I'm bouncing along a dusty road in a four-wheel-drive Australia Post truck with Outback postman Peter Rowe. The mail bags in the back are bulging with letters and parcels addressed to residents of the remote South Australian stations and towns we are soon to visit. Twice a week the mail is delivered, with Rowe and his son Derek taking turns to drive the 644km round trip, and more often than not their truck is filled with adventurous tourists eager to experience a day in the Outback.
The trip starts at Coober Pedy, a multicultural community of opal mining families. Rowe arrived in town more than 30 years ago to dig for opals, and his mail-run commentary is peppered with tales of the good old days. As we depart he points out rocky ridges that conceal sprawling subterranean mansions. 'Some of these underground homes are really posh. They have swimming pools, gyms, solid gold fittings in the bathrooms and there's one with an en suite bathroom attached to every bedroom,' he says.
Just out of town the countryside is scorched and desolate. We stop at a section of the 5,300km dingo fence, the longest fence in the world. Twice the length of the Great Wall of China, it was built to keep dingos out of sheep-farming country.
Farther along the dirt road we leave a cloud of dust in our wake as the truck's wheels spin through the Moon Plains. Rowe informs his passengers that the rocky landscape is abundant with 120 million-year-old marine fossils, remnants from a time when this brown, barren zone was at the bottom of a freezing southern ocean.
This stark landscape has captured the imagination of apocalyptic filmmakers and consequently the plains have featured in movies such as Red Planet and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Adding to the out-of-this-world ambience are movie props, such as a huge spaceship that sits parked in front of the Opal Cave underground complex, left behind by the makers of science-fiction film Pitch Black.
Every few kilometres we come across flood warning signs that look completely out of place along the dry and dusty road. However, these incongruous signs are not to be ignored - rain falling 20km away can turn dry creek beds into raging torrents, rapidly flooding large areas. Although regular rainfall is uncommon, when it does rain the desert's wild flowers flourish. Every few years the desiccated earth transforms into a brilliant kaleidoscope of blooming flora. It may also come as a surprise that desert communities have a seemingly endless supply of water, thanks to the Great Artesian Basin, a natural underground reservoir that holds 132,000 times more water than Sydney Harbour.