Letter from Australia: line of fire

The road, the day, the night, everything felt upside down. The Australian way could be felt in every breath we took and the warmth of the outback wrapped us with a sense of safety. In the car, we stared at the never-ending white line that divided the road and drew out as the only landmark possible to follow.

The longer we drove, the deeper our eyes would sink into that never-ending line, leading us somewhere between the infinity of the sky and the ground of fire. Red dust and burning air, nothing else – nothing more but the sun, the sky, the dust and their primary colours.

The day starts at 4.30 in the morning and ends around 7.30 in the evening. Real explorers always wake up with the sun and fall asleep with the moon. Each day was a new adventure, a road trip towards the discovery of this fascinating land. And each day would start exactly the same: sunglasses on, sunscreen on and – the most important of all – net on. This would actually be the only place in the world where you would want to put a net over your head in order to avoid swallowing a kilo of flies per day, and probably the only place where you would pay $18 for one of these nets.

However, as explorers, we were ready to accept all the challengesthat might come along – for instance, taking a shower in lost iron cabins with giant frogs for company, or eating cans of tuna – on top of the copious fly dish – three times a day, for they were the only food that would not boil in the trunk.

As the night fell, it brought the sweet relief of fresh air in the furnace that was our car and home for that week. The only lights that could show us the way were now the stars, which seemed multiplied in the nudity of the sky. In the immensity of the land, everything was amplified.

Silence had never been that noisy. We did not feel alone any more; we had never been so aware of everything that surrounded us. Dingoes, frogs, snakes, mosquitoes. Yes, mosquitoes. They were the ghosts of our nights, invisible but audible, and the vampires of our adventure, sucking our blood for as long as the night might last. More than any wild creature that was living out there, they were the scariest.

Each night was a battle for our survival in this land of wilderness and danger, won by the swatting of what had seemed to be a billion mosquitoes. In the morning, most of our blood would then be found on our mottled clothes, on the flecked roof, in every spot the fight between the devilish mosquitoes and our poor European human nature had happened. As the sun rose up, its rays would greet us with that wonderful feeling of peace and loneliness again.

The Guardian Weekly regularly publishes a Letter from one of its readers from around the world. We welcome submissions – they should focus on giving a clear sense of a place and its people. Please send them to weekly.letters@theguardian.com