Starting the long drive home

With some reluctance, but also some joy, we left Darwin on October 7, heading homewards after all these months.

We’d had a wonderful time in Darwin, parked in the driveway of the home of Fred and Lyn Barlow, with our stay extended to two weeks because of John’s operation (see previous blog) and the need for his surgeon to check him a week later.

We got the all-clear on Monday, Oct 6, so we were ready to go by the Tuesday morning.

One stop on the way south from Darwin was at a mango farm which produces the most glorious ice-creams. We’d had some at the open-air Deckchair Cinema in Darwin, John phoned, and arranged to collect some on our way south. So now we have the bottom of our little freezer packed with these 200ml tubs of tropical flavour.

Gorgeous boy at Mataranka.

We stopped in Katherine just long enough for me to catch up with a cousin there. We’d had lunch in Darwin with her sister and husband and the daughters of each of these cousins. They were all off to Singapore later this week to help the son of the Darwin cousin (Coral) celebrate his 50th birthday and recent marriage to an Indonesian beauty. So I was so glad we caught up when we did.

Then we drove down the Stuart Highway to Mataranka (about 38 C but no humidity, so it was actually a little more pleasant than Darwin) where we stayed the night.

We had to dissuade an over-friendly peacock and his harem from pinching our cheese and bikkies before dinner, but the caravan park was almost empty, showing that it really is nearing the end of the dry season.

Today we have driven more than 500km to Tennant Creek, just south of where we will go back to turn east tomorrow towards Mt Isa.

The countryside is dry and often quite burnt but there is still something wonderful about these Central Australian open spaces. Also wonderful, and mirth-producing, are the thousands of termite nests, many of which have been ‘dressed’ in t-shirts, caps and sometimes sunglasses by passers-by.

We couldn’t stop to photograph many as invariably we had massive road trains on our tails, but we certainly enjoyed looking at them.

Tomorrow we’ll have an easy day, just a few hundred km to Barkly Homestead, then on to Mt Isa.

We’ve admitted to each other that we are really ready to go home after all this time, and all the things that have gone wrong, although an enormous amount has gone right and we’ve seen some glorious parts of Australia.