August 2014 - South Bound on the Stuart Hwy

Katherine is right on the junction of the Victoria Highway which comes through from Western Australia, and the Stuart Highway which goes south through Alice Springs to Adelaide.
We stayed a few nights in Katherine on our way to Darwin and saw most of the sites, but when we found out that the local rodeo was on the following weekend, we decided to stay for the week.

The Boab Caravan Park has good concrete slabs to park the van on as well as a concrete slab under the awning, then the rest of the area is all manicured grass. It was a very pleasant place to stay for a week and catch up on a few small maintenance items.  Another good thing is that the Mitre 10 and the Toyworld shop that sells bike parts give 10% discount if you have a Seniors card.  They actually ask you at the checkout if you have a Seniors card which I think is jolly decent of them.

Mataranka is only just over 100 kilometres south of Katherine and is best known for it’s hot springs, but there is so much more to this little one horse town as we found out.  We booked into Mataranka Cabins and Camping for 2 nights, but we found a really good shady, secluded site that we ended up staying 5.  Mataranka is known as the “Capital of the Never Never”, and is the gateway to Elsey National Park which is one of the smallest national parks that we have visited.

This area was home to Jeannie Gunn who wrote the famous book about life on Elsey Station entitled “We of the Never Never”, and the replica home that was built for the film of the same name, is still on display at the Mataranka Homestead.

Bitter Springs is in a very quiet bush setting and a lot more room to get away from the crowd

Bitter Springs is the lesser known of the 2 hot springs in this area, but as it was only a short bike ride from where we stayed, we spent most of our time there.

Mataranka Hot Springs has beautiful clear water but we found it very crowded

  After visiting the more well known springs on the south side of Mataranka, we voted Bitter Springs the best by far.  A beautiful natural bush setting surrounded by River Pandanus, Cabbage Palms and Broardleaf Paperbark, with crystal clear water at a constant temperature of 34 degrees makes it easy floating around for a couple of hours.  Thirty and a half million litres of water per day flowing through here makes quite a strong current that carries you down stream, where you can either swim back upstream against the current, or get out and walk back along the path beside the stream.

The closest I got to a big barramundi was at the Barra Feeding tour at Territory Manor.  They have a big dam, stocked with wild barra which are all around 1 metre in length, that have been trained to come to the surface to take pilchards from visitors standing on a submerged jetty.  The fish sit just below the surface of the water and you hold the pilchard above their eyes where they just size it up for a second then bang, they grab it and are gone before you see them move.  We were told that they don’t have teeth so they suck their food in and swallow it whole, no wonder they are a good fighting fish to catch on a line.

Mataranka Museum has a collection of historic information from the early days of the township, railway line construction and the soldiers camped here during the second world war.  It’s amazing how things come the full circle. They have an “antbed” oven which is constructed of a 44 gallon drum sitting on a bed of rocks and then the whole thing covered with crushed antbed, (termite mound) which was mixed with water to make a mud.  Due to the additives that the termites mix with the soil, the mud makes a good insulation as well as a good base for flooring.  And we thought the wood fired pizza oven was a modern day invention!

With our time up in Mataranka, we moved on further south and stopped for lunch at another unique place called Larrimah.  What a dag of a place.  The pub was originally the WW2 Officers Mess, but today features a free entry zoo with dozens of different local birds, animals, snakes and even a salt water crocodile.  The pink panther features on his gyro copter out the front and the whole place is painted pink to match.  You certainly can’t miss this place as you travel along the road.  After a look through the zoo and a nice toasted chicken sandwich for lunch, we continued on to Daly Waters which is further south and has the distinction of being Australia’s first international airfield.

Daly Waters Pub

  It was first used for flying mail into Northern Territory from Queensland before it became a staging and refueling point for Qantas international flights flying through Darwin and on to Singapore.

Daly Waters Service Station

  We had heard about the “Beef and Barra” meal from far and wide that they serve in the evenings at the Daly Waters pub, so we decided to stay in that vicinity so we could sample if for ourselves, and we weren’t disappointed. We didn’t know the drill for ordering so we were on the last serving for the evening as they only cook 50 serves at a time on the BBQ out in the beer garden.  From about 120 diners,105 would have had the beef and barra and the remaining few had meals picked from the restaurant menu.

In the bar of the Daly Waters pub

The salads from the help yourself salad bar were freshly made with their own home made dressings, and it was all topped off with freshly baked crusty bread cut into slabs with real butter.  The whole time we were there, their was a one man band called Stevie Still Rocks playing 50’s, 60’s and 70’s music which was very entertaining and easy to listen to.

Entertainment in the beer garden at Daly Waters pub

It’s now a toss up between the chicken parmy at Adelaide River or the beef and barra at Daly Waters as to which is the best pub meal we have had.  Judy tends to think that Adelaide River’s parmy still tops her list but I think if it came to a choice side by side, I would go the beef and barra.  The only disadvantage of this pub being so popular is that the caravan park attached to it is packed with 120 caravans every night during the dry season, so it soon becomes very claustrophobic.

We took the advice of some other travelers and stayed at the Highway Inn, only about 6 kilometres away, it has lovely grassy sites and only about 30 caravans per night in the same sized area. With not much to see at Daly Waters, we set off for Renner Spring.

