One hundred kilometres to the South of Tennant Creek, my brief stop for the night, is what must be one of the most photographed attractions Australia has to offer - The Devil's Marbles. Aboriginal legend has it that these massive round boulders standingmysteriously on their ends and scattered around a small area of the desert are the eggs of the Rainbow Serpent, a spiritual being who helped to create the world in the Dreamtime by forcing up the land from below to create the mountains and terrain. The Marbles provide welcome shade from the burning sun, as long as you can cast off the niggling thought that the one next to you is about to fall over and squash you flat, and the odd Goanna can be seen darting in and out of the shade if you stand around long enough. This is also one of those truly spiritual places in Australia where you really do have to sit down on the edge of a rock and just go "wow" - I'd like very much to know what it's like here with nobody else around, with total peace replacing the clicking of camera shutters and kids laughing and screaming as they try to knock the boulders over. If you've seen Billy Connelly's World Tour of Australia, this is where he suddenly decides to take all his clothes off and dance naked around the rocks while people watching at home regurgitate their lunch. To each his own.

Upon first inspection, there seems to be no logical explanation for how these perfectly round granite boulders come to be standing here, clearly worn away from beneath by ancient forces, right up until the point where they are about to topple, and then left alone as a puzzle to visitors for centuries to come. Of course, there's probably a perfectly good geological reason why they look this way, but that would mean that the Rainbow Serpent story wasn't true so I don't want to know. Actually, in recent years the Australian government has done something of a U-turn on the issue of Aboriginal rights - these days, and quite rightly too, the Aboriginal culture is taken very seriously and everything is being done to put right the mistakes of times gone by. The Devil's Marbles are considered to be sacred by the Aborigines, so you can imagine that they were just a little annoyed at the beginning of the 50s when one of the marbles - and remember that these are believed to be the eggs of one of the creatures who created the world - was plucked away and put on display in Alice Springs to mark the grave of the Rev. John Flynn - without anybody thinking to ask what the local tribe thought of the idea. This, to me, is a bit like somebody walking into a graveyard, digging up your grandmother and putting her on display in the natural history museum. In the last few years, the "egg" has been returned to it's rightful place in the desert and has been replaced in Alice Springs with a large boulder which somebody presumably found by the side of the road. If there are four things you must see in Australia, forget the Opera House and all that modern junk and head straight for the natural marvels - Uluru, The Devils Marbles, The Barrier Reef and Wave Rock in Western Australia, among others. I'll be getting to Wave Rock later in this trip.

Travelling North from Alice Springs on the Stuart Highway, the coach crossed the Tropic of Capricorn and we were all encouraged to be true tourists and get off for a look. The actual line between South and North is, um, a line drawn across the road - giving several of my fellow passengers the opportunity to make idiots of themselves by demonstrating a total lack of understanding of the difference between the Tropic of Capricorn and The Equator and leaping back and forth across it going "Look, I'm in the Northern Hemisphere... Look, I'm in the Southern Hemisphere" while we all smiled politely and wondered if anybody would notice if we drove off without them. Our coach captain, having a particularly wicked sense of humour, went and got a funnel from the back of the coach and used it to demonstrate to anybody gullible enough to fall for a simple magic trick that water drained clockwise on one side of the line and anticlockwise on the other (1). I am now officially back in the tropical zone, which means nothing other than I can expect to be attacked by a different species of insect from now on and I can sweat buckets again without being a whinging Pom.

Tennant Creek is the main town on the junction of the Stuart Highway which runs almost the entire way up the middle of Australia and the Barkely highway which heads off Eastwards back towards Mount Isa and eventually Townsville. It is therefore also a major terminal and stopover for the many coaches heading between the red center and the East coast and is positioned almost exactly half way between Alice Springs to the South and Katherine, where I will be stopping tomorrow on the way to Darwin, to the North. The town is named after a nearby Creek which was given it's name by John McDouall Stuart, the most well known of the Australian pioneers and a man who dedicated most of his life to exploring and mapping great chunks of the country and presumably saying "Oh look, some more desert" every few miles. Stuart had already made several expeditions across the outback by the time he reached Tennant Creek, losing companions and catching Scurvy in the process, finally arriving here as part of an attempt to explore the country from South to North - an attempt thwarted soon afterwards by a tribe of Aborigines who obviously hadn't learned that thwarted white men often came back later with guns. Stuart is such a popular figurehead in Australia, in fact, that Alice Springs was generally referred to as the town of Stuart until 1933.

In the 30s, Tennant Creek was a major destination for miners keen to take advantage of the Gold Rush sweeping the area. These days, however, it is just a sleepy outback town on the way from somewhere to somewhere else, but nevertheless seems to suffer from the slightly over-inflated ego that Australian towns often do. I don't mean to suggest for one moment that it's not a perfectly nice place for a stopover or a bit of a walkabout, or that the people are anything less than charming and welcoming, but if you're looking for nightlife in a typical outback settlement you're probably going to end up with your backside firmly planted on a barstool in the town pub, talking to the same three people for your entire stay. The Tennant Creek tourist literature describes it as the only major town in the middle of the Northern Territory, which really is about as meaningless as saying that London is the biggest city in the London area. The only other signs of civilisation for hundreds of kilometres in any direction are small Aboriginal settlements and cattle ranches - In fact, there are only a handful of towns of any decent size in the Northern Territory and four of them are larger than Tennant Creek.

I have to admit that I've never really understood people who insist on being patriotic just for the sake of it - after all, nobody gets to choose where they're born and surely in a free world someone is entitled to grow up, weigh up all the options and then decide they'd rather be elsewhere. This, after all, is the basis on which many people choose to spend their life travelling. The Australians seem to have local pride almost down to street level - so much as mention to an Australian that the town he was brought up in doesn't have streets paved with gold and he'll shout at you until he's hoarse and then head off to find his knuckle dusters. I made the mistake, when I passed through Tennant Creek again in 2002 after leaving Mount Isa, of mentioning to my previously chatty and light-hearted coach driver, who turned out to have lived here for several years, that Tennant Creek was perhaps "not as nice as Alice Springs". Not only did he never speak to me again, but I suddenly found myself allocated to the only broken seat on the coach. I was just glad I didn't point out the graffiti on the door of the bus station toilet which mentioned something about his mother.

Another thing you should probably not do is listen carefully to a local guide telling you that the town hall dates back to the 1920s, and then point out casually that your front door is slightly older. Trust me on this.

(1) The whole myth of water draining in different directions on either side of the equator, by the way, is just that - a myth. The Coriolis Effect, which is what we're talking about here, isn't anywhere near strong enough to create such a noticeable effect. It's an urban legend. Tell your friends.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.