Since our last update from Katherine, we’ve covered about 1000kms and arrived happily in Alice Springs. The trip has been pretty interesting; we made some friends in the caravan park in Katherine and bumped into them a few times since then, we’ve found a man who can catch Barramundi with his bare hands, beautiful hot springs, heaps of termite mounds, vivid flowers, old telegraph stations, some not so busy (or populated) towns, a man who claims to have the last remaining Oomidoodle birds (otherwise knows as goofy looking chickens) and a massive heap of marbles that apparently the devil has lost. I’ve put in the pictures below in the order in which we have seen them. The Barramundi guy was in a place called Mataranka. They have 6 or 7 Barramundi in a pond and they hand feed them twice a day. It is really cool. They are huge fish the one in the picture is a “medium” sizes one at about 90cms long. In the same place there is a really beautiful hot spring where you can swim around in the pool on the up stream end and then float down stream and see all the interesting aquatic life as you go. Our friends from Katherine (Lynn and Annie) were there so we stuck around goofing off in the water for a while. On our way out of Mataranka we saw an entire paddock full of Termite mounds. Mel took Mae’s picture next to one of the bigger ones. During our drive we did see some that were much bigger though. This one just happened to be close to the road.

After Mataranka we headed down to Daly Waters where they have a very entertaining guy by the name of Frank Turton. He is a comedian and singer who provides that passing caravaners a bit of a respite during the dry season. He has a clutch of chickens that he calls Oomidoodle birds of which he had 6 the morning we came and by the mid-afternoon he only had 5 because a Green Python decided that one of them was going to be lunch. Lynn and Annie were there as well and Lynn got herself into trouble by talking during a song so she had to join Frank on stage. It certainly was well worth stopping at Daly Waters for the show.

After Daly waters we decided that it was time to hit the gas a bit and we headed for Tennant Creek. We stopped at the Old Telegraph station there for a quick look around and then headed into “town” to grab some supplies before we continued on to Devil’s Marbles 100km further down the road. Devil’s Marbles is really beautiful. It is amazing how the stones look to be stacked on top of one another. According to the signs there the stones are actually just extremely hard packed clay and will eventually fall apart and disintegrate. Mae and I did a good bit of climbing around and managed to get on top of the highest rock in the whole park (Mel took our picture, she wasn’t keen on climbing up there with us).

Our last stop before Alice Springs was an interesting old Telegraph station at Barrow Creek. It is a really pretty building but we saw one of Gods little wonders while we were there. A bush was just dropping its most recent (and probably last) fruit. The entire bush was covered in butterflys. They had just slipped out of their cocoons and were trying to find a partner before their very short lives came to an end. Mae managed to make the best picture of the lot.
So now we’re in Alice and we’ll be heading out to Kings Canyon, Uluru and the Olga’s tomorrow. Mel (and a half), Ryan & Mae