Plenty and Donahue Highways

We headed out from Alice Springs to drive across the border and back to Queensland.  Total distance to Boulia (first town in Queensland) 745 km over dirt roads.  We had heard many stories about the poor quality of the roads but really they were just like any other dirt tracks - some sections excellent and some very slow.  The art seems to be driving above 70km/h to avoid corrugation vibrations and below 85km/h (well, we know what happens when you hit a pot hole/wash-out/bulldust patch at higher speeds!) Mostly, both roads were excellent.

We Geocached throughout the trip and go to some more interesting places as a result.  The photograph below is the Hartz Range Campsite where we found the cache and also excellent views from the site.

The "Eagle Eerie" geocache site. In the howling wind and dust-storm it was certainly an eerie landscape!

Max and Max and Laura really got into the geocache spirit and had a great time finding treasure.

We didn't take many photographs of the many amazing termite mounds we have seen but this one was too large to leave without a photograph!

At the Queensland border, the route changes name from the Plenty to the Donohue Highway

 The scenery wasn't quite so impressive compared with the Northern Territory side of the highway.

 We had to take a photograph - the monotony of the Mitchell Grass has to be seen to be believed!

 Fortunately a little further down the highway we arrived in the jump-up country.  This was a very spectacular landscape

We camped on the side of a side-road next to a jump-up.  It was one of our best campsites and the advantage of the camper trailer - being so self sufficient meant we could take advantage of the opportunity to camp in beautiful surrounds totally alone.

This is taken with the trailer behind us - stunning.

We moved onto another geocache site for breakfast - this photograph is taken from the top of the jump-up where we found the treasure.

We visited the Middleton hotel - the seventh of the nine stages of the stage coach run between Boulia and Winton and once a small town.  Now it is a pub in the middle of nowhere.

The kids enjoyed a coke in the pub.

We finally set our own geocache which we will upload onto the website once we get to Brisbane.  We have added our own geocache to the "Outback Way Geocache trail".

Finally our outback way adventure is complete - starting in Laverton in WA and travelling through the Northern Territory and to Winton in Queensland.  It was a much more interesting trip than taking the bitumen route down south.  It was well worth the planning and effort!

Tourists in Alice Springs

Our circular trip through the East McDonnell Ranges brought us back to Alice Springs for a mad 36 hour visit to Alice Springs. 

We visited the reptile house in town and the Royal Flying Doctor Service museum on day one. On our second day we spend the morning in the "Desert Park" a well run wilderness park combining aboriginal culture and outback wildlife. The bird show was excellent. The park mostly consists of ecosystem-specific aviaries in a bushland setting.  The bird talk at the waterhole was excellent.

 As the temperature was 38 degrees we escaped to the movies for the 2pm showing of "The Boxtrolls" a new movie. After catching up with a friend from Brisbane who we hadn't seen for years we fed rock wallabies at Alice's gap in the McDonnell ranges. Then we shopped for our trip across the rest of the "Outback Way" back to Queensland.

Cool lizards in the reptile house.

Laura and Max flying a RFDS aircraft.

Tony loved the cool pedal radios that the RFDS introduced throughout the pastoral stations for communications.

The bird show at Desert Park. Hawks, owls, curlews (plenty of these on the UQ campus where Tony works) and a goshawk,

Laura and Max chillin' at the movies.

Feeding the rock wallabies in Alice Springs.