Sophie Matterson likes to say that she "fell into camels". Not literally, of course. (Actually, probably literally on the odd occasion. But nevermind that...)

What Sophie means is that, in the space of just a few years, she went from having only seen camels on overseas holidays to leading five, newly domesticated dromedaries on a 4750 km trek from one side of Australia to the other.

Speaking toMamamia'sNo Filterpodcast, the adventurer said it all started in 2016, when she took a job at a camel dairy run by a friend’s aunt on the Queensland Sunshine Coast. Sophie had grown up around horses and considered herself "an animal person", but she wasn't prepared for the experience of meeting camels.

Watch: Get to know Sophie Matterson more. Post continues after video.

"They all brought their heads right into me. And they gave me this long, long smell with their nostrils right touching my face. And it was the most amazing experience," Sophie said. "I'd almost describe it as a bit of a reading of my soul. It was like they were really getting to know who I was, what I was about, how I was feeling, what my intentions were. It stuck with me, that moment."

Sophie became so enraptured by these animals that she embarked on a mission to learn as much about them as she could. That mission took her to The Flinders Ranges, the Tirari Desert, and to Uluru, as well as abroad to the US states of Michigan and Texas, and Rajasthan in India.

"I was at this point in my life where I'd never really found something that I was totally passionate about and totally focused on. And the camels had, all of a sudden, provided this huge focus and drive and passion," she said.

Amid it all, she started dreaming of an epic camel trek. One in the style ofTracksauthor Robyn Davidson, who famously ventured across the Western Australian deserts with her dog and four camels in 1977.

Sophie imagined taking the journey with her long-term partner, Sam — an Army man who she described at the time as the love of her life. But between Sam's tours in Iraq and Sophie's quests to remote corners of the world, their relationship reached a breaking point. It was Sophie who delivered the final blow. In an act of "cruel self-sabotage", she had a fling with a French chef whom she worked with on outback camel treks. As she writes in her book,The Crossing, which documents her incredible journey, "I didn't know how to fix my relationship, so I blew it up from the inside out."

Speaking toMamamia, Sophie said her split from Sam actually spurred her on towards her dream trek: "I sort of thought, 'God... there's this one person that I loved so, so much, and I've gone and stuffed that up. Now I have to follow through, otherwise it's going to have been for nothing.'"

In 2019, single and having just turned 30, Sophie bought five wild camels from a station near Uluru. Over the course of a year, she named them (Jude, Delilah, Charlie, Clayton, Mac), tamed them, trained them, and planned the journey they would take together from Shark Bay in Western Australia to Byron Bay, NSW. Almost 5000 km. Alone.

Laden with bare essentials (food, water, camping gear, and two rifles among them), the six of them set off in April 2020. Their journey saw them traverse enormous drought-sapped cattle stations, harsh desert, salt lakes, sacred Aboriginal sites (which she was granted special permission to travel through), dunes, and fields of fleeting wildflowers.

"The beauty of the Outback is in the detail. And that's what you really get to see when you walk the country at that slow pace of three kilometres an hour," Sophie said.

There were characters, too. People who broke up long stretches in which Sophie had only her camels for company. Like a group of young men on a hunting trip who shared beers and steak with her in the middle of the outback. Or the station caretaker who, for four nights in a row, drove to share dinner with her before she headed into a vast expanse of lonely desert.

Much of the time, though, Sophie only saw faint signs of civilization. The carcasses of culled wild camels. Tyre tracks from rangers' utes. Clusters of flickering lights from homesteads, or mining camps, visible from hundreds of kilometres away. Until...

"I have this memory of going into the Great Victoria Desert and it was like all light had been extinguished. All of a sudden, I wasthatremote that there was nothing else out there. The blackness, it was almost like thick," she said.

"It's quite a cool feeling because you realise that not many other people have been through that, not many other people have been to these special spots that are so remote. You start to get comfortable with that."

There were challenges, of course. Thick swarms of flies. Her camels bolting. Stretches where there was no feed on the ground for them. Wild male camels coming so close she had to shoot them to protect her herd. Hot summer weather forcing her to pause the trek for several months.

But she also fell in love again along the way. Jimmy worked at a bakery in a tiny town in the Flinders Rangers. In him she found someone who celebrated her unique passion, and who proved to be critical support. He drove hundreds of kilometres to deliver water and hay, stayed with her for parts of the journey, and cleared traffic as Sophie and the camels walked their final stretch into Byron Bay in December 2021.

Just like the relationship, the finish line caught Soph