Alice Springs to Darwin

2nd - 4th of September 2006

To make our way from Alice Springs to Darwin, we had decided to jump on another Adventure Tours tour, the 3-day Alice Springs to Darwin bus, which kind off breaks the normal bus journey by doing a bit of sightseeing on the way, rather than just constantly driving for 24 hours. This meant we had to get up early again though... Argh.

For the first time, we had a female guide/driver! A pure Aussie girl with strong accent, nicknamed Arnie because of her big biceps...

First stop on the programme was the Tropic of Capricorn, where the tropical zone starts! This being 6:55 in the morning, I still felt a bit cold, even though i had one leg in tropical climate! But our worries about cold weather was gone, as we were roasting on our next stop, Barrow Creek. This place had a bit of a sad history - in the first decades of white mans time in Australia, the owners of the telegraph station were trading groceries for sex with the aboriginal's wives, this being a normal article for abo's, who were used to share their wives. Eventually though, the whitefellas stopped paying their part of the deal, and they ended up getting killed when the abo's took their revenge. This is when the real sick part of the story begins - the government sent some psychopath sheriff to "sort things out" after the two murders, and he and his men ended up killing more than a thousand aboriginals. What's even more sick is that he did this several times in his career, wiping out entire aboriginal tribes, and that he ended up retiring with a public servant pension... Barrow Creek is also about 10 km from the place where a backpacking British couple got pulled over and shot at by some crazy idiot a couple of years ago. The guy got killed, but the girl managed to escape, and last year Maddock (forgot the murderers first name) was finally convicted for the murder. Like I said, quite a sad history... Barrow Creek did have really cool and cute donkey though :O)

After hours of driving on long and straight road (the road on the photo is 40 km long without a single curve), we had lunch at a silly place which claimed to be the UFO capital of Australia. Next stop after lunch was the Devils Marbles, an area with massive round red rocks, some of them split in two by erosion. Devils Marbles has one of Australia's most famous photographic spots - the Devil's Balls. After a badly needed swim in a dam in some country town, we arrived at the Banka Banka cattle station where we camped for the night along with a really ugly turkey!

Next morning we climbed a hill and Arnie showed us a sign that proved the remoteness of Australia. Next up we had lunch at the Daly Waters Outback Pub, a crazy place with a lot of funny signs (my favourite was: ANGLE PARKING - any angle mate!, which, of course, I didn't take a photo of... doh). Classic Aussie humor! We went for a quick dip in the pool at the pub as well. Second dip was in the thermal pools at Mataranka... Nice and hot... As if we weren't hot enough already. It was a really nice spot though. A few poms and I went for a swim in the river as well, which had both cold and hot spots, since the water from the thermal springs ran into it. Dan, one of the poms, made a great effort of splashing and yelling while we swam up the river to scare the crocodiles away. Though I didn't see any, the river did have crocodiles in it, but only the relatively harmless freshwater crocodiles (which only grows till about 3,5 meters and feed on fish). After eating ice cream etc., we kept on going towards out stop for the night, only interrupted by Arnie hitting the brakes as a massive water buffalo almost blocked our road (didn't manage to get a proper photo before he ran of).

Our last day started of with a bit of river canoeing on Katherine Gorge. I haven't got any pictures, since I don't have an underwater housing for my camera. But it was quite a beautiful little spot, and the canoeing was quite cruisy. Instead of carrying the canoe across the rapids we reached after about an hour, we went for a walk swim in the river. On our way back, we met two familiar faces carrying their canoe across a rapid - Zac and Nick from our Uluru tour. It's funny how you always meet the same people completely random places when you're travelling... Anyway, we were going really slow on our way back in our eager to spot a freshwater croc, but all we managed to spot was a lot of fish and a little turtle :) What I did take photographs of was a couple of wallabies and a really funny bird. Now, the funny thing about this bird is that it collects random stuff with a specific colour and hides it in it's nest, in this case it liked the red cap from my Coke bottle, whereas it got really pissed and removed some blue stuff some other guy placed in it's nest. How weird is that!! :-D

Our last swim took place in a pool with a little waterfall! We swam across to the waterfall for a bit of a massage by the hard pouring water. Even though the fall was only about 5 meters the current was quite powerful - you literally got pushed away when you approached the front of the waterfall. Good fun! Last stop before Darwin was the pub at Adelaide River, home of an Aussie celebrity - the buffalo from Crocodile Dundee! Unfortunately, he died five years ago, but they decided to stuff him. After about another hour or two of driving, we arrived in Darwin...

This tour was definitely a really good way of making a hell of a long drive managable - both H and I enjoyed the tour as we saw some quite cool stuff on the way and had some nice travelling companions. Not bad...