Namaste Travelling!: Australia (North)

The next day we continued our trip towards the red centre. We stopped off at the Cutta Cutta caves and had a very informative tour by the very professional guide there. He spoke as if he were performing to an audience of hundreds, with emotion and feeling behind each little speech and story. Unfortunately for him there were only 5 of us on the tour of the small caves but we enjoyed it all the same.

Cutta Cutta Caves

Our enthusiastic guide

We left the caves and continued our journey towards Daly Waters, the town where we had planned to camp for the night. We had been advised by everyone not to travel at dawn or dusk because there are often lots of animals on the roads at those times and driving can be dangerous. On the stretch of road just before Daly Waters we must have seen 50 or more bits of road kill, primarily Kangaroos but at least 5 large cows, on the side of the road. It was horrendous! Every 50m another horrific smell seeped in thorough the air vents and we saw another mound of fresh road kill more often than not covered in hungry birds. We were relieved to arrive at the campsite in one piece just as dusk was really setting in!

Daly Water is a tiny town with a population of 25 people! It has a historic pub with lots of memorabilia decorating its interiors…a wall of bras hanging up, a wall of money, a wall of underpants, a wall of old t-shirts and a wall of passport photos amongst many more. All of which have been donated over the years by people passing through and visiting the famous pub. It is renowned for its Barramundi, a large fresh water fish up to a metre long, popular with the local for its excellent flavor. Therefore Mike and I in true traveler style shared a ‘Barra’ burger and half a pint of lager J Apart from the pub there was not really anything else to see so after a long day driving we retired to bed early. Unfortunately the camper was like an oven inside and we were so hot we couldn’t sleep. We also couldn’t open the doors because there were so many mosquitoes outside. Needless to say we had a horrendous nights sleep and set off the next morning exhausted.

'Barra Burger'

Ghost town - Newcastle

Once again on the Stuart Highway we stopped off at a couple of the attractions mentioned in either the lonely planet or other various tourist pamphlets we’d collected along the way. The first was Newcastle, a bizarre little ghost town with derelict corrugated iron houses, sparsely spread across a flat piece of land with a small memorial park in the middle. We also paid a visit to Renner Springs which turned out to basically be a watering hole in the middle of a caravan park. We ended the day at Tennant Creek which is 700km south of Katherine and 500km north of Alice Springs. It has a population of 3500 and has one of the largest aboriginal communities. Unfortunately there appeared to be a bit of an alcohol problem amongst some of the local residents and we heard some pretty heated arguments as the evening progressed. We also met a really nice Australian couple in the caravan park who had taken a year out of work to travel Australia. I think we were probably similar ages to their children and obviously tugged on some kind of parental heart strings. They ended up giving us all sorts of useful things for our trip and lent us their mosquito net for the night so we could open our doors and get some sleep!

Seemingly never ending - dead straight
highway

The rest stops were extremerly basic

Just south of Tennant Creek are the ‘Devils Marbles’ which are huge rocks in the middle of the desert that have formed over time with wind erosion. They were very impressive, particularly with the early morning sun shining on them. We went for a walk around the marbles and then continued on to Alice Springs, stopping only to sample amazing mango ice cream at a local mango farm – it would have been rude not to J In contrast to the vast barren land we had seen it was bizarre to see rows of green mango trees in the middle of the desert.

The amazing devils marbles

Part of huge 'Road Train'

Although we certainly clocked up the miles and the hours driving, we actually really enjoyed it. The road was so straight at times that it looked endless, disappearing into the horizon. We had been warned that it might be boring but it was far from boring as the scenery changed from small trees and bushes to tussock grassland and bright red earth. It was certainly a very unique experience and none like any other we’ve had before. We swapped drivers regularly and listened to the entire contents of our ipod to help pass the time, stopping of course for regular breaks and to let the HUGE road trains pass. We had been warned about over taking road trains because they can be four trucks long but I don’t think we ever overtook a road train as they travelled so fast, it was always the other way round.