Five adventurers left Sydney on 01 December and took a leisurely 3 days to get to the eclipse site - stopping everyday at a new Outback town to explore the local culture and get a sense of one of the most alluring and remote regions on this planet.

We visited the wineries and citrus groves of Griffith - spent the night in an underground cave attached to an opal mine in White Cliffs - and joined hundreds of other eclipse chasers with eclipse fever in Leigh Creek.

At 9,500 feet eclipseguy enjoys the ride with eclipse first-timer George Macarthur.

If the thought of hopscotching through the Outback in a small plane scares the hell out of you, then you wouldn’t have enjoyed this trip! Personally, I can’t get enough of this stuff. It seems that if I am chasing an eclipse, I am willing to do almost anything. Plus, I have way more fun than most people!

A great AP photo!

Our landing strip campsite in the giant “dust-bowl” know as Lyndhurst.

Lyndhurst (population 25) was lucky enough to be situated directly in the path of the Total Eclipse and had one of the few serviceable landing strips we could use. We arrived the day before the eclipse with the intention of camping for two nights. During the forty hours we were, the stiff southerly wind never let up and it was a struggle to keep the tents from collapsing. Using the gas stove to prepare any hot food was out of the question. Fortunately for us, the eclipse had brought more visitors to Lyndhurst than it had ever seen in its history and there were truck-loads of food and water available at the Elsewhere Hotel, a tiny Outback watering hole two kilometres behind us!

Elsewhere Hotel. Centre of the eclipse universe!

With the thousands of freaky revelers brought in by the well-organized Eclipse Outback Festival, Lyndhurst was a carnival of sights and sounds and celebration. This was a very different energy than my eclipse experiences in Turkey or India which were at sacred archeological sites. But I was loving the change. This was truly a giantic eclipse bash complete with 24 hour-a-day trance music, all the food and drink you could desire, and artists and dancers and crafts from 20 different countries!

This is what a campsite for 6,000 looks like.