Days 95 – 103

After six long days of full trailer and car services, collecting and filtering oil in the freezing conditions in Alice Springs (tops of 18 during the day but zero at night) and attending our first outback rodeo, we chug, chug, chugged out of Alice Springs heading North West, back to the Tropics of Australia for some much needed heat and flies!

The reason for the “chug” is still unknown and still ongoing (you would think after spending over $1000 on a full car service that everything would be working fine but you would be wrong!). We initially thought it may have been our own fault as we forgot the night before to switch from oil back to diesel. When it would not start in the morning, we thought it was due to the cold conditions and our lovely camping neighbours, Jan and Rus from Western Port, Victoria, offered to lend us their electric blanket that they had been using in Alice to warm up the Battered Fish!!

You would not believe the crowd the sight of an open bonnet with a man peering underneath it in a camping ground can form. It truly is incredible. As soon as they heard the sound of a car not starting, the meerkat impressions started of men hoping up off their chairs and seeing where the noise was coming from. Then, very slowly edging their way forward towards the car, the first man arrived and the conversation started:
“That doesn’t sound good”
“No”, I replied
Then after several minutes of just standing there and me trying to start it, “Know what’s wrong?”
Through gritted teeth, I replied “no”.
Then the next man approached – “That doesn’t sound good – know what’s wrong”. AARRGGGGHHHHH!!

After six others crowded around the car and joined in the helpful conversation, eventually Bruce from the campground came to our rescue and got it started.

On the positive side, the rodeo that we attended in Alice was great fun. We saw Bronc riding (that is unbroken horses to the virgin rodeo goer!), steer roping, barrel riding (for the “cowgirls”) and my favourite, bull riding. The announcer introduced the “cowboys”, who came into the ring dressed in chaps and akubras, before we all stood to sing the national anthem. After this, the announcer did not stop speaking for the whole night, repeating over and over about the main sponsor, “Billy Buck” (seriously!) and coming up with some classic sayings, my favourite being the one to a slightly large “cowboy” - “he jumped on that steer like he was jumping on a hamburger”.

The transition from cold to hot came after driving for two days through the Tanami Desert. The road was “rough as guts”, as some Aussies we met described it, with corrugations for over 500 kms. We saw two cars pulled onto the side of the road changing their tyres after a puncture and a lot more tyres on the side of the road evidenced of punctures to previous travellers.

Crossing from the Northern Territory into Western Australia, we stopped one night in Wolfe Creek. For those of you who have seen the movie, we are very proud to say that we have stayed there in a flimsy camper trailer with just canvas separating us from all evil! The crater itself is impressive and the view it gives of the deserted outlook is quite eerie. We really did get the feeling there that we were in the middle of nowhere. The sky at night was fantastic – we were lucky enough to see a full moon rising from the crater, followed by a sky lit with thousands and thousands of bright stars.

After crossing the desert, our first stop in the Kimberleys was Bungle Bungle National Park. We arrived at the visitor centre to register that we were bush camping in the park. Gerard was on his way to the visitor centre when the lady behind the counter came out telling Gerard that she could smell burning. Gerard sniffed the air and replied that he could not smell anything unusual. She then commented that it smells more like someone cooking than burning. Gerard looked around and noticed that I still had the engine running on the Battered Fish. He told the lady that it may be our car which was causing the smell and not someone cooking. Her look was of total astonishment when we said that we were running the car on waste cooking oil – she had never heard of this before or realised that it was possible to do! She did seem slightly relieved that it was the car causing the smell and not burning as the park had an extreme fire danger rating and as she was new to the job, she would not have a clue what to do if something was burning! The road into the Park was extremely rough and took over 2.5 hours to travel 50 kms. It was well worth it though just to see the beehive domes with tiger stripes on – the colours up close are a fantastic burnt orange with black stripes. We went for sunset at a lookout which offered a fantastic 360 degree view of the Park. However, our attention was diverted away from the sunset by two young children who went away from their parents for a few moments with a camera to take some pictures of the sunset but came back, (much to our amusement but their parents disapproval), with pictures on of something much more interesting than a sunset, their bottoms!

