Down the Stuart Hwy - Darwin to Alice

We've now left Darwin and done a couple of solid days travelling south down the 1500 km of the Stuart Highway to Alice Springs. We've travelled the northern half of this route quite a bit in the last few years, but we hadn't seen the part south of the Barkly Hwy turnoff towards Queensland since we first came up through the centre over three years ago.  Accordingly we decided to pull off the road and investigate the 'historical sites' we went past, and found that not only had we forgotten most of them, some had actually been installed new since we came this way last. It seems that the Engineering Society of Australia has been putting up lots of information boards recently, so we discovered new information on places such as the point where the north and south construction of the overland telegraph line joined in 1872, and one of the many wells dug along the overland telegraph route.

We also detoured into Newcastle Waters, the remains of a once thriving settlement that serviced the drovers taking cattle from the Northern Territory to the southern markets. With the advent of sealed roads and road trains the droving industry collapsed - the Drovers Park at Newcastle Waters has a memorial statue commemorating this quintessentially Australian activity.

The Tropic of Capricorn runs just north of Alice Springs, so we've now left the tropics for what we expect is the last time on our Around Australia trip. The desert climate means we'll be snuggling up under the doona at night for a while, rather than sleeping with just a sheet as we have been doing for the last week or so in Darwin.