December 2014 - Koondrook

After 18 awesome months on the road, we arrived back on the Murray river at Barham.

We have always had a soft spot for this area, so decided to have a bit of a look around for a block of land that we might call home one day.

On previous visits we have always favored the NSW side of the river, so this time we decided to explore Koondrook, which is on the Victorian side.

Having more time on our hands, we were in town for the local farmers market and an antique clearing sale that was being held on the same day.  This gave us a great feel for the town and encouraged us to look around a bit further, and we found a real little gem of a town. All the folk in the town are typical country people and happy to stop and have a chat, even to people like us that they had never met before.

The town has it’s own post office, hairdressers, pub, fire station, general store, coffee shop and cafe with most of the rest of the services and shops you would need only 2 kilometres away across the river at Barham.

The history of the river, saw mill and building paddle steamers is fascinating, with the red gum saw mill still operating, and big talk around the town that the old wharf is going to be rebuilt.

Koondrook was the passage for the early settlers in the area to get their goods to Kerang.  From the 1880’s the wharf was a bustling river port, where the goods brought in by paddle steamers would be unloaded, stored and then forwarded by “tram” to Kerang.

In the late 1950’s the Marine Board declared the port to be in dangerous condition and ordered it to be dismantled.  

It would be fantastic to see the wharf get rebuilt.

A world renowned chainsaw carver from Melbourne has completed 18 life sized redgum carvings which are placed along the river front.  These all started in November 2002 with the carving of Alexander “Sandy” Arbuthnot who was the founder of the Arbuthnot sawmill in the late 1800’s.  The name of Alexander Arbuthnot is synonymous with the days when Paddle Steamers were more than Tourist attractions. "Sandy” started his business at Koondrook using a second hand steam engine to drive his mill on the banks of the river, where his enterprises included building of paddleboats and barges for the busy river trade along the Murray River.  The "Alexander Arbuthnot" paddleboat, built in 1923 in Koondrook is still in service as a tourist attraction at the Port of Echuca.  At their peak, "Sandy's" enterprises employed two hundred men, between the sawmill, ship building and timber getting.  Today the mill is a modern timber processing plant with automatic equipment, employing 15 people, which is a far cry from the days of steam power and heavy manual work.

Another of the red gum carvings is one representing the paddle steamer captains who worked long hours and had an intimate knowledge of the Murray River.

For many years Koondrook and Barham were important trading stops on the river boat journeys, and rebuilding the wharf will revitalize the town as a tourist attraction.  There is even talk of the paddle steamer Alexander Arbuthnot coming back to town once the wharf is rebuilt.

After many hours of driving around and evaluating various options for a block of land, we fell in love with a nice little 8 acre, laser leveled and irrigated property just out of the Koondrook township on the Kerang road.

Being zoned as farming, we had to jump through the hurdles with the shire to get a planning permit so that we can eventually build a house on it, but finally it’s ours and we are looking forward to getting a shed up to store all our gear in.

This doesn't mean the end of our travels as there is still way too much of Australia out there that we want to see, it just gives us somewhere to call home.

I hope that reading our blog over the past 20 months has encouraged others to get out and see this country of ours, and we will continue on with our journeys next year before the cold weather settles in around Victoria again.

September 2014 - Alice to The Murray River

Travelling south from Alice Springs is really easy, as the roadhouse’s are about every 200 to 250 kilometres apart, and most have good little caravan parks attached.

We stopped for “elevenses" in the parking bay at Stuarts Well, and this triple road train with 2 decks of cattle pulled in beside us and I just couldn’t resist a photo.  With live cattle export back on the agenda again in the top end, these road trains transporting cattle to and fro is once again a common site, which is giving the station owners and the cattle industry a much needed boost.

Two hundred kilometres south of Alice is the Erldunda Roadhouse which sits on the corner of the Stuart Highway that runs north/south between Adelaide and Darwin, and the Lasseter Highway that runs west out to Uluru, The Olgas and Kings Canyon. Erldunda is known as the “Centre of the Centre of Australia” as the “geographical centre” of Australia is only about 50 kilometres to the east.

