SomewhereSouth.net

Darwin to Cairns in 2 weeks...

Because I have the most to do on the internet I decided to update this one as well :-) Meanwhile a couple of new pictures are uploaded at a thriving 1Kb/s or so (the upload window doesn't seem to go away but I have the time anyway so I don't really care), so by the time you read this some new pics should be on the gallery. Unfortunately we forgot to take our USB2SDCARD tool (to make it possible to grab images directly from Nicky's digicam instead of a burned CD and THUS being more up2date) so I only have this CD, but not to worry too much, probably tomorrow we'll return and upload a few of the pics currently on Nicky's cam. Ah well, enough to tell I think. The last update in Katherine was nothing more than a yell that we where safe for Ingrid, our cat 5 cyclone right at our doorstep. We heard that it even got the news back home, so can imagine that you where quite scared. But nothing to worry about, never where we really near to Ingrid (it's been at least 300Km away from us) and we where out of the Darwin region way before it could strike. Actually, in Darwin we decided to go down ASAP but off course WITH seeing Kakadu on our way south. So we did, went to Kakadu, the info center and spend the next 2 nights at an official camping to keep ourselves updated with the weather-status AND near someone who could evacuate or warn us if neccecairy. Fortunately none of this was neccecairy as Ingrid processes slowly along the cost and didn't seem to go on shore so we had a couple of nice days at Kakadu. To be honest, because of the wet season most of it was closed and it was not THE experience we both hoped but it was absolutely interesting and nice to see. Pretty interesting WAS that quite close to Kakadu you can go on all sorts of Jumping Crocodile trips and off course we did. Slowly moving over a seemingly quit river they hang out some food and suddenly you see something moving in the water. A saltie! (Or, for those who are not yet used to aussie-slang, a saltwater crocodile.) At that moment you realize that that water is a quite hazardous place if you manage to fall overboard of the ship, salties DO eat human. Breakfast, lunch or dinner, they don't care, human is nothing more than just food for them. And they do jump. Basically a natural behaviour for them, (BTW spacebars on the run are quite annoying, cheap internet, cheap rotten keyboards an a rotten upstream) they use it to grab prey on the side of the river above their heads. And almost the complete croc comes above water. 3 meters of massive murder machine. WOW! On those trips 2 of the passengers get the chance to feed one themselves (with meat, not theirselves off course) and Nicky got lucky this time. So with something that looks like a fishing rod and a Kg or 4 of meat hanging at it she swong the thing above the head of croc "Anna". Jumping was aparently not on her program, just a small jump came out of her but at least Nicky can say that she DID feed a salty. Nice.

Good, as I told we left Kakadu quite soon though it was quite allright as we didn't want to get involved with our lovely cyclone and drive quite straight to Katherine to do our usual stuff like developing pictures and in this case, update the internet to let you all know we're safe. I almost killed the persons in the photoshop there because they where extremely clumsy (4 different items on one order was a bit too much for them, they handled my precious negatives with their bare hands straight on the surface instead of the edged AND they shut off their digiprinter 10 min before closuretime so we couldn't check if they burned the right images on CD), anyone going there do NOT take the newsagency/photostore in the mainstreet but just go to the one in the shopping mall across Woolworths. The last one mainly being a pharmacy but with a lot more relaxed and professional personell. As the lady behind the counter told us it was not uncommon that the other shop messed up, here development street broke down and now she has actually people just waiting with their films till that thing is repaired instead of going to the other shop.

From Katherine we headed further south again, doing part of the Stuart Hwy double as there is NO other route to the east. There is, sure, but only with a couple of permits to cross aboriginal land and last but not least, a sturdy 4x4 as most of the tracks are dirtroad and have nasty river crossings, even in the dry. (Or in a kinda dry wet as we have now.) Slept 30Km south of Katherine on a rest-area as it was getting late already. (We do that a lot, they don't complain as long as you don't really camp there and they're free.) Next day was finally the day where we would say goodbye to the Stuart Hwy and hello to the Barkly. Where the Stuart goes south-north from Port Augusta to Darwin, the Barkly goes west-east from Three Ways (25Km north of Tennant Creek) to Cairns. Not completely true, it DOES start in Three Ways but it ends little south of Cairns and it doesn't do a complete cross-country like the Stuart Hwy does. Anyway, we serviced ourselves (and Vannievan) at the service station, bought a magnet to prove that we where really there and headed east on the Route 66 of Australia. Still in the middle of the outback, desert all around us and more to come. Only Darwin, Katherine and Kakadu helped us out of the dry and fly-filled red-center for a while but being around 600Km south of the ocean Three Ways is really center of the outback. Off course you see that there is NO rest area in the neigbourhood if you need it so we drove a little further, almost 800Km that day and found ourselves a rest-area just 200Km from the Queensland border. This one, as remote as it was actually stated that it was allowed to spend the night there. In the Northern Territory ALWAYS true (according to our information) but still gave a relief. Grabbed a coldie (yes I mean beer, though it was not cold unfortunately), made some pictures of the sunset in the desert and went down under to dreamland. If after driving the Stuart Hwy you think the outback doesn't get any emptier, try the Barkly. It DOES get empty, our first impression of Queensland was a very empty one. No shrubs, no trees, nothing, just endless Km's of just little bunches of grass, if any. Still no sandy-desert (we didn't and won't pass them as they are off the track for us and 4x4 only) but really impressively EMPTY. Makes you feel quite small, driving in your minivan through this landscape of desertness knowing that you might be the only human in a patch as big as The Netherlands.

