Alice Springs to Wycliffe Well

Ok, so the tears and emotions are done from the experience at Uluru. We are now on our way to Wycliffe Well NT. The weather has been stinking hot again and it is mid 30's celsius and it is still just mid morning. I complain now but I just know it's going to make for great memories later...

We got to Alice Springs NT, that's Alice, as we like to call it up here in the bush... !!! ha! 
Not a nice looking city. Sort of dirty and mangy. Lots of aborigines and no one seems to like to bathe. Lovely!! We stopped to see a bit of the 'downtown' and to find a couple of bottles of 'refreshment' for that night. It was 1:15 in the afternoon and the bloody Bottleshop, as they call them, didn't open until 2:00pm.... What the??? bleep bleep!!

 Alice Springs NT

 Alice Springs NT

 Gas prices in Alice Springs NT

They have very strict liquor laws up here in the Aboriginal Lands. You are not allowed to sell any alcohol to aboriginals on their lands and I guess they don't want anyone else buying it earlier than 2:00, for some stupid reason, anyway... We were more than pissed off and left Alice with a huff and a few curse words and headed north to our caravan park another 300+/- kms away.
 

 
One of dozens of abandoned cars we saw along the highways in the outback.

 Tropic of Capricorn

Typical Road Train in the outback

 Finally here!!!  Woohoo!

I was so excited about staying at Wycliffe Well Caravan Park. We found it online when looking for places to stay that would break up the long distance drives between Alice Springs and Mt Isa. It seemed to fit our needs, it was so cheesey and it looked absolutely wonderful. Well, on the computer anyway. We pulled in around 4:30 or so and it was bloody well hot again, still 38c or so, whatever.....!!! HOT!!

 Not WalMart greeters but.... Wycliffe Well greeters....

So as you can see from the picture above, this place is literally in the middle of nowhere.It's function is obviously a rest stop, gas stop and watering hole for weary travellers. To access this caravan park you have to pull off the highway and turn onto a service road for about 100 meters or so. Past the entrance to the park about 75 meters more is a pond or billabong or well (hence the - Wycliffe Well?) As we arrived we noticed there were some aboriginals swimming and hanging around in the shade of the bridge overhead of this pond. It might have been a family as there were adults and children. You could hear them talking to each other and it seemed they were always yelling at each other. Apparently that is how they normally communicate with each other. I thought it was rather cool to actually hear them in their own environment and speaking their own language to each other.

Anyway,  the abbo's that were just down the road and yabbering at themselves didn't bother us too much until about 9:00 when, after hours and hours of arguing and yelling at each other constantly, the owner of the park had to call the police and have a few of them taken away... They must have been drinking (illegal for them out in the outback I think)...

 We saw these signs along the Stuart Highway after leaving Port Augusta and all the way to as far as Mt Isa in Queensland.

It was more than a bit unsettling as we watched them argue and yell and then leave one or two behind while the rest drove off in the car and then see the car return and more yelling and then someone else takes the car and drives off with it and the one left behind now has to walk down the highway to wherever it is they came from.. Scary.. You have to remember, this place is literally in the bloody middle of nowhere.... Nowhere.....  look it up...

a couple of the local residents at Wycliffe Well

so cheesey!!!   lol   love it...

Anyway, here's the story.... We arrive and pay for our site and buy some coolers and beer and get set up, and it's again 38c or 39c, or more, and all you want to do is dive into the pool... But first you have to have a cocktail that we just paid nightclub prices for at the front desk. That just goes along with the $1.99 per litre for gas that you have to fill your tank up with, $150.00 or so, thank you very much!

 Gas prices at Wycliffe Well NT

We (Mark) made dinner and I walked around, taking some pics of the Emus and trying not to get too creeped out about some dodgy looking guy who was walking around looking at the chickens...  lol   ahh jeeeez....

 Emus wandering around at Wycliffe Well caravan park.