We are now staying in Kununurra, which is the start of the Gibb River Road. We are restocking on oil as well as fruit and veg as we came across a quarantine section on the Western Australia/Northern Territory Border. It was not like the one we came across in Queensland on the weekend (which was closed as obviously fruit fly only works during the week days!), but it was more of an honesty bin. We, being very lawful citizens, tried as hard as we could to eat most of the fruit (Gerard won the prize as he ate 4 oranges and 2 grapefruits which resulted in some rather unpleasant consequences for Sarah and I in the car with him!!) and chucked the remaining fruit, veg, nuts and honey into the bin.

We are slightly confused with the time at the moment. Western Australia is 2 hours behind Sydney (NSW) time and 1.5 hours behind South Australia / Northern Territory time. However, when we turn on our mobile phone, it tells us we are on Hong Kong time! If we go by WA time, it means the sun sets at 5pm and rises at 3.30 am so we have not, as yet, put our clocks back to WA time but are wondering when we should. Any advice anyone?!

I have included some pictures of the Rodeo at Alice Springs (one of which is a photo of the "cowboys", none of whom met our expectations as a potential boyfriend for Sarah!), Gerard and I crossing into WA, Sarah and I at the Bungle Bungles, the domes of the Bungle Bungles and the deserted expanse at Wolfe Creek.

Thanks to all those who have blogged and emailed – as always, it is great hearing from you. If “Sweet Relief” are reading this, please write another post with an email address so we can answer your question about engine conversion.

Hope you are all well,

Rach and Ged (and Sarah, who is doing very well with the dirt and the flies that have appeared now it is hotter!!) x

Days 85 - 94

Be warned, if you do not like rocks, gorges and walking, Central Australia may not be the place for you. These last ten days have been jam packed in terms of the sites we have seen (or more precisely, the amount of rocks we have seen), the amount of kms we have walked, the adjustment of life at a temperature below 30 degrees and also the adjustment of life with a third person travelling in the car and sharing the camper trailer.

That third person is my sister Sarah, who we met up with at Uluru (Connelian) Airport. It is fantastic having her with us and we are amazed at how well she has adjusted to life in the “bush”. However, like us at the beginning of our trip, she is struggling with how dirty everything gets, identifying the numerous noises of wildlife during the night, going to the toilet in the bush and wondering whether every spider she sees is poisonous or not (the answer to which we tell her is “definitely no” but in truth it is probably “yes” and “lets get the hell out of here pronto”). We gave her quite a steep learning curve into camping as we bush camped for the first three days in a beautiful but very dusty site with dingo’s howling during the night and a night temperature of 3.5 degrees, it was freezing!

Those that read the last blog will be pleased to hear that we eventually found Uluru (for those that haven’t yet caught up, we mistook Mt Connor for Uluru on first glance). Although it is such an iconic image of Australia and we are pleased that we have seen it, we were all a little disappointed with it and don’t quite understand why. One reason may be that for our liking, you could not get close enough to it. The climb of the rock was closed due to strong winds for both days that we were there (there was a list with at least 12 other reasons for why the climb can be closed) and the base walk that we did had a fenced off area between you and the rock of about 50 – 100 metres the majority of the way around. This is due to certain areas being sacred sites to the Aboriginal people where you cannot photograph or walk. Having said all of this, when we first saw the rock, we could not take our eyes off it due to its colour and size – it really has a presence. I also took over 50 photos of it at different times of day, including at sunset and sunrise, so it could not have been that bad.

On the other hand, we thoroughly enjoyed the Olgas and Kings Canyon. At both of these places, we did long walks taking you all the way through the sites. At Kings Canyon, we did a walk where we climbed to the top of the Canyon and then down into the middle where we found a lush oasis of paperbarks, palms and a swimming hole with glorious reflections of the trees and the Canyon in. Unfortunately for my legs, we then had to climb back out! The colours of Kings Canyon were very impressive and although I took a lot of photos, none of them do it justice.

