Vikings in Australia - Víkingar í Ástralíu

We are now in Halls Creek in WA. We got the cruiser on Friday arvo from the garage in Alice Springs. The rear oil seal had been replaced and we were ready to continue our trip. We left Alice Springs on the Saturday morning and headed north where the turn off is for the Tanami track to Halls Creek. It's only around 1,050km road. The first 200km have a bit of bitumen on it, the rest is a corrugated gravel road. We spent two nights along the way, the first one we did bush camping, using an off road track to nowhere and the second night we spent in a camping site next to Wolf Crater.

On the first day, when the bitumen ended and the gravel road began, we had to stop to reduce the tyre pressures, both rear and front. I did that with assistance from Kylie. We had been advised in Alice by other travellers that the corrugations were horrible and at times slow going. This wasn't as bad as we had expected, so we managed to get almost half way between Yuendumu and Rabbit Flats. This is were we simply went off road down a track towards a bore hole and found this great place to camp. We had a typical bush sunset and then later on, all the stars came out on display.

The second day we left early and drove on towards Wolf Crater. On the way we came across a couple of wild camels. Australia is the only place in the world, where camels run wild. They are of course introduced, but given that there is very little market for camel burgers, they have run wild in the outback. The second camel hogged the road and initially refused to give way, but Sibba with grim determination managed to pass it anyway. We arrived at the Wolf Creek camp site mid afternoon. The Wolf Creek Meteorite crater is the second largest in the world of it's kind. It's just over 830 meters wide and is very circular. It slammed into the Tanami desert around 300,000 years ago and is estimated to have been around 50,000 tons if an iron meteorite. The fragments have been found up to 4km away. It's quite a strange site to see as the surrounding desert is very flat.

The following day, Tuesday we left Wolf Creek and drove the 150 km to Halls Creek. Only about 16 km of that is bitumen, the rest was a typical Tanami special i.e. corrugations. We only had to switch to the main tank just about 40 km from Halls Creek. The 170 liter sub tank got us most of the way without any fuel stops.

We set up camp in a caravan park in Halls Creek. There we met up with some former camping friends from Sweden. They along with a couple from Adelaide are heading down the Canning Stock route, which is around 2,100km long track, which is very slow going. It starts off the Tanami track about 170km from Halls Creek, so it's a base used by travelers to either start or end the journey down or up the Canning. While here we also drove out to the Duncan Road and visited the China Walls and some of the Gorges that are along there. The China Walls are quite interesting to see. I'll post some photos of them later, but nature has some strange ways of producing these things.

Tomorrow we are heading up to the Bungle Bungle national park and will stay there for three nights. While there we won't have any coverage. We plan to go from their to Fitzroy Crossing, so hopefully we get in touch then. So for now, some photos from the Tanamai and Wolf Creek..
Simmi and Sibba.