Darwin to Alice Springs - Adventure tour
Trip Start
Oct 14, 2005
1
16
71
Trip End
??? ??, 2006
Northern Territory, Australia
Monday, December 5, 2005
This tour, which I pre booked in England came about at just the right time, after 4 days of inactivity in Darwin I was becoming lazy, and forgetting how I should be travelling and that it's all about doing things and seeing things you wouldn't normally, I can drink beer by the pool in england, if I had a pool, and the weather was nice, but that's not the point, it was nice to relax for a few days, but now to the serious business of travelling.
My first early start for a week, was not that difficult, because I hadn't slept, people who snore like trucks should not be allowed to stay in shared accomadation, they should have it branded across their foreheads so that they can all be put in one dorm that can be sound proofed, or perhaps carry complementary earplugs around with them, to hand out to their unsuspecting room mates
Bats!!!
. So as I was awake all night getting up at 5:30 was not a problem, in fact it was a relief to get out the room.The tour was good, our driver and tour guide "Buzz" was a couple of crocodile bites away from being Steve Irwin, he was very enthusiastic and really friendly, and despite a fairly sluggish, and sedate group, (at Katherine's Gorge only 4 people climbed up to the look out point the rest stayed in the air conditioned visitor centre) did his best to inject enthusiasm.
The highlight of Day one was Katherine Gorge, it was a big gorge, with a river running through it, that we could normally swim or kayak in but there had been sightings of a "saltie" (salt water crocodile - a lot more ferocious and aggressive than their fresh water cousins) in the water, so the options were a walk to the look out point, helicopter flight, or doing nothing, I was amazed at how many people did nothing, still each to their own, the walk was short but in the heat quite difficult, but worth it for the views (see photos) and the walk back took us past the banks of the Katherine river where the trees were full of bats, and I mean full.
The accomodation was camping, which was ok, the weather didn't help, a particularly heavy down pour soaked our tent, but after that it was a fairly dry night, with the most spectacular views of storms, there were at least 4 storms going on around us, and every direction you looked you could see the sky light up, that was cool
Close encounters
.The second day was mainly driving, although we did get to watch the best of Aussie Comedy;
The Nugget - Working class comedy about pan handlers who find the world's biggest nugget, testing friendships and loyalties with their new found wealth,
Danny Deckchair - Working class comedy where Danny gets fed up with his lot in life, with his dead end job and cheating wife, and ties a lot of helium balloons to a deckchair and floats away, to make a new life and name for himself elsewhere while a national man hunt is carried out to find him,
Occaisional Coarse Language - A working class comedy in which a women loses her job her house and her boyfriend and sets about rebuilding her life (I fell asleep at the end, but I was assured it all turned out ok, she found love and they all lived happily ever after)
The highlights of the second day were Daly Waters pub, with it's unusual interior decor (see photos), and Materanka Hot Springs, which was a really nice thermal pool in a stunning tropical setting, we could not stay there for long though becuse it was in the middle of flying fox relocation
Daly Waters
.The accomodation was a horse farm in the middle of nowhere, that had an abandoned UFO in it's fields (it was never explained) it also had an amazing night sky, after yesterdays fireworks of lightening and thunder, we were allowed to just marvel at the mysteries of the universe under one of the clearest and most stellar populated night sky I have ever seen. It really surprised me to see Orion standing on his head, but I guess that is what happens in the southern hemisphere, I also saw a couple of shooting stars, not that uncommon out here.
The final day was mainly about one thing, the Devil's Marbles, formed by blah blah blah, you don't really want to know it's not that interesting how they were formed, and it also spoils the mystery I find. What you have is a number of boulders in various degrees of sphericality (a real word honest) some almost perfectly spherical, others less so (see photos) but they were great fun to climb over and pose in front of, on top of, and inside of, they are called the Devil's Marbles, because the area was known as the Devil's country, after an aborigine farmer was transporting his sheep through here and 2 thirds dead mysteriously. It was also where I saw my first snake in the wild, it was a woma python, non venimous, but pretty big
Egg head
. From here it was virtually non-stop to Alice Sprongs, with a quick stop over in Eliot, UFO siting capital of Australia, weird place very backwards, made me think of Bill Hicks
"I'll tell you, too, that's starting to depress me about UFO's, about the fact that they cross galaxies or wherever they come from to visit us and always end up in places like Fife, Alabama. Maybe these are not super-intelligent beings, man. Maybe they're like hillbilly aliens. Some intergalactic Joade family or something. "Don't you all want to land in New York, or L.A.?" "Nah, we just had a long trip, we gonna kick back and whittle some." Oh, my God, they're idiots. "We're gonna enter our mothership in the tractor pull!" My God, we're being invaded by rednecks. My biggest fear. Last thing I want to see is a flying saucer up on blocks in front of some trailer, you know? Wouldn't that be depressing? Some bumper sticker on it - "They'll get my ray gun when they pry my cold, dead, eighteen-fingered hand off of it!"
Bill Hicks RIP