Next day we headed towards The Isa (Mount Isa for non-aussies or again, those unfamiliar with the aussie-slang), after driving along the longest mainroad in the world. Officially the mainroad of Mt. Isa goes from downtown Isa to Camoweal, ~188Km east of the town, all being hiway. The first night we spent at the movies (Hitch, absolutely a must-see feelgood movie!), had a marvellous view at the town during sunset and parked just 200 meters out of town on a road-train rest area, maybe 100 meters away from a caravan park. Lucky we didn't get caught there, for sure they wouldn't like THAT. But hey, police patrolling the city lookout (probably for hiding backpackers finding it a nice place to spend the night and couples (or married men with gay- or cheating habits) finding it a nice place to be "romantic") we didn't dare to dump ourselves there... So we took the gamble just parking outside town. Because of the darkness we couldn't see where we really where, the next morning brought us this amusing surprise. Didn't get caught and have yet another backpacker story to tell this way ;-P

Mount Isa beeing a copper/silver/etc mining town had some nice surprises for us though no cheap silver as ALL of it is exported straight away in big blocks and nothing is kept in town for low-price sales to poor backpacking tourist like we. Unfortunately. But, nonetheless Mt. Isa was interesting. Went down a mineshaft to get a wonderfull presentation of underground mining throughout the years, starting somewhere around 1930 and ending in the present and future. The trip was guided by a bloke who used to work underground for the last 34 years and clearly knew his stuff, telling all sorts of annecdotes from his years underground. You know BTW that it's very confusing uploading pictures of the Stuart Hwy (NT) while you're typing a story about your trip on the Barkly Hwy (QLD)? Anyway, the mine was unfortunately not a REAL mine, though dug out like a real mine with all the original stuff. The mining companies shut down all tours in their mines and let the town basically suffocate. So they (the town) decided to dig their own mine, so that they still can profit from the tourists who want to see a real mine. And they did it good, the mine looks and feels genuine and it IS. The only difference is that it was never comercially used to get silver, copper or whatever out of the ground. There is a price to that off course, $45,- for an almost 3 hour during guidance through the mine. You get what you pay for, not only a very experience guide but also hands-on demonstrations of the equipment being used and you get dressed in a mining-overall to get the image complete. So, for sure something to do if you ever manage to find yourself in Mount Isa.

After Mount Isa we headed little east to Cloncurry, going off the Barkly at that point and taking the less-taken Matilda Hwy, driving towards Normanton. This is where you finally leave the 2-lane bitumen and end up at the famous 1-lane strips where you really have to look out for road-trains and other heavymetal, towards and from behind. These strips are too small to let 2 cars pass without one leaving the tarmac completely. (Or both leaving it with 2 weels.) Road-trains and other trucks go first in any case (they can NOT leave the tarmac unless it's in an emergency) so be carefull, watch out, and be prepared to go off the surface as soon as you see something big thundering towards your bullbar with around 100Km per hour. Mind you, we're still talking about hiways here. It makes driving hard though very interesting. There is something strange about these roads, they make you realize your really in a remote area of a country far away from home, at least me really giving the aussie-feeling. And aussies patch their roads quite funny, there ARE 2-lane strips on these roads but they suddenly pop up and dissapear. Not that they start in one city and end when the bitumen (or the money) is finished, no, they just take pieces of one-lane strips and lay patches of 2-lane on some places. Sometimes on potentially dangerous ones (which makes sense) but as often on places where it seems completely unneccecairy and out of place. And they do move funny things along these roads. First beeing pushed away by a pace-car we already felt something oversize was coming our way. Far away on the dirt we waited, and waited, and suddenly something HUGE popped up. A house! WHAT!? Yep, a complete house, straight on the back of a giant truck, followed by its shed, probably made in Mount Isa and having destination Camoweal as we saw those houses a lot in this service-station-on-steroids.
We've seen this before, a little more south in Victoria but that was on the side of the road. It was kinda surprising finding this on the middle of a one-lane road...

