Aliens, road trains and lead.

It's a long long way north south on the Stuart Highway from Darwin to Port Augusta, about 3000 kms. And in all that way there is only one bitumen road that goes east, the Barkly Highway. There are a couple of gravel roads, but as they run through the Simpson Desert and are about 1000 kms long off road, this time we decided to stick to the bitumen.
To get to it we had to drive 550 kms north of Alice to Tennant Creek, a mainly aboriginal town, where we stayed overnight.


On the way we passed Wycliffe Well, the UFO centre of Australia, supposedly where Aliens have been seen on many occasions.
Each of these roadhouses has to have a reason to stop people as they pass on this long road, some have a famous pub, others,as Aileron, has a very big statue of sorts. Otherwise they would go out of business! And aliens are the attraction here, the whole place is decorated with stories about flying saucers, and even the outside is painted with UFOs. Ah well......



Twenty kms north of Tennant Creek we turned on to the Barkly, which slowly rises to the Barkly Tablelands and some 300kms on to the Barkly Station, the only roadhouse and fuel stop on the way. It's a long long very straight road, but as we rose the terrain became greener than we had seen for a long while.

After the Station we started to drop again, and entered the Lake Eyre catchment area. You will remember that we visited Lake Eyre from the Oodnadata track, some 1500kms ago. So this is the area where the water to fill it comes from, a very long way away, and is very unreliable as the lake only fills about four times each century. And this is certainly not the year for it, as most of the creeks and rivers are dry.
We had had enough by the time we got to Camooweal, a tiny town around five hours drive east from Tennant Creek. Nothing there to report, so the following day we moved on to Mount Isa, a mining town another two hours down the track.

I have to say that was a disappointment, we had been looking forward to getting there, but it turned out to be totally dominated by the lead mine, and there was very little else. And expensive, a motel room was twice what we had paid for an great apartment in Alice.

We decided to move on to Winton, some 450 kms south east, and as we travelled the terrain became more hilly, and pastoral.

Miles and miles of pasture, thousands of cattle, not only in the fields, but on the move in huge road trains.









We must have passed thirty or more, going both ways, some to railheads but others to fatten up in the grasslands. These are double deckers, each with at least three trailers, I can't imagine how many cattle they can each carry.






The temperature the last few days has been in the mid to high thirties, (85-100f) and we have had to travel with the aircon on all the time. It's very hot at night too, which makes it difficult to sleep. But that's nothing like the record temperature set at Cloncurry in 1889, 56c! That's 135 deg f. I don't think even I could live with that!

Anyway, we are here in Winton, we've travelled well over 1500 kms in the last few days, and after a day's housekeeping tomorrow we will have a good look round here. There seems to be things to do and see, so we'll give this place a few days.