The long and not at all winding road
Trip Start
Feb 14, 2007
1
37
68
Trip End
Ongoing
Devils Marbles,
Australia
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Our long and not very winding road north took us via some odd places. Wycliffe Well being the most odd. There is nothing here apart from a campsite and a petrol station. However, they have got themselves on the map by boasting to be 'the UFO sighting capital of Australia'. I bet their mothers are so proud. They have signs saying 'humans welcome too' and newspaper articles headed 'an alien chased my car'.... Yarp. In fairness though, if I lived in Wycliffe Well or even just stayed there for more than 20 minutes I too might start believing I was seeing aliens, particularly in the heat of the midday desert sun. Either that or a large delivery from Nimbin stopped to refuel here and never left.
Spending a lot of time on the road has made us somewhat ammune to the unpleasantness of roadkill. We are accustomed now to seeing dead things in various states of decay. However seeing cattle is something else. It is quite bizarre to see a full adult cow with rigure mortis lying by the road with it legs in the air. Very surreal.
Our next stop was the Devils Marbles, which bizarrely I can only seem to say with a high pitched oirish accent making them the dev-ills mayr-bills. They are huge granite boulders scattered over a vast distance that change colour with the sun. Some balancing precariously on top of others, some perfectly rounded and others sharply sliced in half. Aboriginal cultural believes these rocks to be the eggs of a large rainbow serpent! Maybe that delivery from Nimbin got at least this far then. The 'mayr-bills' are very cool and in my mind would be a great movie murder scene like karnak temple in Agatha Cristie's murder on the nile. I see a cleaver/spielberg partnership being created, using a couple of locals from Wycliffe Well and an old ET costume perhaps, anyone want to audition for a part?
