Barkly Homestead, Tennant Creek, The Devil’s Marbles and Wycliff Well

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After lots of goodbyes, one last swim in the pool and stocking up on food, we hit the road and drove right out of Camooweal. 15km down the road, we finally we made it into the Northern Territory!



Cue the first time change during our trip! Bizarrely the NT is half an hour behind Queensland so, because daylight saving has ended in Victoria, we’re now 1.5 hours behind Melbourne. Pretty strange… where does the half hour go?!



The NT also has a higher speed limit of 130kph on the open roads. Not that our van is capable of that anyway… To our relief, it was a cooler than usual day so we weren’t sweltering in our van. Faithful old Alabama made the 260km trip to Barkly Homestead without a hitch. I had expected Barkly to be another place like Camooweal, but it’s literally just a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere; a welcome reprieve on the journey from Camooweal to Tennant Creek, or vice versa. The roadhouse had a pool just like the one at Camooweal and it didn’t take long for us to jump in. After three weeks of living on frozen vegetables, rice, crackers and the occasional dodgy chicken breast, we had a beautiful dinner of salmon and steamed fresh veg. I seriously need to reload up on zinc as I’ve been getting calf cramps every single night! That night, the heavens opened and we had torrential rain. In the morning, the camping area looked like a mini version of the Lake District. After weeks of (very welcome) sunshine, it felt a bit symbolic as we watched everything getting washed away.



The following day, we continued on to Tennant Creek. This outback town precedes its reputation… and not in a good way! Several travelers had told us not to get too excited about stopping there, and the locals in Camooweal warned us to keep everything locked and out of sight. Even the Lonely Planet spoke of boarded-up buildings and a lack of interesting things to see. If anything, it was even worse than I had expected. Sadly, it’s one of those places where many of the negative things you hear about Aboriginal communities are confirmed. There was loitering, drinking, yelling, spitting, scruffiness and not a smile or kind word to be found. You know you’re in a dodgy place when you see pamphlets telling you to “use opal fuel to help stop petrol sniffing”! We had actually planned to stay in Tennant Creek for a night, but it felt really unsafe and unwelcoming so we decided to keep on driving. But not before visiting the Tennant Food Barn – the first supermarket we had seen in three weeks and not as disgustingly overpriced as the Camooweal post office. There was even frozen kangaroo tail for sale!



100km south of town are the awe inspiring Devil’s marbles. These rock boulders are the remnants of a solid mass of granite which formed from molten magma some 1700 million years ago. There are several different shapes of boulders and geomorphologists have christened the slab-like boulders ‘cheese rings’ because they resemble flattish rounds of cheese :-) We thought the slabs that were perched on top of each other actually looked more like a game of jenga! The Devil’s Marbles are in fact quite Stonehenge-ish, but there’s a much greater number of them. Their reddish brown colouring in places stems from oxidized iron mineral in the granite. The surrounding countryside is strikingly dry and barren. Apparently the area only gets 35cm of rain each year (most of it falls during summer) and interestingly there is a native frog that’s known for its ability to bloat itself with water before burying itself alive. It then slowly absorbs the water through its stomach lining to survive the drought!



That night, we stayed at the Wauchop Homestead, another roadhouse in the middle of nowhere. Today, we drove 400km south to Alice Springs. The most memorable place en route was probably Wycliff Well… That place is weird! Apparently it’s Australia’s UFO capital. We don’t know why and we don’t want to know why. All I can say is that it’s pretty creepy and we swiftly drove on after taking a few photos.



Chilling out at our caravan park in Alice, it feels INCREDIBLE to be back in a town and we’re excited about exploring this one. There are lots of conflicting opinions about Alice so it should be interesting. I just can’t believe there are proper supermarkets, a mall, galleries and cafés! Our time in Alice will be my second birthday and I’m certainly going to enjoy it!



Incidentally, I’m rocking the Casbah at chemistry :-) I can’t believe that the subject which seemed like Japanese to me at school, and which I had been dreading ever since the start of studies, is actually making sense to me. It’s even fun! To my surprise, it’s easier than Anatomy & Physiology and I’m ticking off the chapters faster than the recommended schedule. I suppose it appeals to my sense of order and structure; you either get an answer right or wrong. Perhaps I have subconsciously absorbed the information at school after all, or else my sense of logic has dramatically changed over the years. Either way, I’m not complaining and enjoying it while it lasts!

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