow’s fart.’ It was not this, however, that greeted us as we stepped out of our cabin, but the cackling call of the kookaburra that is known as ‘the bushman’s clock.’ We’d cracked a few stubbies the night before and, as we started out towards a ridge that was just beginning to rear up against the paling sky, my usually tireless sidekick Crocodile Dougee was sporting eyes like the slits in Ned Kelly’s tin helmet.

You can count the miles down the Stuart Highway from Alice to Urldunda in dead kangaroos. There’s not a helluva lot else to look at though and my eyes began to glaze over somewhere after the thirtieth ‘roo road-kill.

These road-kills have had a horrifying effect on Australia’s biggest bird of pray. The wedge-tailed eagle, with its eight-foot wingspan, is irresistibly attracted to this transcontinental smorgasbord and, having no natural predators, it is quite ready to do battle with any vehicle that has the audacity to try to scare it off its meal. Trackside roadhouses are full of yarns about drivers who were terrified to see a half-dead wedgie coming through the windscreen at him. “He was all torn and bleeding and spitting feathers when he turned up here,” they tell you. “Funniest bloody thing you ever saw!”

The Sydney Harbour Bridge climb must be the most successful tour operation of its kind anywhere in the world. It is a complete human conveyor belt – an entire factory dedicated to elevating whole groups of people spiritually and physically skyward. The Bridgeclimb complex is erected in a series of tunnels where, until a few years ago, they did nothing more adventurous than sell Porsches. At the height of the season Bridgeclimb is now processing groups of up to 10 tourists, 24 hours a day.

You are prepared, kitted out and trained in a super-efficient environment. You are shown how to attach your harnesses and are fitted with earphones that instead of going in your ear rest on your cheekbones and send vibrations that your brain deciphers as your guide’s voice. This way your ears are also open to eternal sound. The whole atmosphere feels strangely like it will on the fateful future day when some of us (or some of you) will be selected for transfer to a less exhausted planet.

It’s now almost seven months since I left London for Panama and began this little jaunt around the world. Seven months living out of a backpack, eating in cafés and cheap restaurants. Seven months of working on magazine stories (more stories than I can remember now) in what must by now be a couple of dozen ‘hijacked offices’ in the corners of cafes, bars, airports, hotel lobbies, private sitting rooms and even railway carriages.

Seven months sleeping in such a motley mingled mishmash of different accommodation that it is almost impossible to recall them all now. There have been nights lately when I’ve woken up in the complete darkness of the wee hours and literally struggled to remember where I am: well I can remember going through X…and the night before last I slept in Y…therefore I must now be in Z. One night I lay in bed unable even to reach for a light switch because it was impossible to conjure up a picture of what the inside of the room looked like.

There are few things more hypnotic than watching a desert highway flicker out, like a shaken rope, as it stretches out into the limitless distance. Moreover you can be pretty sure that no cop in his right mind is going to be sitting out on this blood-boiling forty-five degree outback day. So you keep the needle hovering at a steady 130km/hr and listen to the wheel purr over the hot sticky tarmac.

“That’s the thing about Aus. It’s vast!” my fellow passenger was saying, as we shot across the desert at 100km an hour while gulping at frosted glasses of Victoria Beer. “People from outside just can’t grasp the sheer ‘vastity’ of it.”

The Indian Pacific train had been trundling across the Western Australian Outback for close to twenty hours already and I had to admit that I was struggling to come to terms with it myself. We were now in what my friend might have called the complete ‘emptity’ of the Nullarbor Desert. The name derives from Latin for ‘treeless desert’ and apart from a few scraggy bushes there had been nothing worthy of the name for the last two hundred miles. Then we came upon a little collection of a few shacks around a railway watering point. At some point in the past some optimistic (or perhaps just humorous) souls had planted about a dozen scraggy pines here and they had named the place ‘Forest.’