We had dinner and chatted with some other travellers who were from Canberra and who where taking 6 months to do the same sort of touring that we were doing, only they were headed up to Darwin and down around the west coast.
I went to the toilet/shower house that the park provides and, well, to make a long story short,, When I stood up to flush, the flush gizmo is on the top of the tall tank and you have to stand up to push down on it, well when I pushed the flusher and waited for the bowl to flush.... A frickin frog all of a sudden gets flushed into the bowl!!!!! It was almost like being in a horror movie... I screamed and panicked and fought and fumbled with the lock on the door and once out of the stall, managed to run out of the toilet house and considered myself lucky to be alive.....lol  good fn grief!!!!!  a frog!!!

So now dinner is over and it's dark....
I have to get the dishes done as we don't want to listen to dirty dishes clanging in the sink for the next day's 800km trip to Mt Isa. So I set out to do them at the tap provided beside the site. It's dark, did I already mention that? Ok, so Mark is sitting on his lawn chair and having his well deserved beer and watching me prepare to wash the dishes. I've started with the water bottles first so I can get them out of the way... I've got them washed from the bucket of soapy water and have lined them up on the cement ledge of the taps...  Did I mention that it's dark???  So I have the bottles all washed and am about to start rinsing them, one by one, under the running tap water.... It doesn't rain very much up here and so any time there is water around, well, did I mention that it was dark? So I've got the first plastic water bottle in my right hand and running it in and out of the water and it's taking a bit of time so I lean my left hand on the pole with the electrical plugs on it... I'm minding my own business and, did I already mention that it's dark outside by now? So I'm rinsing the plastic bottle and all of a sudden, there is this flash of something dark out of the corner of my eye, and it lands on my left arm.................................. !!!!!!!!!!!
Well, it's a good thing that bottle was plastic, and it's a really good thing that wasn't a knife in my hand, because after I screamed in horror, or maybe as I screamed in horror, I flung it (the water bottle) mindlessly towards the motor home and it landed some 15 feet away underneath the front tire..!!! There was some unamused chatter coming from someone from the direction of one of our lawn chairs about how I should calm down as it was probably just a moth.... or something......or something........
Well, you can imagine what I wanted to say to that!!!!!!
I calmly went over and picked up the bottle from under the wheel and said.... NO!!!! It wasn't just a moth!!!  It was a frog or toad of some sort..... So that same someone from the lawn chair came over to inspect and make sure I wasn't overreacting or anything girlish like that...lol.... 
I calmly and silently did the rest of the dishes without any further incident and had a good stiff cocktail when I was done.... Later, we found the tree frogs around the water tap and ran it a bit more to give them some water to splash in or drink or bathe.......
Still later yet, I was enjoying my 'calm down' cocktail and decided to walk to the edge of our site to have a look around, about 25 feet from the motor home. It was dark, yes, but there were some street lights on in a couple places so it was not total blackness. As I got to the end and turned around, I looked back at our site, and in particular, the little slime green alien head sign that had our site number on it. I noticed it had some sort of bullet hole, or dirt mark or splat of sorts, something was beside the left eye of the alien... I looked at the neighbouring site sign and saw that there was no dirt or splat on that one... I was intrigued... As I walked back and got closer to the sign, did I mention that it was dark? The dirt mark began to look like a bullet hole or something..... I was even more intrigued..... I'm sure I've mentioned that it was dark.... So as I got a bit closer, and as Mark just happened to be at the water tap playing with the tree frogs, which is a foot and a half away from the slime green alien head site sign, with the bullet hole or dirt mark or splat mark on it....... I told him to come to me.... I said, "Mark, come here"...... "Mark, come here now"..... He looked at me, and as a look of uncertainty crossed his face, he turned the tap off and walked over to me and I pointed at the sign and said..... "Is that a spider on that sign?"....... He looked at it and said.... "Yes".... "Yes I think it is".....  "Where's my head lamp"?.......  Sure as shootin, it turned out to be a small!!! Huntsman spider. The huntsman spider is one of the top 2 or 3 most poisonous spiders in Australia and maybe the world.... Well that pretty much did it for me.... lol.....My one last frayed nerve was about to snap and so I jumped at everything that made a sound or that moved for the next 10 minutes and as soon as I was done my drink, into the motor home I went.... Lock, stock and barrel..... lol....

Needless to say, I used the motor home's toilet that night and I didn't shower the next morning in the free showers that the park provides....
Sadly, I was glad to get the hell out of Wycliffe Well...
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.......