Simpson Desert
"The Simpson doesn't have a view. It has a rhythm — dune, swale, dune, swale — and it does not vary for a thousand kilometres."
A sea of parallel red sand dunes running for a thousand kilometres across three states, crossed by a single legendary track and almost nothing else.
I crossed the Simpson Desert on the French Line with a convoy of three other vehicles, because nobody with any sense does this alone, and I understood why within the first hour. The desert is built from over a thousand parallel sand dunes running roughly north-south, some of them twenty metres high, and the French Line goes straight over the top of every single one instead of around them. You crest a dune not knowing what’s on the other side — sometimes another car coming the opposite way, sometimes just more red sand falling away into a swale of spinifex and gidgee scrub. My tyres were dropped to 15 psi and I still bottomed out twice.
Big Red, the enormous dune just west of Birdsville that marks the desert’s eastern edge, has a kind of local celebrity status — people camp at its base for days trying different lines up its face, and there’s a running culture of failure and cheering that I did not expect to find in the middle of nowhere. I watched a ute attempt it four times and fail four times to genuine applause from strangers. On the fifth try it made it, and everyone at the base, me included, cheered like we’d known the driver our whole lives.
What stays with me is the emptiness at night. We camped in a swale between dunes with no fire allowed under total fire ban, ate cold food, and lay on the sand watching a sky that had absolutely nothing between it and us — no town glow within four hundred kilometres in any direction. Someone in the group had done astrophotography as a hobby and set up a tripod; even without his equipment, the Milky Way was bright enough to read a map by, which is the only time in my life that’s been literally true.
When to go: May to August only. The desert is legally closed to travel in the peak of summer due to extreme heat risk, and a permit plus a satellite phone and full convoy protocol are non-negotiable — this is genuinely remote country where breakdowns can be fatal.