Journey to Darwin - Another Epic

Location: Darwin
Weather: Hot n'Humid

Saturday 18th December 2004
After collapsing in the room around 2am and getting up at mid-day with a huge hangover and being rather annoyed with myself about the night before, missing my appointment with the van woman didn't help. But phoning her up, apologising and downing an energy drink did! I was eventually given the keys at 3:30pm! This van was owned by the Wicked Van Company (check out the features, it even has a portable TV) - one famous amongst travellers here, because the vans are all painted with different logos and my one had Finding Nemo!


Cool eh! As you can guess I was very popular on my journey - I got asked and shouted at in loads of places. HEY NEMO all the kids would say. Your van is cool...Did you paint it yourself others would ask. I think it saved me from getting robbed by delinquent kids quite a few times to be honest!

Anyways, I stocked up on supplies in Broome and spent the night down a dirt road near the Broome Bird Observatory. I then set off, without any maps, except for the Lonely Planet and having heard people say that Highway One led to Darwin. The first landmark was a place called Fitzroy Crossing. The scenary to here was extremely boring, ok, so the odd Boab Tree and the thousands of large Termite mounds were interesting for a while, but not after 3 hours! it was mostly just plain scrub land. Considering this is part of the famed Kimberley Region I was disappointed. But from here on it improved, some mountains and rocks appeared.



Perhaps a short detour to Alice Springs only 1040kms?


Finding nothing much in Fitzroy Crossing, I continued onto the small town of Halls Creek. This was a small town mostly populated by Aborigines, many of them drunk on the streets and two handy petrol stations. After driving down the highway a bit more and seeing a bush fire on the way I spent the night in a parking spot. 700km clocked today!

After returning to Halls Creek to get petrol and to be abused by a drunken Aborigine and then apologised to by him after I said I was from London (seems they don't mind us white fellas from London), I drove a few km's down a dirt road (the van did not like this much) and visited China Wall - a wall of white quartz upon red sandstone rocks. It looks like a man made wall, but it's a natural formation. I then left Halls Creek and proceeded to Turkey Creek then Kununurra.

Doon Doon Roadhouse and Surrounds (about 60kms south of Halls Ck)


I got there just in time to do some swimming in the River Ord as the sun went down. This was very pleasant.



As it got dark I went up to the lookout on Kelly's Knob (Knob is a popular Aussie term for a hill, hehe). There was a major electric storm approaching Kununurra and it was spectacular to watch this. Fork and horizontal lightning every 10 seconds and huge crashes of thunder. I later went down to the lake for another view.
After buying some food from the Coles supermarket and seeing yet more Aborigine kids generally causing trouble, I slept the night down the road in a parking spot, yet again! Stopping here meant I had only done 400kms this day, so it was an early start and a visit to Hidden Valley - part of the Mirima National Park - and home to the Mini Bungle Bungles - the Bungle Bungles are circular rocks formations and are famous as Helen Daniels from Neighbours always used to disappear to them whenever she went on holiday. It was a very nice in this place and there were black cockatoos in the trees and stuff.



It was then 300km to Timber Creek, crossing the Western Australia border and into the Northern Territory - HOORAY!

In The Second Photo One Foot Is In The NT And The Other Is In WA


Timber Creek isn't much except a servo, so it was then another 300km to Katherine - the first bonefide large town of the journey! Katherine is a very nice place in a beautiful setting and is very popular in the dry season as there are lots of activities to do there. I managed to have time to go swimming in the Katherine HotPools - a bathing place that was much like a small river really, rather than a group of pools, but very nice none the less.
As I still had a fair way to go and had to return the van by 10am the next day, I decided to do a bit of night driving. Discovering this was the only bit of road in Australia that didn't have a Parking spot for over 40kms, I did eventually find one and cooked dinner on the van stove. This was not a great experience as the van got infested with about 10million horrible flying insects thanks to the inside lights.
I stopped for a cup of tea at a road house where I was asked for drugs from a truck driver because "don't all you backpackers carry drugs" (I think he was joking) and spent the night somewhere about 30km outside of Adelaide River.

Awaking with about 5000 insect bites I had a quick look around the 'town' of Adelaide River and then speeded down the road to Darwin. I even turned the A/C on full blast to desperately burn petrol so the van company wouldn't get any for free, well I still had about 3 quarters of a tank left and it cost me a fortune to buy that stuff from those roadhouses! Approaching Darwin it was good to see some kind of civilisation again and I dropped the van off exactly at 10am!

In summary this wasn't a bad trip, it's a shame I didn't get an extra couple of days. The van ruled. Not only was it like driving around in the Scooby Doo Mystery Machine, but you could literally live in that thing - it had a good stereo and sleeping in the back wasn't bad. The only annoying thing was that the engine stayed hot for ages and with the very humid climate and extremely hot sun - I've decided the weather here is officially now way too hot, even for me - it was like trying to sleep in a sauna most nights and I've never drunk so much water in my life - around 4 litres a day. Even worse further north, I had to keep the windows closed unless I wanted to be eaten alive by insects. It was like being a roasted chestnut the last night.

P.S. Interestingly enough Broome->Darwin has the longest stops between fuel - twice I had to drive over 200kms between service stations! that's longer than the Nullarbor's 186km one, strange considering the Nullarbor is supposed to be THE outback road trip.

The Famous Car Eating Cow Road Sign


Map Of The Journey


Tuesday 21st December 2004

By JamesReed on 21.12.04 @ 06:46 AM GMT