We gave Sarah the experience of corrugations whilst driving to the MacDonnell Ranges along the Meerenie Loop. The road only gets graded once a year and that was 11 months ago. For 160 kms non-stop, Sarah had to endure being shaken around in the back of the car to a constant noise of d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d (say it as a child pronouncing “D”). The road conditions did not get any better once we left the Meerenie Loop and drove along the 4WD track to Palm Valley. Some of the pot holes we found in the ground would have been a great spot for fishing in. The rough drive was well worth it though for Palm Valley was stunning. The burnt orange colour of the sheer cliffs at sunset with white ghost gum trees set into the cliff and red cabbage palms fringing the waterhole was an incredible sight. We later found out during a ranger talk given around the camp fire at our camp spot that 99% of the Worlds red cabbage palm trees are within 5 kms of Palm Valley (a fascinating fact I am sure for all of you!). I admit that we initially only attended the ranger talk because of the prospect of a warm, blazing fire as we did not have any firewood of our own but found the talk to be extremely interesting, especially when the ranger spoke about the high proportion of mammals that have become extinct in Central Australia due to introduced animals by the Europeans (ok, I may have become a little bit of a geek!).

We left Palm Valley and drove to the MacDonnell Ranges, another stunning area with yet more rocks, gorges and walks to do! Some of our highlights of this area were the walk we did around the Pound at Ormiston Gorge, Ellerey Creek Big Hole for its peacefulness and Standley Chasm, a deep red cleft that rises 80 metres above the floor and glows from reflected sunlight creating a stunning display of rich colours. We also did some great bush camping in this area and had huge fires to keep warm.

On our first night in the MacDonnell Ranges, we did not bush camp but ended up camping at Glen Helen Resort, as the national park camp ground was full. I knew it was going to be an interesting night when I saw three tour buses pull up outside the reception and the guy at reception announcing there was a happy hour and karaoke that night. We went for happy hour to warm up a little and the karaoke started. The guy running the karaoke started singing his first number – it was painstakingly embarrassing how bad he was! As if that wasn’t bad enough, he then proceeded to do yet more numbers whilst two rather large German ladies stood up and started to dance not quite in time with the music!! It felt very surreal to be watching and listening to this after the peace and solitude we had experienced during the last three months!!

I have mentioned a few times about how cold it was during the nights. It really has been quite a shock to our bodies after we had come down so quickly from the Tropics to temperatures of no more than 20 degrees during the day, dropping down to zero at night. I have slept for the first time this trip in two fleeces, a woolly hat, gloves and the sleeping bag under the duvet.

Not only has the weather had an impact on how long we sit around the camp fire at night for, but it has also had an impact on the waste cooking oil. The filtering of the waste cooking oil is taking over twice as long as it normally does and the Battered Fish has taken longer to start in the mornings because the oil in the car has not heated up. This means we are running on diesel for longer in the mornings before we can switch to cooking oil.

We are now back in Alice Springs collecting more WVO for our journey North across the Tanami Desert to the Gibb River Road (we are not predicting there will be many takeaway restaurants in the Tanami Desert so need to stock up as much as possible!). We cannot wait to get out of the cold and back into the Tropics, which will hopefully be in the next week!

I have included some photos of Palm Valley, Kings Canyon, Uluru at sunset, Sarah and I at Uluru, Standley Chasm, Gerard and I at Ellery Creek Big Hole, Gerard and I at the Olgas at sunset and a Major Mitchell Cockatoo (a Pink Cockatoo) that we saw at Palm Valley.

Thank you to all who have emailed and blogged us – as always, it is great hearing your news.

Hope you are all well and enjoying your summer over in the Northern Hemisphere and your winter over in the Southern Hemisphere!

Rach and Ged x

Days 71 - 84

Despite the sheer beauty of Katherine Gorge, we were so pleased to be leaving. The amount of people and cars on the road was quite a shock and we had not slept very well due to noisy neighbours and people using the facilities at all hours! It was in stark contrast to what we had been experiencing during our time along the Gulf Track and we yearned for some peace and solitude once again.

