Our Darwin Tour – A Retrospective

We have been home from Darwin for a day and after catching up with things around the house, it’s time to look back on our trip and review our travels. I returned our rental car yesterday and its information screen gave me some interesting details.

A direct road trip from Darwin to Melbourne via Jabiru is 4,010 kms. Our total driving distance was 6,123 km. It is quite normal for us to travel about 30% further than the straight road distance with sightseeing diversions and looking around. Our average speed was 65 kmh and our total driving time was 93 hours and 7 minutes.

What surprised me was our average fuel consumption of only 8.6 litres per 100 kilometres. We were driving a Ford Everest which is a big SUV style car and this fuel consumption was surprisingly low. Its diesel engine certainly gave us a longer range and much better fuel economy.

As we look back on this adventure, a couple of places stand out.

It was wonderful to see my old army mates again at the reunion in Darwin. We spent four days together and although we look a lot older, the war stories that we could tell are still strong. Our afternoon Vietnam Veterans Day service with the local veterans was a standout.

I think that our most interesting activity on our trip home was a late afternoon cruise on the Mary River Wetlands. We came across many birds and interesting wetland scenery on this two-hour boat ride.

We had a similar cruise at Yellow Water later after we reached Kakadu National Park. This tour was earlier in the day while we did not see so many birds,we did see a lot more crocodiles.

Termite mounds were everywhere – millions of them. Far too many to count!  Little ones, big ones, tiny ones – all created by the termites’s saliva and mud from the flood plains. 

The biggest surprise for me was to stop at the carpark at ‘The Breakaways’ lookout near Cobber Pedy and look across the landscape to see vivid desert colours on the features across the plain. I hadn’t expected so much vibrance. It was a fantastic sight.

Coober Pedy was the most remote town that we stopped in. It is 687 kms south of Alice Springs and 540 kms north of Port Augusta with nothing in between except for a couple of roadhouses. We travelled through 1200 kms of country like this. 

The drive between Alice Springs – Marla – Coober Pedy and Port Augusta was the most boring part of your trip.The towns are hot, dry and dusty. Even the cold water in the tap comes out warmer than body temperature! The road train is the standard form of transport in this area and we encountered dozens of them.

At Coober Pedy, over 50% of the population live underground and even church services are held underground. People are only here for one reason – to dig for opals. It was rather amusing to find that in this place in the middle of nowhere, the pizza restaurant is famous for having some of the best pizza in Australia.

The only town that we came across south of Coober Pedy (during the long haul to Port Augusta) was Woomera which was built by the government to test rockets in the 1960s. Its architecture is similar to any other military base in Australia.

The quirkiest place that we stopped in for an overnight stay was the pub at Daly Waters. It is almost the only building in the town and it has a lot of outback character. The accommodation rooms were the most basic of all but still quite comfortable

Kakadu National Park is an interesting place, however, all the main attractions are many kilometres from the main town of Jabiru in the centre of the park. The Mercure Crocodile Hotel was one of the most comfortable hotels in which we stayed (and so it should have been for the price of a room). We also enjoyed the hotel room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Alice Springs.

Ubirr at the northern end of Kakadu National Park gave us the most historic sight that we encountered on this trip. The Aboriginal rock art is somewhere around 20,000 years old.

The most scenic area that we travelled though is undoubtedly the Western MacDonnell Ranges out of Alice Springs. We found a number of gorges and rock holes that were simply stunning along this scenic mountain range.

Finally, the prettiest part of the country that we travelled through was the road from Port Augusta to Adelaide. It went through Crystal Brook and the Clare Valley. The weather was threatening to rain and the dark skies behind the wheat and canola crops were brilliant. The old sandstone buildings in South Australia (whether in good shape or in ruins) always have a character of their own. Perhaps it was because of the amount of green and yellow colour that looks different after all the saltbush and barren desert vegetation.

We had two reasons for travelling through the ‘Centre’  The first is that it is just about the only place in Australia that we had not seen. Secondly, I wanted to see some of the locations where my father had served in a number of supply units in WW2. Although nothing remains of these places after 80 years, it was still good to see them and imagine what a military experience in this part of the world may have been like. He would have seen these places:

The town of Alice Springs and Heavitree Gap from Anzac Hill

Mataranka Hot Springs near Tennant Creek

The Devil’s Marbles south of Tennant Creek.

The site of the original Barrow Creek Camp before it was moved 30 km north to a location with a more predictable water supply.

The Northern Railway at Larimah – the end of the railway line south of Darwin