Alice to Darwin Roadtrip

We’ve just spent the last three days travelling on the Stuart Highway from Alice Springs to Darwin as part of our Cloud 9 tour. This part of the tour is really just an add on to get you from the Red Centre tour to the Kakadu tour, but all of us on the tour are in agreement that its definitely the surprise eye opener of the tour, many claiming it to be the best part!

The drive from Alice Springs to Darwin takes about 20-22 hours normally, so spreading it out over three days has given us lots of time to stop off in all the weird and wonderful places in between.

Nine of us have continued on from our Red Centre tour – the four Irish girls, Mark and I, two Germans and a French girl. Having spent the previous three days together, we were all fairly well acquainted …especially us Irish! Our tour guide Tegan was great, and far more experienced than the last guy!!

Over the three days we’ve stopped off at some lovely natural/ aboriginal places. The Devil’s Marbles was our first stop on Saturday, which is a bunch of pretty cool looking red rocks, which you can walk in between. There is an aboriginal story and a ‘silly white fella’ (i.e. scientific) reason as to how they came about. I prefer the aboriginal, which is that a giant snake laid its eggs there just before it died.

We camped our first night at Banka Banka cattle station, which is part of a massive 11,000 km² farm (or over 1 million acres) with 65,000 cattle. We got a powerpoint demo as to how the farm operates, which for even a country girl (who was never interested in all of that when I lived there) was actually quite interesting!! The German guy on the tour somehow managed to “frighten” Tegan (tour guide) though that night, nobody really knows what happened, but it changed the mood on the tour for a while. Luckily everyone seems to getting on again.

As we travelled up the country, you can really see the terrain change. It goes from red desert into tropical rainforest slowly, with more and more water and green becoming visible as you go along. We also got to learn loads about aboriginal culture and the early explorers who made their way up from Adelaide to Darwin via this route – oh and we got to see where the British backpacker Peter Falconio was murdered and hear all about that!

The highlight of Sunday was a stop at the Mataranka Thermal Springs. It’s a warm pool in the middle of a bunch of glorious palm trees. We actually complained that it was too warm cos it was so hot outside. As well as the countryside changing, you can even more so feel the temperature change as you go along – from dry mid 20s to hot, humid high 30s!

Sunday night we camped at Katherine, and spent Monday morning at Katherine Gorge. We even got a lie in til 6.15 which was really amazing given that we’ve been up at 5.30am every other morning. Also, Kilkenny won the All-Ireland during the night (woohoo) so I’d been awake reading all the texts (in the excitement I managed to spill a glass of water over my Irish phone and kill it – oops, sorry Rachel) so the lie in was fantastic. Katherine Gorge was definitely the highlight for me. We got to canoe ourselves up and down two really pretty gorges. Seeing such beautiful scenery thanks to your own hard work really makes it worthwhile. And no, I wasn’t too scared!! Well a bit at the start, but the water was so calm there was no reason to be, plus Mark was in the canoe with me (doing all the work – hehe)!! I’m being really brave here, although our tour guide says us Irish are the biggest bunch of wusses she’s ever had on a tour!! The other girls individually have all of my fears combined and exaggerated (heights, water, etc) and I actually appear slightly brave sometimes!! Crazy I know!! We also had a stop off at Edith Falls, which compared to all of the other waterfalls I’ve seen in Australia was a bit disappointing, and the water was feckin freezing…Mark was too chicken to go in above his waist – wuss!! But the rest of us welcomed the refreshment cos it really was roasting out! Helen on our tour, used to work in Kilkenny so the two of us had our mini All-Ireland celebration at the side of the lake. Go on the cats!!  

But despite all the amazing stuff we saw, the highlight for most people on the tour – especially Mark, was the weird and wacky places we stopped off along the way. Every two hours of so we have a rest stop which is either at a petrol station, café or pub, and you can really see in the these places the effect that isolation has on the people!! One place is the UFO capital of Australia. The population of that town is 25, and they are all employed in the café. It is such a strange place, all decked out to welcome UFOs with newspaper clippings everywhere and very strange staff. The weirdest part was one area which looked like a Granny’s sitting room with an alien cuddling a gorilla on a four poster bed with a little room off it covered in china dolls!!

My favourite though was Daly Waters Pub. This is in a ghost town which once had a population of 5,000 and now has 10! The pub is really famous across Australia (I even saw it on Sunrise on Channel 7). It takes souvenirs from all the people who have a drink there. The place is covered in GAA jerseys and hurls and bras and knickers and flip flops! I left my passport photo and stuck up Mam’s business card…sorry Mam, hope you don’t get any people from outback Australia looking for wedding flowers!! All the girls left something, it was really cool! There was loads of other little stop offs too, the last one having a massive stuffed crocodile and buffalo! Mark really loved all these places (mostly cos they served beer) and has decided if he was to ever move to Australia he’d definitely want to live in a place with a population of under 20 and become a weirdo!!

So with 6 days of the tour up, we only have another 3 days of 5.30am starts!! Can’t wait to see Kakadu, its supposed to be amazing… but it will have a hard job topping what we’ve seen so far!!