Alice Springs - Darwin- day 28,29,30

Our next tour was supposed to leave at 5h30 this morning, but we only woke up at 5h48 and thought we'd missed it! Thanks to Pierre's quick reaction and sprint out the door, he managed to stop the bus just as it was driving away!! This tour took us from Alice Springs to Darwin in three days, covering 1500 kilometers on the Stuart Highway. On the way we passed by Ti Tree (1500 inhabitants, but a school for 3000 students!! hahaha!!), Barrow Creek (telegraph station; place where a similar story to the one in the movie Wolf's Creek actually took place), Wycliffe Well (the UFO capital of Australia), Devil's Marbles (bunch of random rocks in the middle of nowhere, most of them are round-shaped due to erosion; it was one of the hottest places we have ever been!!), Tennant Creek, Attack Creek, Mary Ann Dam (waterhole with lots of birds), Banka Banka Station (cattle farm that is bigger than Jamaica!!; we slept in a camp there (got up at 6h the next morning) and saw a baby kangaroo, the cutest thing ever!), Elliott (80% aboriginal population; the only place where they still have a segregated bar, one for white people and one for black people!; the city is only built on one side of the highway and Nat is the first one who ever guessed what was special about this town!!), Dunmarra (service station where we held a Blue Tongue Lizard!), Daly Waters (the Northern Territory's oldest pub, they had 4 bottles of Galliano and a bunch of bras and underwear hanging around!), Mataranka Thermal Pools (natural spring where we swam; in the trees around it there are thousands of Flying Foxes (kind of bat), really impressive to see!!), Katherine (a bit of a bigger town; we camped here and got up at 6h the next morning), Katherine Gorge in the Nitmiluk park (we went canoeing here for 3,5 hours, went swimming and jumped off some rocks; it was very hot!), Edith Falls (went swimming again! great way to cool down! although they had crocodile warning signs everywhere...), Adelaide River (where we saw the buffalo that played in Crocodile Dundee) and finally Darwin! It was an exhausting trip, with lots and lots of hours in the bus and very hot weather and tons of flies everywhere we stopped... Darwin is the biggest city in the Northern Territory, with 114.000 inhabitants (which is more than half of the population of the entire Northern Territory!!) and has one main street with tons of pubs and restaurants... There are lots of foreigners here and the weather is horribly hot!!

Weather: very very hot and sunny and humid in Darwin