We have been travelling now for 5 months and it is exhilarating, tiring, humbling, inspiring and at times overwhelming. The people on the road are such a mixture and it takes a while to realise that your encounters are short and sweet and that you are all moving on and maybe, or maybe not, you will meet again and, oddly enough you like this….. Also the landscape is such a mixture from Devils Marbles, massive wetlands, flowing hot springs, sacred sites, incredible pubs, crocodiles and beaches and waterways that you cannot swim in, to off road travel, 100% humidity, midges and mossies and cold nights with campfires, camp ovens, wine and a good yarn, collectively it leaves you reeling.
As we toured up from The Alice to Darwin and now across to Kununurra we only begin to appreciate this magnificent country, and the people who have lived here for thousands of years, the varied people who arrived here only 200 odd years ago and forged a life here in this unusual land of extremes. I can see why the :
“‘Remittance Man’…() tramped the back tracks in the summer haze letting everything but life slip through his fingers…..” (Judith Wright’s poem ‘Remittance Man).
farmers through good and bad times stay in the outback,
missionaries failed to tame this country and its people,
explorers died and succeeded in opening this land to new ways and why
Patterson and Lawson’s poems of the pas were so loved for their stories and visions of this strange and wonderful country….
Now we have new Remittance men and women.. in the form of the Grey Nomad, Young Nomad, and Travelling Workers….they are viewing and embracing this land trying to live, love and know… In the cities we do not grasp Australia and we seem to know little of its ways through brief tourist encounters … I think I could travel around for the rest of my life in the outback and only scratch the surface…
For this post Leo has written of many of our stops so I will just put together an collection of photos of my experiences as really I have thousands and thousands of photos and it is daunting trying to process even some of them as a group….
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Leos Top End Photos
Posts Kakadu, Daly Waters, Longreach Water Hole, Stops along the Stuart Highway, Mataranka