Follow the Red Dirt Road: Centralia

Try this quick quiz. The centre of Australia is:
a/ hot
b/ dry
c/ red
d/ none of the above.

The correct answer, at the moment at least, is d.

As we headed down the Tanami Track towards Alice Springs the clouds gathered, the temperature dropped and the landscape stayed stubbornly green. Our 4WD guide to Australia lists the Tanami as one of the great desert challenges, but this hardly seemed to describe the road we travelled. There was no bulldust, no sand dunes and no bones of unlucky travellers bleaching in the sun. There were at least camels and corrugations, but even these weren't really a challenge. Drop below 60 km/h and they would shake you to bits, but around 80 km/h there was a sweet spot where the vibrations were quite tolerable. We made surprisingly good time, and by the first night we were halfway along this road that we had expected to take at least four days.

Camels, the only evidence of 'desert' we experienced on the Tanami

The first day the landscape was fairly featureless and places to pull off and camp were very rare, but as dusk fell we finally found a good clearing about 100 m off the road. Now a lot of people worry about imagined dangers of bush camping, but it is something I have always enjoyed and been very comfortable with. In the very unlikely event of trouble, I am sure that I would be ready to protect my family. I sleep like a lion protecting his pride, soundly but with my subconscious mind always alert to danger. So it came as a shock when we woke in the morning and Nic pointed to a road train just down the track and said "What the..., I'm sure that wasn't there last night". Incredulous, I got up and walked over and asked the driver when he came in. He told me "1 o'clock, I saw your swags there and I tried to creep past". I followed the tracks of his 50 odd wheels back to within 15 metres of our camp. While we slept, this huge FOUR TRAILER road train had rumbled past our swags, so close we could almost touch it, and not one of us had even stirred!

The highlight of the Tanami was the chance to visit the art gallery in the community of Yuendemu. It is typical central desert art with lots of circles, squiggles and dots. As well as the opportunity to learn what the symbols mean, we had the chance to watch some of the paintings develop before our eyes. It was as fascinating as it was beautiful. It was also impossible to walk out of there without buying something so we bought a medium sized canvass for ourselves and a small board each for Mallee and Jarrah.

From Yuendemu to Alice Springs the landscape got more and more interesting as we closed on the West McDonnell Ranges. Just short of the Stuart Highway the car slipped out of top gear and stubbornly refused to be put back (we probably shouldn't having been using 5th anyway when towing but at these speeds its hard not to). We discovered that Alice Springs is not a good place to break down. Every mechanic we rang said they couldn't even look at it for a week, but the consensus was that it was just 'excessive end float' in the gear box and we could continue on using the remaining 4 gears.

Our first day in the West MacDonnell Ranges was overcast, drizzly and cold. Twelve miserable degrees in the middle of the day. We kept warm by going on walks by day and campfires by night. Australia is absolutely blessed with beautiful, rugged landscapes, each subtely different from the other, and the West McDonnells are no exception. With time running out we couldn't explore the West McDonnells properly and just visited a few sights like Ellery Creek, Glen Helen and Watarrka (Kings Canyon) before it was time to head down the Mereenie Loop to Uluru and Kata Tjuta.

We'll see you when the dust settles.