Aliens and marbles...

Saturday, July 25, 2015
Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia
Day 8 – Aliens and marbles

Well, the rather too warm weather ended last night at around 2am when a rather blustery front or such came through Tennant Creek . I almost purred in delight, cooler at last!

Having managed to actually get some uploads onto the blog site last night, after days of inability to get a signal, I felt a little better that both my avid readers would, at last, have some food for thought!

Anyway, onto today's riveting activities…

First up, after an hour or so of driving we came upon the Devil’s Marbles. A set of granite outcrops in an otherwise pretty flat landscape comes as a nice change. The boulders areretty cool though, the "onion skin weathering" and frost wedging has created round balancing boulders and the occasional cleaved boulder of truly impressive sizes.

The occasional ghost gums along the road were also quite impressive, a stark white trunk and beautiful canopy of green seem like monuments to the wonders of evolution, toughing it out in an otherwise relatively treeless or at most stunted tree studded plain .

Next up was Wycliffe Wells, the self appointed alien centre of Australia. It was complete with an emu seemingly on guard duty in the forecourt. G managed some photos but it was gone after I paid for petrol.

Upon asking the heavily accented young lady behind the counter (Dutch of German we think) where the aliens were she said “all around”. I said (with a huge grin on my face) “oh don’t they call them backpackers?”  She said “you’re not having a go at backpackers are you?” (also with a huge grin on her face) and of course I assured her I wasn’t! I then paid for the gold plated petrol with my first born and we were on our way (after G had also purchased some gold plated coffee from a machine!

Trundling along we spied what looked like a Mayan pyramid in the distance…one which the road, for some inexplicable reason, seemed to pass directly over. Why couldn’t they go around?

As we neared it however, it turned out to be man-made (no, not Mayans) but rather an overpass for the road over the railway! Still, that counted as excitement for a while! Being so close to Wycliffe Wells we wondered about landing pass for aliens too…

The Ti Tree roadhouse further down the road is the repository for some essential supplies, a pretty impressive bar in the tavern, aboriginal art and, it would appear from personal experience, concrete chicken burgers! It also boasts a very impressive waiter, built like a cross between a front row ford and a bulldozer and no, I didn’t complain about the burger!

Escaping with full bellies and all appendages intact we moseyed down the Stuart Highway listening to some podcasts I had on disk . Several insightful discussions of the content ensued and much to my dismay GG closed in on my fuel consumption record!

Later we passed by a small settlement called “Aileron” for reasons we didn’t investigate and it features a very impressive statue of an aboriginal hunter on a small hill overlooking the town and at least another lower down.

We had booked into a caravan park so we checked in then went looking for some hardware. (One of my gas bottle hoses burst last night and my drinking water hose was 2 feet too short for our site tonight!)

A very nice Indian meal tonight and we settled down to Griff Rhys Jones travelogues on British rivers!
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