Monique and Justin's Travels

Goodbye Queensland

Northern Territory is an interesting place.  It’s a part of Australia but not part of the whole British Commonwealth scheme.  The inhabitants took a vote to join the Commonwealth a few years back and roundly voted against it.  Landslide.  As such, they still have people in Parliament but they have no voting power.  Their votes don’t count for anything but because all Australians are required to vote, they still go to the polls.  Who knows where those votes go.  The positive side is, they’re the only state in Australia without that godawful Union Jack in the corner of their state flag.

The entire territory has just over 200,000 people, 30% of which are Aborigine.  Roads are well maintained and straight and loooooong.  People give a wave to you as the pass when you’re going up the highway.  But the biggest difference is the lack of XXXX beer signs. -jp

The road to Alice Springs is very long and very flat. Get use to this view.

The road to Alice from Cairns is over 2500 kilometers.  Well, the paved road, anyway.  You can take an unsealed, corrugated desert track and save about 300km but we’d decided that we’d had enough of that kind of thing for awhile.

It took us 5 days to drive it and some of those days we drove over 600km in a day.  That’s kind of a lot when you’re averaging 80km/h or so with a max of 100.  We blew a tire on the way.  It was the same tire as every other time.  It’s starting to piss me off.

The sites along the way included Mt Isa which is a major mining town but otherwise uninteresting despite having terrible drivers, a few other mining towns and cattle towns, and a lot of monuments for explorers along the Stuart Highway.  The biggest news is we left Queensland finally after nearly four months. -jp

Von Cairns nach Alice Springs!

2500 km – ja, es ist ein verdammt langer Weg. Und leider landschaftlich nicht so wirklich interessant und abwechslungsreich. Naja, wir sind nach glaube ich 5 Tagen Fahrt in Alice Springs angekommen. Klingt lange ja, aber mit Biggie können wir auch nur so 80-100 km/h fahren, sonst frißt er uns die Haare vom Kopf wegen hohem Bezinverbrauch.

Auf dem Weg runter ist uns auch mal wieder ein Reifen geplatzt und komischweise war es der, der uns bereits 2 mal kaputt gegangen ist. Wir hatten also die Vermutung, dass es irgendwas mit der Felge zu tun haben muß, aber der Typ in der Werkstatt meinte, ne passt alles mit der Felge… -mk

Gallery: http://gallery.me.com/the_np_bat_man#100943

The route we took.