Animals left over from the Y2K celebrations

     

We often read on travel forums where people complain bitterly about the cost of fuel, food and accommodation in places like this, and I am sure they don’t take the time to understand just what these people go through to provide travelers with a service.  Erldunda has 50 or so powered caravan sites, possibly as many air conditioned motel style units, a restaurant, tavern, gift shop and service station.

Animals left over from the Y2K celebrations

  They generate all their own power which burns 750 litres of diesel per day, they pump 86,500 litres of water per day from a bore 20 kilometres away, which burns another 1,000 litres of diesel per month, and all their supplies have to travel 1,500 kilometres by rail to Alice Springs from Adelaide and then another 200 kilometres by road to them.  Their closest service personnel come from Alice and they charge $800 to $,1000 call out fee, before they do any work.  It makes you appreciate how good we have it when power and water just run past your door.

Kulgera is the southernmost roadhouse along the Stuart Highway in the Northern Territory and Marla is the northernmost town in South Australia on the Stuart Highway.  With so little rain, it is a wonder that anything grows out here, but we found wild flowers in full blossom all the way along here.

The RFDS provide a fantastic medical service to people living in and visiting these outback areas.  Of course to be able to provide these services, they need to be able to land their planes, and to make this possible they have created landing strips on straight stretches of roadway.

One of these is the Traeger Roadstrip on the Stuart Highway between Glendambo and Coober Pedy, which although it has only been activated for aircraft landing on two occasions since 1997, it is a vital part of the service they provide.

Coober Pedy is the Opal Capital of the World and I don’t think you would find a landscape quite like it anywhere else in the world.  The opal leases now extend for 50 kilometres all around the town, and the little mounds of overburden from drilling shafts looks more like a lunar landscape than anything else.  Even after 50 years of opal mining in this area, geologists are yet to come up with a method for detecting opal without digging.  The only way to do it is to peg out a 50 metre x 50 metre claim (which costs $80.00 for 3 months) and start drilling holes about 1 metre diameter by 30 metres deep and watch for the opal seam.  A Cadweld-type drill is used to excavate these holes using an auger bucket.

If nothing is found, the hole is abandoned and consequently, there are literally thousands of these abandoned holes all over the opal field today.  If the seam is found then tunneling machines are used to follow it along horizontally and the opal is then dug out of the seam by hand.

One of the great inventions of the Coober Pedy opal fields is the machine called “the blower”.  This is best described as a giant vacuum cleaner mounted on a truck. The suction hose goes down the shaft and sucks up all the unwanted material and dumps it in the hopper above ground.

When there is enough weight in the hopper to overcome the suction, the bottom door drops open and the material falls out onto the mullock heap.  I had a go at feeding some overburden into one of these machines and was surprised that it could easily pick up at least a 3 inch diameter rock without any effort.

Opal seam which keeps miners underground

 

All around town there are shops selling opal in any shape or form that you might want, we resisted the urge to purchase as it is much more exciting if you find it yourself.  

Heading out of town, we had a fearful side wind of about 55 to 60 kph which buffeted us around a bit, but thankfully about 30 kilometres down, the road turns to the south and the tail wind improved our fuel consumption considerably.

A lot of the centre of South Australia makes up a part of the 1.2 million square kilometres of the Lake Eyre basin.  Of course with such little rainfall and the extreme heat, most of this area is dry all the time.

Travelling along the Stuart Highway we came across Lake Hart which is one of the smaller lakes of this system.

All the way along the highway we saw signs saying that we were passing through a restricted area, and this was explained when we got to Woomera to camp for the night. Woomera was built in 1947 as the domestic support base for the Woomera Test Range (formerly the Woomera Rocket Range) in support of the Anglo-Australian Joint Project.  This project focused on the development of long-range weapons systems, principally to counter the growing intercontinental ballistic missile threat from the former Soviet Union.