Further up the road we needed bread. So headed into Normanton, a tiny settlement in the gulf-region, still the largest town around. Not really THE place to be. Aparently not really used to strangers there, the first lady almost looked us out of her store. The next one was a lot friendlier (we needed lunch and the first one didn't have anything usefull) and even pointed us to a park nearby. Declined the offer and had lunch outside her shop but nonetheless a better experience than the first one. Still not a town we need to visit again. 7Km south of Normanton we headed further east on the Savannah Way, looking for a rest-area. Off course, again not to be found so our first stop was a service-stop in Croydon to re-fuel and re-oil our car and somewhere outside Croydon we parked the thing on a rest-area.

Next day we headed further east on this very touristic road. NOT really touristic was the detour we took, starting a couple of Km's east of Croydon, heading south, east and north and after ~ 150Km ending straight in Georgetown we took a track which was absolutely very scenic but... Well, read for yourself. The track started as a fairly normal dirt-track as we did before in Tassie. Heading south, no problem, turning left and heading east, even less troublesome as the road changed to one of the best dirt-tracks ever seen. One you can easily drive 80Km/h without ever being afraid to loose your car on a bump. Off course it had it's rotten pieces where suddenly you felt like a milk-shake but it was absolutely a nice drive and the scenery was pretty ok. Actually, as still a bit afraid of dirtroads after our Tassie-incident I needed this track to get confidence again. So that was good. But, the as we turned left hell started. The first river-crossing was fairly easy, Nicky out of the car walking barefoot through the river in front of our van (no salties here and very shallow so no worries) to see where the concrete was and if there where any unstable pieces. Only 20cm of whater and no strong current nor hidden nastynesses so we crossed the whole 30 meters slowly but steadily and easily. The next part of the track (around 42Kms in total) was less easy though. It started with a sign "high clearance only", as our van has a fairly high clearance (in other words, it stands high on his wheels) we weren't to afraid for that and started on the track. But it turned out a little trickier than expected with lots of potholes, bumpy tracks and worse, kinda muddy and sandy river crossings. Glad that it was a dry wet instead of a wet (otherwise we couldn't do the track at all, meaning driving 100Km straight back) we managed the first few crossings with a lot of hassle, almost getting stuck a couple of times but by means of luck and probably some decent driving capabilities of yours truly we got through the first 20Km. And then horror happened, a little too muddy, a little to deep and a mistake in judging the right track our van got stuck. Tried to rock it back and take the other track but unfortunately by that time the rear wheels (our driving wheels) got digged into the mud too deep to get out on ourselves. Puzzled we stopped the engine and looked up to see how the hell we would get out of there. This track was rarely used, maybe 1 or 2 cars a day so we had what you call a little problem. Luck was with us, looking up the hill a kinda old and crappy looking 4x4 showed up! Walked towards the vehicle and tried to speak to the person in it. Another challenge, the guy in the vehicle seemed older than his pre-WWII truck, was even thinner than I and could barely speak. It took a while before I realized that the blode did UNDERSTAND what I needed but we managed. And off course he only had a really thin rope with in his car, by far not enough to pull out our 1750Kg minivan. By this time Nicky got her brains together when I yelled "rope" from the hill, realized that I had brought a climbing rope for common purposes (she cursed me for that when I arrived here, being utterly useless in her eyes) and that we might try that one. Well, climbing rope is strong but it is NOT designed for pulling out vehicles. Having nothing better we attached the rope to our car and to the 4x4 and just prayed. Probably all three of us. The poor 4x4 had some trouble finding grip on the steep hillslope, the rope squeeked, but slowly and steadily our van started to move! The rope held, the 4x4 was strong enough and after a couple of minutes we where up the hill. Cut the rope (by no means you can untie that nut), thanked our saviour extensively and went both our own ways. He where we came from and vice versa with still 20Km to go before we would reach the civilized roads again. To be shorted, the rest of the road was as nasty as the first 20Kms, stretching the capabilities of our van and our hearts to the maximum. We definetely missed a couple of heartbeats on that track as the only proper technique of doing those crossings seems to be just to get up the hill, steer into the right direction, hitting the gas and just plunge down with 30-40Km/h, using the weight and momentum of the car to get through the dirt and up the hill again instead of getting stuck, relying on the trackion of your rear-wheels which isn't there. (It's MUD...) That's SCARY. You don't have any control in the down-section and just have to pray that you don't hit any rocks damaging your car, blowing a tyre or two, get stuck in the mud instead of up the hill or simply loosing the control of your car completely and ending up somewhere off the track or worse, on your side. After this any other type of road seems easy as cutting through butter with a hot knife and any other surface seems ironed. Being scary like hell it WAS fun though, we made it to the bitumen again after uncountable nasty downs and where pretty proud of ourselves that we did this track with getting stuck just once. The next town (Georgetown) we first got petrol, got info about the lava-tubes a bit further on the road and celebrated our survival with a roo-burger (the lady in the general store asked if we where interested in one instead of the meatpie and sausageroll we ordered) and a pause on their bences. The first lady told us that it WAS a 4x4 track and not even made tidy because they normally do that before the dry starts, the second lady welcomed us very warm. So, another tip for if you ever get to this part of Australia, do NOT do that dirt-track unless you have a very sturdy 4x4 and some experience but DO stop in Georgetown and get a rooburger at the general store. (And say hello to the lady and her husband from us.)

