Day 99

Day 99 Alice Springs

Old minning gear

At the Marbles

Well the ton is nearly up and we have hit another of our major targets – Alice Springs. Today was designed to be bit of a road trip, I know the whole thing is a road trip, but today was about our longest leg yet – over 560kms. A look at the map showed a few possible stops, but none had enough to fill in the half day that we would have up our sleeves, so we girded our loins and set the target to get up early and set off, well

Marbles

Hatched?

we hit the road at about 10. So we re-girded and pushed on anyway. At the caravan park in Tennant Creek, they have an old ore truck in the park. It is obviously from one of the old mines but the whole town seems to have cottoned on to the idea and there is old mine machinery everywhere. Old underground loaders and drag lines and winches and just about anything you can think of to do with underground mining, it is good to

Maureen at the marbles

UFO Central

see it out in the open.

Our first stop was the Devil’s Marbles. The local people say they are the Rainbow Serpent’s eggs fossilised (don’t know if they added the fossilised bit or the white people later). They are an awesome site. You get the impression that there are a few of them near the road. There are a lot of them. The old rainbow serpent was sure busy laying eggs, just hop none of them hatch! There are stacks or mounds of them and Maureen went for a walk around them in the heat. The marbles are jumps of granite that have split and eroded caused by heat and water

ET

Say no more

until they look round.

From the marbles we headed south to Wycliffe Well, UFO Centre of the world, or so they say. They say they have had more reports and landings than anywhere else. They have a little display set up and I must  I was a little disappointed, I was expecting the Road House in the movie Paul, but it was fun anyway. They went to a lot of trouble promoting the outside with signs and warnings and alien stuff, but did not continue it inside.

Sin Bin at pub

The next stop we had was at Barrow Creek. Again it is a town that has grown up near a telegraph station and so there is an old station there. We were looking for a roadhouse to get some gas and a drink and we learned that in this region, the word roadhouse really means pub. The next few we came to were pubs with fuel bowsers. There were a couple of cops talking to a couple of locals about their car that seemed to need a bit of work to get it roadworthy. We pulled up

Dead Linesman

Centre of Australia

but they did not have gas so we got our drink and moved down the road. Not far away was a memorial to a teamster who died in 1871 building the telegraph. It is also the place we found out the result of the Melbourne Cup.

We pushed on and we found a spot where we were exactly in the middle of Australia. The spot is contentious, but there is a marker there and we got there, halfway down and halfway across and we will accept that. Ti Tree is a roadhouse nearby and claims to be the

Tall Man

Tall woman

most central roadhouse, so we are not the only ones.

We were driving along when out of the side window we spot this huge statue on a hill of a man standing there. The sign said it was Anmatjere art gallery. They have this huge statue on the hill and another of a woman and child. We stopped and took some pictures and headed on.

We stopped at the Warburton Landmark. It was at this point that the explorer Warburton left the known for the unknown and he walked all the way across Australia to reach Roebourne in WA in 1874. It is

Tropic of Capricorn

amazing what these people did. The last stop was at the Tropic of Capricorn marker where we did the usual pictures. We missed it on the way up WA so we were determined to do it this time. We hit Alice Springs at about 6:30 and booked in. We are looking at spending 4 nights here before going to Ayers Rock.