Woomera test range file photo

The Range today is much smaller than it was in 1947, but still covers one-seventh of the State of South Australia.   Although there are now several major mines established within the range, the Woomera support base is the only permanently established 'township' facility in the range, which covers an area of just under 127,000 square kilometres, or an area roughly the size of England.  It is the world's largest land-based instrumented defence systems test and evaluation range facility.  

Now days the range is used by the Defence to trial and test Defence systems including bombs, missiles, rockets, aircraft and electronic warfare systems.  The range conducts about 50 – 60 trials each year using many items of special equipment such as high speed cameras and optical trackers to ensure that such testing is always carried out as safe as possible.

The village housed 7,000 people back in the 60’s and has been in decline ever since and today there are only 200 permanent residents rattling around in all this infrastructure. The population can increase rapidly in spikes when special tests are being carried out.

This aircraft is a Meteor Mk7 which entered service with the Air Force in 1944 and saw service in Japan and Malta and this one is believed to be the last one remaining.  After the war these aircraft were converted to pilotless drones and used for target practice at Woomera.  There were 477 sorties over a 17 year period during which time 59 Meteors were destroyed in flight and a further 20 crashed through malfunctions.

The Black Arrow is a 3 stage British rocket that stands 13 metres tall and was designed to carry a satellite into orbit.  This rocket weighed 18 tonnes at take off and used 3 engines to propel it into space, where 10 minutes after take off it would be 1,700 kilometres from Woomera and 560 kilometres above the earths surface.  At this point, with it’s speed approaching 8 kilometres per second, The nose cone would open and the satellite would be deployed into permanent orbit.  The last satellite it deployed is named Prospero and it remains in space circling the earth every 100 minutes and will continue to do so for the next century to come.

Seventeen Canberra Bombers were once again used here for target practice after being converted to remote control by a company in Northern Ireland and then flown to Australia. The first target flight was flown in 1959 and the bomber was destroyed from the ground while flying at 50,000 feet.  A further 11 were shot down over the next 6 years and 5 more malfunctioned and crashed before the project ended.  No wonder they need such a large area around Woomera for the range.

This one is called the Jabiru and is a seriously fast rocket which can reach speeds of 2,500 metres per second or 9 times the speed of sound. This rocket carried a payload of 90 kilograms of specific instruments designed to measure the effects of aerodynamic heating.

The Thunderbird is a large ground to air missile which went into trials at Woomera in 1954, and the program was completed in 1960 when it went into service with the British Army after many failures and mishaps.

Two days travel and with an overnight stop in Port Pirie, saw us back on the Murray River at Renmark.

The Big 4 caravan park at Renmark is undoubtedly one of the best caravan parks in Australia.  Right on the banks of the Murray it offers a very tranquil place to sit and ponder the river going by.

Just by chance we saw the strangest house boat pass by so we followed it to the wharf at Renmark to find out what it is all about.

The boat was built by Frank Thornton who is one of the most eccentric characters that we have met on our trip.  Frank is a 70 year old busker who writes and sings country songs as well as songs from his idle, Johnny Cash.  Frank is known as the Chookman as he travels everywhere with his bantam chickens and rooster who also live on the boat with him.

They also used to travel up north with him to Daly Waters in the Northern Territory where he was the main attraction at the pub, performing nightly during the tourist season with the chooks sitting on his head.

So here we are now, back in our favourite part of the country, along the Murray River learning to wear jumpers and long trousers again.  The trip over the past 18 months has been absolutely awesome and we have seen heaps of this great country, but the call of the land beckons and we are thinking that a nice place on the river might be a good place to interrupt our trip for a short time, while we contemplate “where to next" .............

September 2014 - Alice Springs

Alice springs is nestled in amongst the East and West MacDonald Ranges and the Todd River “runs” around the south end.

