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Published: July 23rd 2009
Central Mount Stuart
Not quite the centre of Australia, but explorer John McDouall Stuart got it nearly right in 1860This month I showered with six frogs.
They were nice little frogs, especially the bright green one on top of the toilet cistern, but it’s a little disconcerting when you have to get naked in front of them and take off your glasses so you can’t see when they’ve decided to leap across from one wall of the shower cubicle to the other.
They were in different places when I’d completed my ablutions, so they managed to avoid my soapy body and I managed to avoid stepping on them while getting dry.
I was willing to share my shower with the local amphibians as I was very grubby from a journey of over 500km along the Stuart Highway on our journey north to Darwin.
We’d reached Daly Waters later than we’d hoped - although we left Wycliffe Well at 8am, we arrived around 3pm in 36 degree heat - which was what we had been craving for weeks but it made setting up camp a sweaty business.
We arrived too late to get a powered site - it’s an icon camping spot because of the famous pub and is a must-do stop off point for backpackers,
My bathing companion
the frog on the loo was not as concerned about me as I was about him grey nomads and everyone in between.
Daly Waters is really just the pub, a small-ish camp ground and overflow field, where we were. Down the road is a WWII airfield and further back in history, the stump of a tree, now known as the Stuart Tree, which was carved as a marker by explorer John McDouall Stuart on his successful trip across the continent from south to north in 1862.
The pub is a relative latecomer, built in 1938 to service the first international airport in the country and fledgling Qantas airline, but has made up for this with a reputation for outback hospitality, food and entertainment.
We’d unintentionally arrived on July 1 - Territory Day, a state celebration which is also the only time they can legally enjoy fireworks. So as soon as we parked the van we crossed the road to the pub to examine the interior and garden bar, every square inch of which is covered with business cards, foreign currency, t-shirts, bras, undies, hats, thongs (jandals and the others) and assorted memorabilia.
We booked in for the “beef and barra” meal - either a steak or barramundi (fish) which is the house
the Daly Waters Pub
with Thong Tree in the background speciality, grabbed a pint and settled into the garden bar for a few quiets before the evening’s entertainment. We knew this was to be a country and western band, so thought we should be internally prepared and as it was happy hour Rhys scored 3 free rounds - payment was decided on the toss of a coin!
The band played both sorts of music - country and western - but the beef and barra were superb, so we were chatting with new friends we’d met on the road and not taking much notice until the rather rustic guy, who had taken over from the band while they grabbed a bite, started reciting bush poems and relating stories about adventures with his pet rooster.
He then proceeded to don a hat in the shape of a hen house and the two adorable white silky bantams which had been sitting more or less motionless on a perch to one side of the stage, clambered onto the apex of the hat roof and remained there while he performed several more songs, A Boy Named Sue, that kind of thing.
They stayed put while the chook man roamed around the pub
Chook Man
Daly Waters pub entertainment after his set, posing for photos with the punters. There was a tricky moment when he rose up from a photo op and the bantams came perilously close to the whirring ceiling fan, but they remained unruffled throughout and obligingly hopped back on their perch for the C&W band’s last set. Wherein the sound guy accompanied one tune with two handed whip cracking! Indiana Jones eat your heart out.
The audience then poured outside onto the road for a show of whip cracking, rodeo style and lit by car headlights, complete with slicing celery held in a female audience member’s mouth, to much unbridled hootin’ and hollerin’. The finale was fireworks - the event is also known as ‘cracker night’ - and after an evening replete with Ozzy bush entertainment, what more could you want than a refreshing frog shower?
It was the second night in a row staying at icon roadhouses along the Stuart Highway. Wycliffe Well is famous for the most UFO sightings in the country and the owners of the van park, which again makes up the entire settlement of Wycliffe Well, have enthusiastically capitalised on this.
Any time a traveller with an artistic
P1040065
has that man got two chickens on his head or have I had too much to drink? bent arrives, they are invited to make a lasting impression on the park and decorate the cabins, amenities blocks, fences, rubbish bins etc. This has resulted in an eclectic collection of mural styles on a unifying theme - UFO’s, with the odd inexplicable inclusion such as a larger than life statue of Elvis.
We met some lovely people at happy hour, but unfortunately no aliens - unless you count the large, hairy Polish artist who was living there at the time, painting stars and planets on the ceiling of the cafe.
We stayed at Alice Springs twice on the way up north. People often think Alice is the place to stay to visit Uluru (Ayers Rock). It is in fact a whole day’s journey from Alice to the Rock, so to do the monolith justice you have to stay at Yulara, 450km from Alice.
We ‘did’ Uluru in 2007 on our practice run, but amazing as it is, we decided there were other places we should see this time, so no iconic pics of the Rock on this blog. Fortunately Australia has no shortage of fascinating, impressive and iconic rocks.
The “Red Centre” also means the
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Chook Man pleases the punters MacDonnell Ranges, remnants of a once huge mountain range ground down over millennia to abrupt escarpments which now frame Alice Springs.
We drove beside the East MacDonnell Ranges to Arltunga, one of the few historic gold mining sites in the Northern Territory. It is so remote, many of the town’s 1880’s stone buildings remain. It wasn’t a very successful gold mining site and the hardships endured by early settlers in this harsh landscape are obvious - there was no water, the sun and flies were pretty oppressive even on the winter’s day we visited, but the temperature drops to zero overnight.
