Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Halls Creek - Tanami Track - Alice Springs


We left our campsite some 107 km from Halls Creek at 6.15am with the intention of going to the bakery and getting breakfast at Halls Creek before we commenced our journey across the Tanami Desert. Unfortunately we forgot that it was a Saturday and nothing was open, so breaky in the car was what was on the menu. But that's the beauty of being on a holiday, half the time we really did not know what day it was and nor did we really care what time it was. So we started our journey across the Tanami Road and it was not a memorable one. You can not get much more remote than travelling on that road. Our aim was to make it to Rabbit Flat Roadhouse to camp for the night. We made a detour along the way and went to have a look at Wolf Creek Crater which was an awesome sight. We did many more kilometres before I drove to give Chris a break from the corrugations. I had been driving for about an hour before we pulled up at the NT border for a photo only to find that we could hear the tyre going down. So we proceeded to change the tyre by the roadside. The downside to this was that we now did not have a spare tyre and we had about 120km to get to Rabbit Flat. We made it to Rabbit Flat and could not believe the conditions that some people choose to live in. The owners were lovely, but we were in the no mans land. The lady who owned the property gave us the warning on Dingoes approaching the campsites and snakes being active until dark so we were really excited about staying there. Chris did some tyre repairs, we had dinner and hopped into bed once again for an early night before we headed off on our second day of travelling on that dreaded road. We came across small sections of the road that were bitumen and we were saying that was to tease us for a brief moment. Ohhhh the relief from the corrugations was immense.....but then we would see the red dirt appear again and so on we continued, shudder,shudder,bump, and rattle on down the road we continued. We made it to Tilmouth Well for a drink and fuel only to be told by the lady behind the counter that we would now have bitumen all the way to Alice Springs. Yeahhhh! We made it and endured two days of shuddering along the road for 1000km. In Alice we stayed in a cabin at a caravan park and the kids were so excited to be staying in a real bed, we had our very own shower and toilet that we did not have to share with anyone and nor did we have to walk a long distance to use those facilities. And Chris could have a shower to clean those FEET..We had some time to wander around Alice as we arrived at around 3.00pm, but firstly showers were in store as we had again been a few days without facilities. For dinner we went to Bojangles Saloon. I ordered the outback mixed grill and everyone (except for Mel she was not game enough) tried Crocodile, Emu, Kangaroo,Buffalo and Camel for dinner . To my surprise we all thought that it was not too bad.

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