Queen of the desert

After fox flying we started our journey to the middle of the country. We drove for about nine hours to a town called Charters Towers and slept for a couple of hours, got up and drove through the desolate outback, and entered the Northern Territory. Right away I almost hit a kangaroo, it jumped right in front of the car, and shortly after that I hit a batch of birds. The road is very long and very straight, and I drove for 13 hours. Oh, and our AC went out a few days prior to this, so were in the outback with no AC and 115 degree heat. Then we here an alarm go off in the car, and sure enough we find out later that means the car is overheating. We make it to a "place", not town, but a place called Barkley Homstead which isn't even on the map, and decide we have to camp there, and have the auto mechanic check it out in the morning. There were so many grasshoppers, beetles and flies here you couldn't even stand outdoors with out getting attacked by a grasshopper. So the next morning, Dusty, the auto mechanic, who obviously heard about our troubles rolls up next to us in his huge tractor and goes to work on the van. This guy is quite a character, he looks seventy but hes probably only fifty because hes so wrinkled from the sun. Dusty figures we will be all right if we stop driving 150 k an hour and sends us on our merry way. We make it to Alice Springs, the town in the middle of nowhere, why did we come here again? Oh yeah, to see a big rock four hours further into the outback. So the next day we headed for Ularu, where Ayers Rock is. There is a really nice resort there, and we stayed at the campground. Its weird to see this oasis in the middle of the desert buzzing with tourists. It was so very hot, and the flys were terrible. Everyone was walking around with fly nets over their heads. At all times until the sun went down there were at least twenty flies feverishly trying to get up your nose and in your ears, it was extremely irritating. At sunset we went to a look out at the resort and watched the sunset on the rock, it was really beautiful. The next morning we got up at five thirty and joined the convoy into the National Park, which is a lot closer to the rock then at the resort, to watch the sun rise. After, we walked around the thing, it is 10k around and took about two hours. There is a spot for you to climb it, but the Aboriginals advise not to because it is sacred, so I don't know why they let people do it in the first place.

We drove back to Alice and stayed at the Wicked campers garage for two nights with our new friend Matt that works at the place by himself and lives in the vans. It was his birthday and he had no friends there so we bought him a cake and played charades for two days. We drove the long distance up to Darwin only to find there is really nothing in this town except for bums and drove right back out. Just out side of Darwin there is Litchfield National park were we stayed and played. It was so much fun. There were rock holes called Buley Rock Holes, and other waterfalls that we played in for hours, there was a rope swing and cliff jumping, and thank god no crocs. There was a waterfall closed off for crocs and flooding though, this is their territory! Every day the paper has a front page story on crocodiles, whether it was a sighting or attack or other. After the funnest National park ever, we spent a couple days driving to Broome (i said a broome chicka broome...), and it was the hottest I've been so far, so very humid. Broome is an extremely cute town, with a lot of plant and bird life, which is refreshing after two weeks in the outback. But it is so unbearably hot, we have to keep moving south.