Pool at Renner Springs

Now we thought that Point Stuart was the worst caravan park we have stayed in, bit this one leaves all other bad caravan parks for dead. Nice friendly staff in the pub to book you in and take your money, but that was the end of the good about it.  The rudest park manager we have ever met, who was a good 10 years past his “best before date”, gave us orders as to where and how to back into a very cramped space.  When I questioned the fact that I couldn’t get the awning out, he promptly told me than in another couple of hours I wouldn’t need it as the sun would go down behind the donga that we were jammed up behind. The toilet block was way around the other end of the park and the floor felt as though it had rotted out and you were just walking on the bit of old lino which had been nailed across the old floor boards to spread the weight of people walking on it.  What a dump!!  The park manager also assembled the ladies together to tell them that the white goose down on the spring hated women, so if it attacked them they should stand their ground and shoo it away, because if they turned around to walk away it would bite them.  I think it is about time they “cooked their goose”. Never mind, we survived the night even though the international visitors jammed in beside us in their rental motor home decided to get up at 4.00 am and take the high powered torch to try to photograph nocturnal animals.

Three Ways Roadhouse mural north of Tennant Creek

Tennant Creek, which is the 5th largest town in the Northern Territory was a welcome relief from all the goings on of the previous night, but for us there wasn’t a lot of interest. 

The Overland Telegraph line which was completed in 1872, put the town on the map and now has a collection of historic stone buildings that functioned to support workers and maintenance on the line.

Gold was also discovered in the region and the 12 stamp battery and some old mining equipment are on display at the visitor information centre. We also saw the biggest display of flowering Sturt Desert Pea growing around Lake Mary Ann which is a man-made lake only 5 kilometres north of the town, purpose built to help soften the harsh outback conditions of the area.

The trip south from Tennant Creek is a gradual 300 metre uphill climb all the way to the top of the Davenport Ranges about 350 kilometres away.  Wouldn’t you know it, we had a howling side wind for 2 days while we tackled this part of our trip, which shot our fuel consumption up to 28.9 litres per hundred kilometres.  This could only happen in the most expensive place on our journey with fuel being at $2.12 per litre at our next stop.

Along the way we came across an area about 1,820 hectares in size, that is covered with unusual rock formations called “The Devils Marbles”, or Karlu Karlu as they are known by the local Warumungu Aboriginals.  This a collection of huge, red, rounded granite boulders that vary in size from 50 cm up to six metres across, and they are strewn right across a area.  Many of them seem impossibly balanced on top of each other, just like the two marbles in the picture above .

The Devils Marbles started out, many million years ago, when an upsurge of molten rock reached the surface, spread out and settled into a solid layer.  That one block of granite then developed horizontal and vertical cracks and split into many rectangular blocks.  Over the following millions of years, erosion did what it always does and wore away the edges.  You can see the later stages of that process on rocks all across the reserve.  Some parts still hint at the original rectangular shapes while some blocks have their corners worn of and some are totally rounded.  Every marble looks different.  You can walk around for ages and find new and interesting views at every turn.

Wycliffe Well, which is known as Australia’s UFO capital due to the hundreds of UFO sightings that have occurred there since WWII, was a good overnight stop to get out of the wind.  What an awesome little place, miles from nowhere, but with great hospitality and clean amenities and ablution blocks.  They really take the UFO thing to the max with aliens and space ships all round the place.  I had a good chat with the owner and he said there are good documented sightings of many UFO’s since WW2, and believes that sightings are so regular because they are situated under the crossing of the magnetic Ley Lines that UFO’s use as highways.

He also believes that as they are right on the edge of the Tanami Desert, all the rain that falls over the north side of the Davenport Ranges seeps down through the sand and there is a huge underground lake just 30 metres below them which is about 60 kilometres in diameter.  This huge expanse of water together with the magnetic Ley Lines possibly has something to do with the UFO’s navigation equipment.  Hmmm, I wonder. We didn’t see any UFO’s but we only had one drink with our meal!

At last the wind had died down a bit and the down hill run off the top of the Davenport Range to Barrow Creek was much more pleasant.

Barrow Creek was one of the original overland telegraph repeater stations built in 1872 to service the phone line that connected Australia to England.  The buildings are still in good condition and now under the care of the Parks and Wildlife as Historic Reserves.

Aileron is another of those quirky little roadhouses right alongside the Stuart Highway about 135 kilometres north of Alice Springs.  As you turn into their service road the first thing that hits you in the eyes is a 17 m sculpture of Charlie Portpot up on the hill behind the roadhouse.

Charlie was the local rainmaker who lived around this area over 100 years ago with his wife Matilda and their children.  The statue of Matilda with one of their children and a large goanna beside the aboriginal arts centre is just as imposing.

Love the outback humor

What better place for an overnight stop with friendly staff and excellent meals in the pub.

Tropic of Capricorn marker

About 30 kilometres north of Alice Springs, we crossed back over the Tropic of Capricorn which is the marker between the “tropical” zone and the “temperate” zone, even though the monsoonal weather pattern peters out about 800 kilometres north of here at Newcastle Water.

Another 10 kilometres on further south we found the reason why we had used so much fuel since we left Mataranka.

Cairn marking the highest point on the highway between
 Darwin and Adelaide

Here is the marker for the highest point on the Stuart Highway which is 727 metres above sea level, so we have been gradually climbing for the last 1,000 kilometres, but now it should be all down hill from here back to Adelaide.

We visited Alice Springs briefly back in 2006 and it sure has grown a lot since then.  Now it has traffic lights, new caravan parks and a whole new shopping plaza.