After our adventure we needed a piecefull place to spend the night so went off to the Lava-Tubes a bit further to the east. Well, the campside was pretty doable and fairly cheap ($12,-) but the park was IMO a bit too commercial. You're only allowed to get into the tubes by a guided tour (as they say because it's too dangerous, as I believe because it's private property and they make nice profit out of tourists that way, Kakadu is with it's salties much more dangerous and you CAN go in there for free), the walks are fairly limited and the tour... Ah, it's a nice place to be and if you're a geologist it might be very interesting but our half-day tour was a bit dull. The guide seemed like a school-teacher (one of those dusty ones) and the lava tubes are simply not THAT spectaculair. So IMO you won't really miss a thing if you skip it and if you do want to visit it, stick to the 2 hour tour, do a walk up to the rim of a crater (nice view, again not REALLY specteculair) and after that visit the waterfalls in the west. We planned to spend 2 nights there, ended up with one and headed of to Cairns. Simply because the park was too commercial and not interested enough to spend longer than a day. Spend the night little south of Cairns in a village/suburb where I did forget the name. We planned halfway but unfortunately there are no rest-areas, so we had to drive through the dark for 2 hours (nasty as it was a long and very winding road, straight through the Great Dividing Range), and after a fuel stop and asking there we ended up on a rest-area being the only one in the neigbourhood. It said "no camping" but having the attendant of the fuelstation saying that it was allright for just a stayover we learned that those signs mean that you can not CAMP but can spend the night there. (Other backpackers even did put their tents down.)

Next day (yesterday) we then finally arrived in Cairns, being the backpacker capital of the far north. Suddenly we realized that we forgot a whole month and instead of having a month and 10 days to go back to Sydney we have 2 months and 10 days. *OOPS!* So we decided to relax here a little, went shopping yesterday, booked ourselves into a camping 15Km north of town for 3 days (both not being in the mood to explore the nightlife we prefer the ease of a more quit campsite) and booked our diving trip. That's correct, we're going to explore the Great Barrier Reef. Even better, we booked our 5-day PADI Open Water course, starting thursday and giving us not only an Open Water certificate at the end but also 3 days liveaboard. That means that the whole training is split in 2, 2 days theory in a classroom combined with practical training in a pool and 3 days on a boat on the reef itself. Luxury, the boat has hotel-like facilities and for the first time we get a complete cabin for ourselves. As the reef is 60Km outside the shore it takes a while to get there, therefore almost all companies offer this livaboard option. It simply gives you more time on the reef. Not only for diving (our course contains 4 training and 5 fun-dives, including 1 or 2 night-dives) but also for snorkeling and just relaxing aboard a multi-million-dollar dive vessel. Not really cheap (my creditcard was ~ $1300,- lighter when paid for the 2 of us) but probably definetely worth it. For me it's something I want to do for the last 3 years (I've done an instructor-guided dive in the red-sea in feb 2002 as part of my honeymoon with my previous girlfriend and got addicted but never took the big step.), Nicky just gives it a go and doesn't want to do things half. So that's for the near future. Tomorrow and wednesday we'll spend our days basically shopping and probably lying on the local beaches. Thursday till monday we're busy with our training and afterwards we'll see what we'll do with the rest of our 2 remaining months. Probably going up north, into the peninsula and then going very slowly down, back to Sydney.

The weather is still tropical but not too extreme, around 32 degrees in the shade. That's far less than what we had in Darwin and the outback. It must be as this temperature feels comfortable and even a bit chilly to me.

Good, that seems to be it for now. Nicky is going out shopping and looking if she can find a shop where they have male-skirts (yes I want to wear a skirt, maybe a scottish, maybe another more dark style), I need to check my email now but offered to write this story. Is a bit bigger than expected so it took me, erhm, 3 hours I think.

Tried to find an IPod or an Iriver (what do they cost back home? The 60Gb Ipod Photo is here just $699,-) but failed as also on this part of the world they go like hot pies across the counter... Even HarveyNorman couldn't help me out so I try again in Brisbane or Sydney. I DID found my woolen liner for my coat though (size 5XL), and the hood. Not the hat but we have still 2 months for that.

Ok, next time probably some diving stories. For now, up to my emails and other neccecities...

BTW the uploading of the new piccies (60 in total) is finished, so have fun!

Grtz,

Murf (and Nicky)

Murf | 22 Mar 2005 (Tue), 04:55 @ story