The pub at Daly Waters has a pretty impressive collection of pub junk inside
On Saturday 17th I set off from Elsey to take a big chunk out of the journey south. The road stretches for a bloody long way with very little to see on the way – Darwin to Adelaide by road is 3019km, or about 30 hours of driving – and the only way to get it done is to devote entire days to driving. This is basically what occupied Saturday, with two little stops, one at Daly Waters, and one at Tennant Creek.
Daly Waters is a little like Whim Creek in that it is basically a pub and precious little else, but the pub at Daly Waters is really special. I stopped off there on a recommendation from Bill and Jean (whom I met on the Bungles tour), and ended up sitting in the beer garden, nursing a Coke. For some reason this pub really reminded me of pubs back in England, probably the first Aussie pub to do so: but what was it that made me think of pints and pies? It wasn't the beer – that was standard Aussie fare. It wasn't the weather, or the thatched sunshade covering the beer garden (the type you so often see in the tropics). It certainly wasn't the tour group who were on a long bus tour to the north, and who were obviously still in the early stages of their journey. Then it struck me: it was all the memorabilia stuck all over the walls, from bank notes to number plates to junk from the old homestead. Just like in English pubs, this place was a rag-and-bone repository, and it really worked. How odd to find such an unintentionally English oasis in the middle of nowhere, as far from civilisation as Australian beer is from real ale.
My other stop was Tennant Creek, a totally forgettable town on the way to somewhere else. The only reason I remember it is that my Visa card bounced when I filled up with Super (what the Aussies call leaded petrol). That wasn't the odd thing – I'd been putting quite a bit on it recently – but what was odd was what the girl in the shop said when her machine rejected the card. 'Is it stolen?' she asked conversationally. I just smiled and asked if she would accept MasterCard: sometimes intuition tells you that intelligent conversation will be a struggle if you try to pursue it...
The strange rock formations of the Devil's Marbles are just off the highway
I had decided to try to save expensive caravan park fees by avoiding spending the night in towns, so I kept driving south until I got to the Devil's Marbles, where the camping was an extortionate A$1 per night. The marbles themselves are quite an interesting sight – huge red boulders, piled together in the most unlikely formations – but as I was setting up the tent, the weather turned very, very nasty, and the rain decided to come out to play. Although still in the tropics, it was bloody cold (at least comparatively) when the wind struck up; so after a quick instant noodle feast in the paltry shelter, where I met a South African who had been in Asia for a year and who had done the whole trip overland – and off whom I got some good advice – I turned in, glad of my new sleeping bag.
I'm now in Alice Springs, and out of the tropics, after a bit of a troublesome day. I seem to have picked up a bit of a stomach bug somewhere along the line – probably all the swimming in rivers in Elsey – and I spent most of Saturday night thinking I was going to throw up, without actually managing it. The drive down to the Alice (as Alice Springs is affectionately known) was pretty uneventful, although with all desert treks, there's actually a lot of variety about. For example, as you head south, the termite mounds go from massive (twice the height of a man in places) to tiny, stubby affairs, but their numbers increase. They also change colour, going from grey to green to red to cream, and from cathedral shapes to thin spikes to round mounds. Considering termites only eat spinifex – and, in fact, they're the biggest eaters of spinifex in the desert, believe it or not – they manage pretty well for such an inhospitable environment. The only drawback is that they come out at night, so if you happen to be sitting there with a pretty little petrol lamp, they just can't help visiting you...
