“Hello my name is Bart, German for beard, and I’ll be your guide for the 1500km drive from Darwin to Alice Springs,” boomed the explosion of hair and mouth from the front of the tour bus. It was 5am on day one and already I was exhausted. I had thought the three day road trip would be a chance to loaf, but Bart convinced me otherwise;
“Today we’ll have breakfast with a movie star, tomorrow we’ll drink at Australia’s craziest pub and the day after we’ll see Satan’s balls!” It was going to be an interesting trip.
I dozed as far as Adelaide River where I shared an artery hardening breakfast with a film star. Charlie, the feisty buffalo subdued by Crocodile Dundee in the first movie, is an Adelaide River local and obliges bushman wannabes the chance to adopt the Mick Dundee stare. I did, and just like in the movie Charlie didn’t budge, but being long dead and stuffed that was always pretty likely.
South of town we hit true Australiana. Never having strayed from Australia’s crowded east coast, I was blown away by the emptiness; no buildings, no people, and the few vehicles I saw abused the lack of speed limit and flew past in a colourful blur. We stopped north of Katherine to collect firewood and ants, then entered the Territory’s third largest settlement to find that although not known for her looks, bless her, Katherine does have a very beautiful Gorge.
Nitmiluk is a string of 13 stunning gorges carved over millions of years by the Katherine River and is one of the Territory’s highlights. There are three ways to see the gorge; cruise through it, fly over it or canoe up it, and I was keen for some paddlin’. I grabbed my oar and jumped in, griddling my thighs and baking my beans on the black plastic seat, then set off with the elegance of a man with one arm, filling my craft with water and pirouetting daintily for several confusing minutes towards the bank, where a sign yelled;
“Danger. Crocodile Nesting Site. Do Not Enter.” I rapidly logged onto my internet and hacked wildly at the river, projecting myself backwards and filling my vessel with more water than a Russian submarine captain after a crate of homebrew. Even though there was more water inside my canoe than out, I paddled between the fiery red walls of the gorge with the sun on my back and a grin on my face like a juvenile Jason after his win against the Gorgons.
It was, however, hotter than ancient Greece, so when I came to the top of the gorge I dodged the birds of prey circling excitedly overhead and dived in. It was bliss, but better still the return was downstream, so I let the current carry me lest my cack-handed rowing result in a capsizing.
After a well deserved stubby I headed to a dry and dusty camp site where I encountered a plague of flies more persistent than any tuk-tuk driver or Indian skid-mark. Biblical Egypt never had it this bad and never before had anything got up my nose both literally and metaphorically. I then had a busy evening massacring a lamb bhuna and misplacing my shoes during a crate of heavies.
Mataranka was a welcome break with a groovy bar, cheap camp site and a natural hot spring that throws up 30.5 million litres of heated water a day into a sandy bottomed lagoon. The surrounding cabbage palms are filled with flying foxes which, when spooked, rise as one and darken the sky like that over London during the Blitz. Invariably where there’s bats there’s splats, and inevitably I got bombed, twice, on the head, so dived in for a much needed scrub and a soak.
After lunch we gobbled up miles of asphalt and amused ourselves by sharing hand gestures with road train drivers. ‘Towns’ along the Explorer Way started life as telegraph stations built on the track John McDouall Stuart forged through the bush in 1862 to connect Australia with the rest of the world. They now consist of a servo and a pub filled with hardy locals who compensate missing teeth with a wicked sense of humour. One of the highlights of any trip through the Northern Territory, however, is the stop at Daly Waters, home of Australia’s first international airport.
The airfield is now little more than a collection of derelict buildings clouded in red dust, but keeping the place watered is the eclectic Daly Waters pub, the oldest in the Territory, which was originally built to fuel airline passengers, but now provides road travellers with sustenance and merriment. It is famous for its eclectic décor and is one of the only places in Australia where visitors can add a little of themselves to the landscape. Travellers have plastered the walls with a montage of flags, currency, shirts, license plates, and underwear and feels like an explosion in a thrift store. I added my photo to the melee, grabbed an icy pint of frothy coffee, and headed to the beer garden to admire the flip flop tree and to wonder how many cane toads you’d have to lick to devise such a place.
Dunmarra, Elliot and Renner Springs all flew by in a blur of fuel, flies and ice cream, and the termite mounds burned redder the deeper into Australia we travelled. The humidity of the North End had evaporated and the vegetation had morphed from lush forest to dry spinifex. By late afternoon we arrived in Tennent Creek, a town of hardy folk brought to the area during the 1930s gold rush, where there’s little to do but join the queues at the bottle shop or camp at the nearby Juno Horse Farm; a place of red earth, water bores and Akubra hats.
After a briefing on what to do should a snake crawl in my swag during the night (apparently panicking is a bad thing), I slept under the stars and woke a little itchy having spent the night curled up on an ants nest. I also had hoof prints on both sides of my swag after a horse had escaped and galloped through the camp during the night.
“Today we’re going to see the Devil’s Balls,” tittered Bart over breakfast. The Devil’s Marbles, or Karlukarlu to the local Waramungu people, are an impossibly beautiful collection of balancing spherical boulders that burn bright red in the early morning sun; great balls of fire, indeed. They are so perfectly formed its hard to believe they are natural; the locals believe they are eggs laid by the rainbow serpent. I wandered between the rocks, took the obligatory comedy photo holding a boulder in each hand, then drove for hours along a perfectly straight road passing through Wycliffe Well, noted for its UFO sightings, and, unsurprisingly, the largest selection of beer in the Territory, Barrow Creek, and Ti Tree, then stopped to straddle the Tropic of Capricorn, before rolling into Alice Springs as the setting sun burned the desert a rich red.
“Welcome to Alice!” yelled Bart, “how was the trip?” Interesting, my friend, interesting.
