As I’m spending some time in Alice Springs there’s going to be a whole lot of photographs to post up. The plant life around here is stunning, sometimes obviously beautiful, other times small and indifferent until you look closely, in the right light, at the right angle. I’ll be adding to this blog post for a while as I take more pictures.
After my minor car dramas in the Kimberly and a whirl wind overnight stop in Derby I arrived in Broome where the reddest dirt meets the bluest sea. And it does so quite literally, the contrast of the red against the ocean is striking. It’s not all red dirt though, Broome is blessed with some beautiful white beaches.
So many pictures to choose from and this hardly epitomizes the Kimberly but I’m finding it hard to pick a photo which sums up the Kimberly for me so far, or perhaps my quality control standards and just a bit too high and I’m finding fault with some aspect of most pictures. Up here the sun is harsh and photos tend to be washed out with stark contrasts between light and dark. Everything’s harsh up here, the light, the weather and the landscapes. Harsh but beautiful.
It’s estimated that about 2000 aboriginals lived in the Kakadu area before Europeans arrived, the Bininj in the north and Mungguy in the south. Divided into about 19 different clan groups who spoke 12 different languages, this is part of the oldest living culture in the world dated at well over 50,000 years old.
Think about that for a minute, let it sink in.
We have the oldest living culture found anywhere in the world here in Australia, but it’s dying out. In fact as Europeans we’ve spent much of the last 300 years trying to wipe it out.
Rainbow lattice sunstone is an amazing thing, looking closely at it, you’d swear it was man made, surely such perfect straight lines, all at the same angles, layered on top of each other couldn’t be natural. For those more technically minded, it’s a feldspar called perthite with lamellar and sagentic twinning of thin titanium iron oxide blades, much of this lattice has oxidized to display the iridescence effect.
For me it’s a pretty shiny rock, and I like pretty shiny rocks.
Ok now heading up towards Darwin, the troopy was booked in for a service. Actually, I’m sitting here now in Darwin typing this while it’s being serviced. What a strange feeling to be in an unusual town without my car. Two days ago when I arrived I booked into a hotel, caravan parks up here are not cheap, the cheapest was $45 a night for an unpowered site right on the side of the highway out of town. So I booked into a hotel room for 3 nights, damn it I was going to get some decent nights sleep.
It’s 38 degrees in the shade and I’m sitting in the Daly Waters caravan park, about 400km south of Darwin and a whole lot of kilometres north of Uluru. The blog has been down for almost a week now because I missed a “your payment didn’t work email” for my domain name. I’d wanted to update the blog almost a week ago while things were fresh in my mind, but alas, it’s still not up, so I’m typing this onto the computer in the hope that it will be back up in the next day or two, so when I get some reception again I’ll be able to post.
I’ve done some driving in the last week or two, I’m sitting at Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory and it’s about 36 in the shade. Strange to think that only a couple of weeks back I was suffering from the cold back in Tingha, in fact I still have the little fan heater out in the back of the troopy, figure I could pack it away now as nights rarely get to 10 or less. The picture above was somewhere in Northern Queensland just before dawn, the sky was the bluest blue I’ve seen in a long time.
It’s been a long hiatus between posts and much has happened since my last post. After leaving Tassie and returning to my van in Learmonth near Ballarat I sold my Landcruiser 200 series and prepared the Troopy for an adventure – the big lap of Australia in the troopy. Well at least that was the plan, however, things don’t always turn out how you plan them and I’m not sure whether I’ll make it around as I’m moving too slowly yet again.
