Tuesday, 14 September 2021

Day 75-77 - The Tanami Track

 

Day 75 -77 – The Tanami Track

We left Purnululu and headed back to Halls Creek to restock on diesel and food.  The local IGA is very well stocked.  We also stopped by the local cop shop to check on the Tanami Road conditions, and to confirm that we could get fuel at Yeundumu.  Most of the aboriginal communities are closed due to COVID, but Yeundumu has one of those 24hr fuel stops.  Yeundumu is about 800km from Halls Creek, and Alice Springs is another 200km or so after that.  Ben says we probably could have just made it into Alice if we drove slowly to conserve fuel, but it was nice not to have to test the depth of the fuel tanks.  The Deli has a 2 fuel tanks, and we carried 100L in jerry cans.

The Tanami was rugged and beautiful, at times roughly corrugated, at times plain boring to drive along.  Just after leaving our camp on the second morning, we were stopped by some WA cops, who were really checking out people traveling the other way.  They were very friendly, announced themselves as the “border force”, and they certainly interrogated us in detail about all the places we’d spent time in WA, and particularly where we’d visited before entering WA.  We had all the right border passes, and we were declared to be all above board.  They told us there are 2 things to watch out for on the Tanami – snakes and corrugations.  We saw no snakes, much to Nicole’s disappointment, but plenty of corrugations.

The border from WA to NT was rather modest – a small sign, and a 44 gallon drum overflowing with rubbish, which was rather sad.

A great lunch stop on the last day was Tilmouth Well Roadhouse, where we treated ourselves to a hot sit-down lunch.






Our first night's camp - a huge gravel pit.  The cows are watching Ben and Keith with amusement as they look for a hole in one of the air mattresses.



The Wolfe Creek Meteorite crater was a 2 hr detour, but worth the trip.








One of our camps was called Tanami Pipeline.  Here you see cleared shrubbery for a buried gas pipeline.

Oh air-conditioning, how we love you when you are working.






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