Historical Ramblings

Stuart Highway: Darwin to Tennant Creek

After finishing up Kakadu and three more days at our "local" wifi cafe in Darwin, we rented a car and I learned how to drive on the 'wrong' side of the road. Driving on the left isn't as bad as I thought it would be. I believe I managed to end up in the wrong lane only two or three times and, luckily, that was in the middle of nowhere.

With our rented Nissan Pulsar, we prepared for the long drive down the Stuart Highway, the paved road connecting Darwin, Alice Springs, and Adelaide, straight down the center of Australia. It's a vast distance, around 2,000 miles, and there's almost nothing between the major stops. At the car rental agency, we asked the guy behind the counter for a map. He looked at us quizzically and said, "We don't have any maps. There's only one road." And, in fact, there is only one road -- at least, one paved road. Every so often (maybe every 20 minutes), you pass a dirt road. Or, if you're lucky, you pass an "unseald" gravel road that has, at least, been leveled.

The car had a minimum rental period of a week, so we decided to take our time getting down to Alice Springs. Our first stop was Katherine, a small town of about 2,500 people, four hours south of Darwin. We arrived late in the afternoon and pulled into our hostel, a really nice place on "Third Street" -- in a town of four streets, best I could tell, with very original names.

The town of Katherine is, in itself, interesting for outsiders, as a large portion of the population is Aboriginals. I'm not going to get into the issue of Aboriginal people in this entry, as it would take me hours to even begin to scrath the surface, but the town itself is probably at least 30-40% aboriginal.

Katherine is famous for the Katherine Gorge, a series of incredibly beautiful freshwater gorges. After a restful sleep in our hostel (where everyone is asleep by about 10, since there isn't much to do in the town), we drove out to the gorge and rented canoes for an 'easy' time canoeing up the gorges. You canoe down the middle of enormous beautiful cliffs, rock formations, and sandy beaches. Unfortunately, the gorges are also not actually connected, meaning you have to climb very slippery rocks to get between them. After flipping our canoes several times and ending up with many, many bruises on our legs, we made it through to (and back from) the second gorge, returned our canoes, and headed back to the hostel.
 

The next day, we had intended to make the drive to Tennant Creek, the next stop on our trip down to Alice. About an hour south of Katherine, we pulled into a BP station in a town called Mataranka, intending to fill up on gas and continue our drive down. We filled up the car and went into pay at the counter, when the nice woman behind the desk asked if we were in town for the Rodeo. Rodeo, we asked? Turns out that we were in town just in time for the Mataranka rodeo, an annual event where locals (meaning people living anywhere within several hundred kilometeres) ride ponys, bulls, and horses. How could we pass that up? So, we spent the afternoon exploring Mataranka's famous hot springs and the evening at a real live rodeo, where they award some of the prizes early so the kids can go home and get to bed and where the emcee encourages people to cheer on their neighbors from the 200 km away cattle stations and outback roadhouses. It was, to say the least, quite an experience.

The next morning, we continue our drive down, stopping at Fran's Devonshire Tea House and then continuing on to Tennant Creek, a drab town about halfway between Mataranka and Alice Springs that's seen better days. We dinned at the only restaurant open on a Sunday night, got a brief and cold night of sleep, and got up the next morning for the remaining drive to Alice Springs.

I'll pick up the story here later, but at the moment, work calls. The story will continue, however, with a Swiss rollerblading hitchhiker, giant marbles, mangoes, and an Alien-infested roadhouse.

Posted by aglazer at August 23, 2005 10:59 PM | TrackBack