Due to this experience, we decided to get off the tar ASAP and get back onto some 4WDrive tracks to get to Litchfield National Park. We drove up the Reynolds River Track and the only person we met along the way was a New Zealand guy who had cycled from Darwin. We met him at a creek crossing where the rangers had just put up a crocodile warning sign (this meant that there must have been a croc sighting somewhere near this creek.) Understandably, he was nervous about crossing the creek on the bike as the creek was 0.7 metres deep and had murky water (a salties paradise). We offered to put his bike on our roof rack and give him a lift across. He did not want to do this but travel behind on foot pushing his bike in our wake so that the water was shallower. After trying to persuade him that this might not be the safest way to cross the creek, we gave in and Gerard set our video camera up on the roof in case anything happened!! It was an uneventful crossing and the Kiwi came out of the creek unscathed!

We carried onto where we were camping that night in Litchfield NP, Sandy Creek. We walked about 2 kms from the camp to Sandy Creek Falls where we were planning on having a swim and spending sunset. When we got there, we found a beautiful waterfall and best of all, it was completely deserted. The water was freezing but we had a quick swim and sat and watched the sunset over the waterfall - a beautiful way to end the day.

We spent two great days at Litchfield visiting all the waterfalls in the National Park and doing some bush walks. Each night, we would return to Sandy Creek for a much needed swim in the cooling waterfall after our hard days work at the office! Even though this is the Northern Territories cooler season, the days did not drop below 30 degrees and there was not a cloud in the sky.

We left Litchfield and drove to Darwin. Whenever we reach major towns or cities, we always have so little time as our main concern is to get waste cooking oil which involves a day asking all the takeaways and restaurants and then another day in the same spot filtering it. It is also a time where we restock on food, drink and do any repair work needed to either the Battered Fish or the Barnacle. Poor Barnacle, it again needed so more welding work in Darwin as once again, we had an accident with the gas cylinder falling off! The Battered Fish on the other hand is running very well and had a service in Darwin as we have travelled over 12,000 kms in three months! Mum – you will be pleased to hear that he handbrake has finally been mended so we now don’t have to deliberately stall the car if we need to park on a hill!

Darwin itself really surprised us. It is a modern city with lots of new development and city flats being built. Best of all, as we arrived at the start of the weekend, there are both day and night markets to enjoy all weekend. On the Thursday night, we went to the famous Mindil Markets. There are aboriginal art stalls, bands playing didgeridoos, a cowboy doing demonstrations with his whips (!) and best of all, thousands of food stalls selling everything from Roadkill (the slogan “you kill it, we cook it!”) to Asian foods. After 12 weeks of camp food, we could not resist the amazing aroma of the foods and we brought some Chinese nibbles and went down onto the beach with the hoards of other people and watched the sunset. Once the sun had set and bizarrely, everyone had clapped, we went and found main course and then pudding! The atmosphere was brilliant and it was a great night.

Over the course of the weekend, we visited every market going and probably gained about 10 kgs in weight due to having laksa for breakfast and curry for dinner each time! We met up with the Dunlop’s again and went with them for a sunset picnic on the cliff tops at East Point Reserve – another stunning spot. Unfortunately, we were not very organised and forgot to bring any lights with us so as soon as it got dark, it was a case of packing up by using feel rather than sight! We also met up with Gerard’s cousin Elisha and her husband Adam who had just had a baby, Isabella. Gerard’s Aunty and Uncle were also there and we had a great time catching up with everyone and telling our travelling stories.

We left Darwin after collecting close to 400 litres of WVO. We are still finding people who are totally unaware that your car can be fuelled by waste cooking oil and it is great speaking to these people about the Battered Fish and also about how they can power their cars on WVO.

