Welcome to the first instalment of The Inland Sea: An Australian Odyssey. Over the coming weeks and months we shall visit a number of locations throughout Australia. This first episode is an introduction to what is to come and it sets up the premise of our ten-week marathon through the outback.

We're off to Aldinga Beach, just south of Adelaide. We meet Lynda McCarty who shows us around Aldinga Arts EcoVillage. We are introduced to Elizabeth Heij who takes on a quick tour of her passive solar house and reflects on life in the village.

We're off to Coober Pedy, the opal capital of the world. Opals were discovered here in 1914, and about 70% of all the world's opals come from this dot on the map. It's a fascinating place, but we're not here for the gemstones...

After a quick stop at Australia's most famous landmark, Uluru, we head to Alice Springs in search of 87-year-old Molly Clark. This was an interesting turn in our travels, as we had all thought that at this point on our trip we would be spending more time sightseeing than running around in a town chasing a story. But, there we were...

As travellers it is exciting to get up close and personal with local wildlife. But some species are better kept at a distance. We have run this video past a number of professionals, who are largely in disagreement about what kind of snake this really is. About half have said it's a brown snake, famously known as the second most venomous snake in the world. On the other hand, some have said they reckon it's not a snake at all and, on the contrary, they think it's a legless lizard. In any case, they've all agreed on this: "When in doubt, don't get up too close, and leave it up to trained professionals to deal with whatever that is."

Four hours north of Alice Springs we find the self-proclaimed UFO capital of Australia. Wycliffe Well is more like a themed caravan park than a town. As we arrived in the off-season for tourism, we possibly doubled the overnight population when we pitched out tents. But we were well provided for, and they serve up a decent feed with a side of mystery there. We caught up with manager Russell Perry who reckons he'd spotted a whole handful UFOs in the last year -- at least. As for our own UFO spotting adventure...

The silly season is upon us as we enter the Northern Territory! In Darwin we catch up with Melbournian migrant Steven Noble who is working as a local tour guide. It's Christmas Eve, and a fortunate coincidence made us cross paths with another local man, Craig West, who shows us some local fauna. If Rudolph were here, he probably would have been eaten by now. Merry Christmas everybody!

The week between Christmas and New Year's Eve was something of an endurance contest, as we drove more than 2,000 kilometres in three days through some of the most spectacular landscapes that Australia has to offer. We met local bull enthusiast Tex Kitchen at Willare Bridge Roadhouse. And as we finally arrived in Broome we farewelled the old year from the camel's back and went looking for 120 million year old dinosaur prints.

Port Hedland is the biggest town in the dry, harsh, and iron ore-rich Pilbara region. It's a sleepy ghost town the first week of New Year. The port is quiet, the town seemingly empty. Rusty old machinery is scattered everywhere around town, and we can't make up our minds as to whether we think it's like an open-air museum for the mining industry or more of a graveyard for obsolete technology. Only minutes away, on Cemetery Beach, a natural spectacle is taking place that makes us forget all about the iron ore.

The Principality of Hutt River is Australia's oldest micronation. Prince Leonard I and 30 other residents officially seceded from Australia in 1970, in an act of self-preservation, after the government technically threatened to take away both their livelihood and property. We follow the gracefully ageing Prince on a busy day in his Capital, Nain.

On our journey south in Western Australia, we realise the global financial crisis had a great impact on some people in the area. While most people felt the pinch, it made plans extremely difficult, if not impossible, for some families in the state who were trying to establish ecovillages, and create a more sustainable lifestyle. Nervous banks either denied or withdrew support from what they thought was too experimental in an unstable economic climate. We look at two struggling projects, the Geraldton Urban Ecovillage and Somerville Ecovillage, near Perth.

It's time to send our Best Boy Eirik back home to Norway. We then head to Fremantle to visit the Pinakarri community; a sustainability-minded suburban housing co-op in Hamilton Hill, the first of its kind in Western Australia.

In Yallingup, Western Australia, we meet permaculture expert Warwick Rowell, who spent more than a decade attempting to establish an ecovillage in the area. Yallingup got its name from the Aboriginal word for "place of love," but as the Rowell family's story tells us, it has not been all wine and roses.

In this episode we're off to Augusta in Western Australia to visit Kevin and his family. We chat to Kevin about his experiments with bush regeneration and his old car, which he has converted to run on used deep frying oil. Then we're off to meet Dave Seegar at the Margaret River Soup Kitchen.

Living Waters is looking to become the first fully operational permaculture hamlet in Western Australia. We were lucky to spend a few days towards the end of our odyssey in the emerging ecovillage, with founder Dave Coleman and his wife Claire Everett and the other villagers.