Steve, if you know Alice then you will know of Katherine. I grew up there. Big cattle country and yes I remember those road trains. Buntine roadways I think was the biggest company. I've crossed the Nullabor plain 3 times, once at night. Its basically the longest straight stretch of road in the world. Roughly a thousand Kms of treeless salt bush in the middle bottom of the country between Adelaide and Perth. The only way to do it at night in a car is to find a road train going slow enough to sit behind or pay the penalty. It was totally surreal, like one of those weird 70's outback thriller movies. The amount of blood and guts splatagated on the road was just amazing. I distinctly remember sitting behind a triple trailer truck pulling 1 metre diameter pipes and struggling to keep with him doing 145kph. The other trucks were going faster. Anyway I remember seeing on the road at one stage a double red sillouette in the shape of 2 kangaroos slightly overlapping just before a slight barump! I never drove it at night again and never will.
Yeah, night driving in the vast wilderness of the outback is serious stuff. Between the animals, the road trains and the vastness, it's a pretty scary. If you go anywhere from Alice it's a hike. 17 hours to Adelaide (one of the prettiest cities in the world), and 15 hours to Darwin. The wildlife between Katherine & Darwin is scary...big Kakadu stuff. I remember
not seeing a water-buffalo right on the shoulder of the road (at sunrise) that wasn't 10 feet from my truck. Thing weighs a ton and they're that blue-grey color. That would have been the end of me and my fishing buddy.
I know Katherine a little bit. I've played in baseball tourneys up there as well as in Tennant Creek. When we'd go fishing in Darwin (Mandorah Bay), we'd stop by Katherine...very nice, down-to-Earth people there (just like most places in the NT).
It's funny; we used to hear this report all the time on the radio: "fire danger is high in the Barkly Region". We used to laugh because we never really understood what it meant...until you drive through the Barkly Region, and even parts of the road are on fire. Crazy place, the NT. Anytime you fish in a place where crocs eat the sharks, you know it's nuts.
I was just chatting with a friend of mine who was in Alice when I was there...we laughed because that was almost 20 years ago, and it seems like yesterday. I miss it - not the blow flies, however.
cheers,
Steve