Our next destination was Kakadu, a place that I had been looking forward to seeing for a long time. Before we got to Kakadu, we decided to camp near to Adelaide River in order that we could do the jumping crocodile tour the next morning. All though this was INCREDIBLY touristy, I really would recommend it to people who are wanting to look at saltwater crocodiles up close (by up close, I mean less than a metre away from you!). We boarded the boat and sat downstairs next to the open window. We found out that this is the best spot to sit as they dangle big slabs of meat down into the water right by this window. As soon as the first bit of meat was bobbing up and down in the water, the guide informed us to look to our right and there in the water we saw a slithering of a tail and some eyes coming towards the boat. Once the croc is by the boat, the meat is lifted up out of the water and the crocodile jumps directly up out of the water to get the meat – it really is an incredible sight to see a wild crocodile doing this. This was repeated about 8 times with different saltwater crocs, varying from 3 metres to 6 metres in length. As the crocs were so close to you, it really got your heart racing every time they were near the boat. What also amazed me was the sheer number of crocs we saw. You really would not want to be anywhere near this river in a small tinny (boat).

After getting over the adrenalin rush of the jumping crocs, we carried onto Kakadu where we spent 3 brilliant nights. Kakadu did not disappoint me at all and it is somewhere I would love to go back to in the wet season (November – May). The size of Kakadu, in comparison to Litchfield, surprised me and also the landscape. I had imagined it being a huge wetland (which I am sure in the Wet it is) but at this time of year, it is quite dry and dusty with huge open plains. We tried to squeeze in as much as possible but some of our highlights of Kakadu were Ubirr, our two hour sunrise boat cruise on Yellow Water and Gunlom Falls.

Ubirr was just incredibly beautiful. We climbed up to the top of the rocky escarpment and were blessed with a 360 degree view of Nardab Flood Plain. The only man made thing that I could see from up here was a dirt track, everything else was natural.

Yellow Water is Kakadu’s best known floodplain. We decided to take the sunrise cruise (starting at 6.45 am!) as we heard the wildlife would be best at this time. It really did not disappoint. We saw quite a few crocs, a pair of dancing brolgas, jabirus, water buffalo, egrets, magpie geese, darters, thousands of whistling ducks and sea eagles. It wasn’t only the wildlife that was incredible. The reflections of the great gum tress in the water at this time of day and the water lilies, which were closed when we first started the tour but opened up at the end, were also beautiful.

Gunlom Falls features rainforest and a large, deep plunge pool at the base of a high sandstone cliff where a waterfall flows (trickles might be a better expression!). We decided to climb up the cliff to the top of the waterfall where we got slight vertigo looking down from the start of the waterfalls into the pool below! Up at the top, we swam in the rock pools that had formed which looked as if we were swimming in an infinity pool as our view was directly out to the rainforest. The water was cold but after the steepness of the climb, it was very rewarding.

When we left Kakadu, we had four days to get down to Uluru (Ayers Rock) to meet my sister, Sarah, who will be travelling with us for the next 6 weeks. From Kakadu to Uluru, it was 2, 213 kms so we really had to motor it. We also had to stop at each roadhouse we came across to find WVO, something that became more and more difficult as we got closer to the Red Centre. We managed to find oil in Alice Springs but this is after being rejected by 22 places first!! One slightly embarrassing incident happened during our trip to Uluru. After the turn off from Stuart Highway (or Roadkill Highway as we have named it) to Uluru, it is about 300 kms to Uluru. To our left, we noticed a huge “rock” in the distance which we thought was Uluru as it looked exactly like it did in the pictures we have seen. Even getting out and taking pictures at a lookout called “Mt Connor Lookout”, we did not twig that this was not Uluru but Mt Connor. It was only when we actually drove past what we thought to be Uluru that we looked at the map and realised our mistake – doh!!

We will be exploring Uluru, Kings Canyon and MacDonnell Ranges with Sarah over the next 10 days before we head back to Alice to once again refuel on WVO. We are hoping that Uluru will be better than Mt Connor!

I have included some photos of jumping crocodiles, some waterfalls at Litchfield NP, sunsets in Darwin, views from the top of Ubirr and Gunlom Falls and some of the wildlife we saw on Yellow Waters.

Thank you to all who have emailed and blogged us, it is great reading about your news.

Rach and Ged x