Alice Springs to Darwin
February 14th
Full Moon
I left Alice on the bus at 8 o'clock on Tuesday evening. It was full moon. Nicki stayed there for a few more days and was going to meet me in Darwin on Saturday. We'd been together most of the time for three weeks and a few days' break would be good.
I was surprised when the desert ended not far north of Alice. I'd always thought it was roughly in the middle of it. But very soon the land became scrubby, dry tropics sort of country, pretty much like Cape York in far north Queensland really.
In the middle of the night, the bus stopped at Tenant Creek. Three Macafferty's buses and three Greyhound buses met up at the bus station there and it was total chaos.
The buses came from Alice, Darwin and Mount Isa in Queensland, and the idea was that people going to or coming from Queensland can transfer to or from either the north or southbound bus. It was a good system, but it was very weird the way it happened in the middle of the night and they way both companies did it at exactly the same time. The place was probably dead the rest of the time!
Tenant Creek was a much bigger town than i'd thought it would be. I'd always had this picture of a very small redneck town. But i reckoned it would be an interesting place to spend a couple of hours - in the daytime.
At 10ish in the morning we stopped at Mataranka. This place was basically a tourist resort at the thermal springs there. I tried to walk to the pool, but i didn't make it because the path was flooded and there were millions of mosquitoes and thousands of weird, pinkish fruit bats which were flying around frantically, squawking and shitting gallons of dark coloured fruit juice everywhere - as fruit bats do! I think there was another way to the thermal pool, but there was only a limited amount of time before the bus went and i didn't bother trying to find it.
Getting out of the bus as Mataranka was like diving into a hot bath. It was wonderful being back in that jungly tropical humidity again, it had been a long time since i'd been in the tropics in the wet season.
We arrived in Darwin about half three that afternoon. My first thoughts were to wonder if there was anyone i knew in town. I decided if there was my best chance of bumping into them would be in the Mall. Five minutes later, i ran into Barny there. I'd known him for years, but it had been a couple of years since i'd seen him last. As it turned out, he was almost the only person in Darwin that i knew - i met the other one a week or so later. Barny had arrived the day before from Western Australia.
I think the weirdest thing about Darwin was the fact that it seemed virtually deserted. Fair enough, it was the wet season, so there were very few tourists and less locals than in the dry. But Cairns, in far north Queensland, which has the same population is never that deserted. I found it quite disturbing.
In Darwin, i experienced something i'd seen, but had never happened to me before. When i was in India, just over a year ago, i was aware that Indians weren't allowed into one of the hostels i stayed in and i ended up getting rather abusive to the owner because of this, amongst other things.
The night before we left Darwin, i found myself in town, with nowhere to stay. When i tried to get a bed at "Ivan's", a backpackers' hostel, i was refused. "This place is for overseas backpackers" i was told, by way of a reason.
"Do you want to see my British passport and my ticket to Indonesia?" i asked, putting on my best pommie accent. "And what's this?" I pointed to my backpack, which unfortunately wasn't shiny, synthetic, "backpacker" style. But it was no use. I was refused a bed in Darwin because i was Australian. It doesn't only happen in India!