2002/11 Australia trip - Barkly Highway |
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Beyond the city, the Barkly Highway deteriorated as we went west. The road’s good to the east of Mount 
Isa, presumably because of the ore traffic going to the Townsville on the coast, but there’s not much traffic headed to Alice Springs and Darwin. Some sections around Camooweal only had a single lane of blacktop, with the rest being red gravel. When you meet another car you both move over so that you only have two wheels on the blacktop, with the rest on the red gravel shoulder.
Road trains have different rules though. A road train consists of a tractor-truck and up to four wagons, and it can be 165 feet long. They do about 60 mph and if loaded with cows, or gasoline, or cement, they can take a long time to stop! I don’t think they’re any bigger than those on the US freeways, but they are a lot closer and more personal on these roads. Sandie was getting completely off the road when meeting them, so I suggested she should be more aggressive. It didn’t make any difference! The rules seems to be that road trains occupy the whole blacktop. Everybody else just gets off the road – either stops or blasts along the gravel until the train goes past. Most people blast along, and hope they don’t meet a termite mound.
The countryside began to change: spiky spinifex grass, flat red earth, and red kangaroos. It was hotter, around 110. We saw a few whirlwinds. These were columns of leaves and sand dancing across the bush. As they crossed the road, they’d disappear from the bottom up, but, as we found out when we hit one, the wind was still there and strong enough to push us off the road.
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Barkly Highway (8.23) |
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We crossed from Queensland into the Northern Territory. There were no towns here, just a roadhouse every hour or two. The roadhouses had fuel, a bar, a café, and somewhat unappetizing campgrounds. Later in the day, we met the Stuart Highway that runs north-south across the country from Darwin in the Top End to Alice Springs and Adelaide. We joined it just north of Tennant Creek and we turned north towards the Top End and Kakadu and Nitmiluk parks.
It was very hot and nowhere looked very attractive, so we kept going until nearly dark. By then we were at Elliot. The campground there had peacocks as well as the native Australian birds. The manager was lighting mosquito coils on his deck when I went to pay, so we expected to have a hot, buggy night, but it was actually quite pleasant, cooling off nicely. The flies go away at night, and there were few if any mozzies. He warned us that the hot and cold taps were swapped around on the showers, but said it didn’t matter much as there wasn’t any cold water anyway.
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Elliot's peacocks (5.35) |
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Monday October 14th
At the campground we met a young family with three little girls traveling in a flatbed truck, with all of their camping gear, supplies, and fridge strapped on the flatbed. They were about halfway through a six-month trip around Australia. He was a pool engineer, and he was busy telling me about all the really nice places to swim in the Northern Territories. I explained that we were more interested in the wildlife. Coming from a place with 10000 lakes, we weren’t looking for swimming holes. But he turned out to be right and I ended up doing a lot more swimming than I expected.
Elliot was partly an aborigine village, and the service station had the first aborigine workers we’d seen. Friendly people, but the diesel pump meter didn’t work, and nor did the cash machine or the cash register!