The West MacDonnell Ranges are more developed, so we chose to take some time exploring them and took the van to Glen Helen ‘Resort’ which leaves a little to be desired in the usual definition of the word resort, but is one of the most spectacular locations we’ve stayed in.
The Finke River, mostly dry, is considered the oldest river in the world - having run the same course for, oh, around 100 million years. It has worn a spectacular gash in the MacDonnell Range escarpment, leaving a cool permanent waterhole which attracts rock wallabies, fish,
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but watch out for the ceiling fans!! birds and tourists.
The rock wall following the river bed provides a glorious backdrop to the resort and an irresistible focus for sunset watchers as it turns from terracotta to a glowing red.
Nearby is the monumental Ormiston Gorge, which on a first visit looks like many of the other ‘gaps’ in the ranges with lovely waterholes and steep rock walls. But taking the four hour walk around the surrounding hills and valleys reveals magnificent scenery, particularly as you walk back along the dry Ormiston river bed that forms the gorge, with its towering cliffs of deep red sandstone eroded in sharp-edged cubes as if it was some huge abandoned quarry.
And then there was Gosse Bluff, which I had read was the remains of a crater caused by a comet impact 142 million years ago! “The road in is only 6km” I whined, so Rhys slowly negotiated the rocky, sandy track which, to my delight, went right into the crater which is one of the largest in the world. This country is a geologist's paradise.
Alice Springs itself is rather depressing, unless you’re in the market for an Aboriginal dot painting - here the galleries
Territory Day
the whip cracker raises some dust outside the Daly Waters pub are the best I’ve seen. It has significant heritage status, being one of the main overland telegraph stations from Adelaide to Darwin which connected the continent to the rest of the world in 1872, but otherwise is an architecturally inert large town with a dry river of sand running through it.
The Araluen Cultural Precinct has the Albert Namatjira Gallery, Museum of Central Australia and local arts and crafts centre, but most of the other attractions are touristy and expensive. Kenworth Truck Museum anyone?
And then there is the thorny issue of having to wait in a queue at the wine shop and have a national security check before we can buy over $100 worth of wine because the laws are so strict in an attempt to curb the huge aboriginal drinking problem, walking out of the shopping centre into a noisy scuffle where security guards are manhandling one of the ‘problems’ on the pavement and encountering several groups of intoxicated locals on the way back to the car. We wouldn’t mind inconvenience if the laws worked, but clearly they don’t.
I did however have a very happy afternoon at the Alice Springs
Wycliffe Well camp ground
the self proclaimed UFO capital of Australia (most UFO sightings) Beanie Festival, learning how to crochet a beanie with a couple of lovely aboriginal ‘ladies’. I’m not convinced of the traditional significance of beanies to indigenous culture, but they sure make a big thing of it in Alice. www.beaniefest.org
Mataranka, a place immortalised in Australian folklore by a book and film called “We of the Never Never” by Jeannie Gunn, who lived here on a cattle station with her husband for a year until he died of malarial dysentery, is another settlement on the Stuart Highway which is a must-do stop for grey nomads on the trek north to Darwin.
The main attraction is mineral springs with water at a constant 32 degrees - not thermal, but heated artesian water bubbling up from deposits in limestone layers close to the surface.
Rivers flood here each year in the wet season, then gradually dry out over the winter months, leaving crystal clear pools flowing along valleys of tall palm trees, pandanus and bullrushes. Mineral salts in the water combine with sunlight to provide a nutrient rich breeding ground for algae, fish and at the top of the food chain, fresh water crocodiles.
“They won’t hurt you” is
Space loos
the amenities were for "maliens" and "femaliens" a regular comment among the bathers clamouring to get into the free hot pools, but we had read the signs that explain that ‘salties’ - the deadly estuarine crocodile - can also be found in the waterways.
This, combined with the primordial ooze of the algal scum floating around the edges of the springs, giant golden orb spider webs close overhead and general Jurassic Park appearance of the natural springs 500m from our caravan park, did not fill me with enthusiasm about taking a dip.
The area is stunningly beautiful and the water lovely, if a little filled with...living things...but I was happier watching everyone else swim through the scum. There is a more touristy pool down the road - but it was school holidays and the normally serene pool with a sandy floor surrounded by palms now sounded like Te Rapa pools on a Sunday.
It was the same story at Litchfield National Park, an hour south of Darwin and the park the locals go to rather than the much-hyped Kakadu. Maybe there are a few days in the year when it’s not holidays, or a weekend, without tour groups, or backpackers or grey nomads, when
The Devils Marbles
just north of Wycliffe Well and spooky in a terrestrial way the spectacular scenery of waterfalls cascading over rocky stream beds and steep escarpments, surrounded by a variety of monsoon vegetation and tropical bird life, would seem like an untouched paradise, a garden of Eden, a place where the power of nature will lift your spirits. Not the day we went.
Screaming kids and bikinied bodies were everywhere. Mind you, Rhys seemed quite happy with the bird watching.
Now we are safely ensconced in Darwin, it is round about 30 degrees every day and sunny, and we are hunting for work. Hopefully more on this in the next instalment!
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