After 10 minutes in Alice Springs we had seen more Aborigines than we had in the rest of Australia put together. They seem to sit together in groups on the sides of roads and in car parks swigging from cans of beer all day and having loud arguments. These are apparently not representative of Aboriginal communities as those gathered in the cities are usually those who have been extradited from their communities because of things like alcohol abuse.

In Alice we spent Saturday looking around the town and Sunday with Ray and Janice Dunn and friends. In Alice there is a river bed that runs through the town, it is usually dry due to the lack of rainfall. Once a year they have the Henley-on-Todd boat race where the competitors pick up their bottomless boats and run in them, it must be the only boat race that gets cancelled if there IS water in the river!! In the Northern Territory there are lots of cattle stations, many of them are over a million acres and the largest one is bigger than Belgium! Consequently cattle often only see humans about once a year at mustering time so can be pretty wild. Mustering is still sometimes done on horseback, but more modern methods involve using helicopters.

We picked up our Camper to drive to Darwin which we managed to hire for $5 a day for four days as it was a relocation deal, they also paid $60 of our fuel expenses! We extended the hire for a further two days for a higher rate so that we didn't have to rush to Darwin. When we collected it, it was a Toyota Landcruiser 4WD with a 4.5 litre V8 engine which made it rather heavy on the fuel! It had two tanks to give it a greater range as fuel stations can be few and far between in the outback. It had a pop up top for sleeping and an awning and pull out cook area to set up outside.

We set off on our road trip north the following morning. We soon crossed the tropic of Capricorn and things became greener and greener as we went on as it is the rainy season. We were lucky as we had fine weather each day, the temperatures dropped a little but the humidity soared and it's hard to say which is the most uncomfortable! We stopped at the Devil's Marbles where hundreds of gigantic boulders are strewn through a large shallow valley. Some appear precariously posed as if they might roll away at any moment. We did about 900kms that day as there is very little else to see, the only reasonable sized town is Tennant Creek, the rest of the places although marked on the map are little more than a fuel station, shop and campsite. We stayed at Daly Waters which has a population of 23!!! That evening as we were cooking our tea a number of road trains stopped to fill up with fuel, most had 3 trailers but one had four, they took ages to fill up! At dusk the mosquitoes came out in force and we got covered in bites before we could pack away our cooking stuff and run for cover. The heat and humidity meant it wasn't our most comfortable night and we dreamt of air conditioning.

The following morning we set off for Katherine. Unfortunately when we arrived the Katherine Gorge was inaccessible due to flooding from recent heavy rainfall. Having already arranged a campsite nearby we went back for a relaxing afternoon in the only place that was cool enough - the swimming pool. The following morning the water level had fallen and we were able to go on a cruise up through the first gorge. We saw a freshwater crocodile on the river bank as we travelled up the river and Aboriginal rock art on the cliff faces. We took a short walk out to a sinkhole and swam in the lovely clear water without having to worry about crocs.

After the cruise we headed off for Kakadu National Park getting as far as Cooinda where we stopped at a campsite. Half the campsite was cordoned off because the river was flooded and there was a possibility of Crocodiles getting a bit too close for comfort!!! There were dingos (a breed of wild dogs) wandering around the campsite and howling in the distance after dark. This night was the most hot and humid that we had in the van and it didn't get cool enough to sleep until after 1am. We got out of the van at one point to 'cool' down a little and got attacked by mosquitoes again. As a result I had a total of about 60 bites including those I had in Daly Waters. The next morning we continued along the main highway through Kakadu National Park but just about every little road out to each attraction was closed and we saw just about nothing so that turned out to be a complete waste of time. So we headed on to Darwin, and so desperate for air conditioning ended up staying in a cabin for the last night of the camper hire.

From Darwin we visited Litchfield National Park which had beautiful waterfalls and rock holes and was not affected by the flooding. In Darwin we spent some of Sunday with Matt and Eunice Hicks and family who were back home from when we met them in Busselton, WA. We had lunch on the Wharf with them and a number of their friends and were invited back to David and Sandy Scholtz's in the evening. We walked along the Esplanade the following day and briefly visited the museum. We also fed fish on the water front at high tide, there were hundreds of large Mullett, Milkfish and Catfish.

In the Northern Territory we travelled 2380 kilometres in total, then decided to fly back to Sydney as Queensland is experiencing another cyclone so we've had to abandon the idea of going from Brisbane to Cairns.