Desolation. Ants. Heat. Flies. Drought. Flood. Loneliness. Scarcity. Flies. Sunburn. Flies.
This post is not complaining. It is just describing our experiences on the stretch between Kathrine in the Northern Territory to Townsville in Queensland. Acording to Google Maps it is a 1360 mile trek, 25 hours of driving. That is farther than the distance between San Diego and Seattle. That sounds about right.
The night after we left Kirijini our provisions were plagued by ants. We went to bed with a few in our tent and woke to find our selves in the Arc De Triomphe of ant traffic. And that was the tent, never mind the table. We had idiotically left our food out instead of putting it in the car as we usually do. Everything was crawling in ginger ants. They were small but bit hard! We cleaned up best we could and shook out all bedding. Despite our best efforts a large population of tiny hitch hikers continued the journey with us.
We thought Western Australia was empty, it was nothing like this! Goods in lone convenience stores were 5 or 6 times more than they had been in Darwin. We ate a lot of canned food.
One day we got up and were driving by 6:30 and didn't stop until 10. We had decided to push on another 200 kilometers from where we had planned to stop with a lure of a restaurant at the end of the road. The road lead right int the heart of a super thunderstorm. Lightning was striking 360 degrees all around us and gusts of wind pushed our car a foot to the left. Justin was tired from a long day but he kept a steady hand on the wheel for the 2 or 3 hours we were stuck in cell. Rain was coming down so thick we couldn't see and the inches standing on the road were tossed up by our tires. The worst part was the road trains. If the gales were moving our little car that much we could only imagine what it was doing to the container boxes connected together like sails. Nick and I fell asleep to the sound of howling wind but Michele and Justin got to the restaurant where they hung out with some locals.
I have told you about out back flies before but they were so much worse now.
After 2 full days of hard out back driving we arrived in Townsville, a well sized city on the coast. The East Coast! We had finally made it! With less name recognition then Cairns it is a quieter access point to the Great Barrier Reef. Justin and I had looked at maps of coral bleaching and noticed that the farther south we went the better condition of the reef so we saved the gas and parked it in Townsville for a few days.
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