Had no wifi or phone signal for any length of time in last few days so think I am a few days behind - but - day 16, here goes...
3 season duvet successfully acquired, we wanted to get on the road a early as we could, to enjoy the 500km of driving to Tennant Creek, punctuated only by Roadhouses, weird rock formations and the odd kangaroo; still haven't seen a live one, but a guy we had just shared a beer with says at 4am there are literally hundreds of them. But then he hit one, so maybe driving at 4am isn't so smart after all.
The Stuart Highway is the road from Adelaide to Darwin, following the route roughly pioneered by John McDouall Stuart in his first successful south/north crossing of the continent in 1862. To be honest, apart from a bit of tarmac I don't think the bush has changed that much. It certainly feels very remote and for a short period (for something to do), Nareesa and counted the cars coming in the other direction. We got to about 20 in about half an hour or 50 km. So we roughly passed 200 cars all day - 500km!!! Thats the length of England and we only passed about 200 cars. Mind you most of them waved at us so if we had broken down I suspect we would not have had to wait long for someone to offer help.
First stop north of Alice Springs was the Aileron Roadhouse. Aussie's are renowned for straight talking and here was evidence. And this is what I call a public toilet!
Our stop for lunch (well elevenses as it turned out) at the Barrow Creek Hotel, lived up to expectation. The suitably eccentric owner, couldn't have been more welcoming, surrounded by multi-national ephemera all he wants to talk about was English football. He has a Brighton & Hove Alboion programme from sometime in the past - he couldn't actually find it on any wall, covered as they are with mostly football related junk from around the world. He claimed to have something from 170 countries of the world. But - he didn't have anything from Guyana! So Nareesa has a promise to keep and send him something.
Wifi and mobile signal seems to have all but disappeared - one of the joys of the outback perhaps, being "off grid". But pictures are just taking too long to load, even when there is a signal! So photo record of our visit to the Devil's Marbles, just south of Tennant Spring will have to wait. As might days, 17, 18, 19...
We'll see, we are now heading for the Kakadu National Park. Might see some water.