The West MacDonald Ranges are very distinctive in that there is a rocky ridge that runs all the way along the top of the range, unlike any other mountain range that we have seen on our travels.

We visited Alice some years ago and went to Palm Valley and Hermannsburg, so this time we decided to visit Glen Helen.

Glen Helen sits on the banks of the Fink River in the West MacDonald National Park, about 130 kilometres west of Alice Springs.  The Fink River, which is often described as the worlds oldest river, rises in these ranges and meanders for nearly 700 kilometres across the plains and through these rugged mountain ranges, before soaking into the sands of the desert about 50 kilometres south of the South Australian border towards Lake Eyre.

The river seldom flows, but in 1988 the river flooded at Glen Helen and water spread over an area of 10,000 square kilometres.  The water hole at Glen Helen gorge is special as it is one of only 6 “more -or- less” permanent water holes along the full length of the river system, so fish, animals and people rely on these water holes for their survival.

The Glen Helen gorge as been carved out over many years by water running down the Fink River.

Only 20 or so kilometres further upstream from Glen Helen is Ormiston Gorge.  Once again there is a “more -or- less” permanent water hole and a short walk along the dry river bank exposes the upper reaches of the gorge.

Who could come to Alice Springs and not visit the Road Transport Hall of Fame, which is a volunteer based project dedicated to the preservation and presentation of Australia's unique road transport heritage.   It does this through its magnificent Hall of Fame, and display of old transport equipment, right here in the traditional birthplace of the roadtrain.  This place was built to not only to remember the great trucks, buses and vehicles of the past, but recognise the contribution of the men and women who drove and lived with these great machines of the past.

Current engineers in the transport industry today are working feverishly to build steering suspensions in modern trailers to improve turning circle and reduce road wear, yet this road train towed by a restored Diamond T 980, has full steering rear suspensions operated by a mechanical linkage from the front trailer suspension.

The army’s 1934 AEC road train, commonly known as the government roadtrain, was used extensively in the top end during WW2.  Not much in the way of a cabin but at least the driver got a nice breeze while driving. Not sure about the safety aspects of the big cooling fan right behind the drivers seat.

Kenworth also have their museum here which displays the first truck built at their factory in Melbourne in 1970.

There are also many other Kenworth's of various models that have been donated by various companies to show the advances in technology over the years.  We visited on the Sunday of the Hall of Fame annual reunion, so there were extra trucks on display, and even better, entry was free.

The Commonwealth Railways also have a museum here showing the Old Ghan diesel electric locomotive with one of the dining carriages coupled to a kitchen carriage on display. You can just about feel the gentle rocking of the carriage and hear the “klickety clack” of the train moving along the track.

There are so many iconic attractions around the centre of Australia it is impossible to see them all in one trip, so we picked on another of the lesser known attractions for a day out.

107 kilometres south west of Alice Springs down a gravel road is Mary Vale station, and another 50 kilometres of 4 wheel drive track leads to Chambers Pillar.

Now this place takes a bit of getting to, with the last 50 kilometres taking about one and a half hours, but the scenery at the end of it is well worth every corrugation and pot hole in the road.

Chambers Pillar is a column of red and yellow sandstone which towers 50 metres above the surrounding plain. Sandstone deposits were laid down in the area 350 million years ago.  Since then, wind and rain have eroded away the softer material, leaving this solitary column of pebbly sandstone.

John McDonald Stuart, heading north on his earliest attempt to cross Australia, first recorded the pillar in April 1860 and named it after James Chambers, one of his South Australian expedition sponsors.  Since then, it has been used by our famous early explorers as a navigational point.

I took this photo from the top of a hill about 15 kilometres north of Chambers Pillar and it is easy to see why it was used as a navigation point, as it is really distinctive and stands out from surrounding landscape.

There are also another 2 sandstone formations in the same area, one is called “Castle Rock” and I couldn’t find a name for the other one, but they are just as formidable.

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.