The devils marbles

Back on the Stuart Highway again today, continuing our progress towards Alice Springs.
Our first stop was at the “Devils Marbles”, an area covered by large spherical (ish) boulders, many of them apparently piled quite precariously on top of each other. Those that aren’t particularly spherical look as if they were flattened by the weight of others, like balls of clay that were dropped while they were still wet.
The most striking part of the day beyond that has been the weather, or more specifically, the temperature. Having got ourselves into a coping strategy for temperatures in the mid to high 30s during the day and 20s at night we’ve suddenly found ourselves feeling cold ! The temperatures today have been in the mid 20s, dropping below 10C. We never thought we’d get used to the high temperatures and humidity and now find ourselves missing the heat – there really is no pleasing some people 🙂

Sculptures at the entrance to the roadhouse

Another stop off on our journey was at the John McDouhall Stuart Memorial which is, from what we can gather, one of three points that can be construed as the centre of Australia. It all depends how you measure it apparently. That particular point was selected by Stuart because of it’s distance between the north and south coasts and east and west coasts. A second point is calculated based on distances from the coastline and a third uses the calculated mass of Australia to find it’s centre of mass. This last method was originally measured using a plumb bob and confirmed with a computer simulation 50 years or so later. We’ve no idea which of the three is correct so will hedge our bets and visit all three if we can !
Alyuen is just a stepping point for us, there’s not much here beyond the roadhouse and a caravan site but it does have some striking sculptures that dominate the entrance to the place. I’m not sure how tall they are, the adults are maybe 30 ft tall, really well sculpted and very enigmatic.
Tomorrow we’ll head into Alice Springs and the info centre there to check road conditions, get a permit for the 4×4 route and so on. We also need to re supply with fruit and veg now we’ve crossed yet another quarantine zone. We’ll camp to the south of Alice tomorrow night and plan our next steps as we’ve a lot we want to do in this area. Will have Telstra signal tomorrow so will add pictures to this post then – signal here is very flaky so posting the text to the site will be challenge enough…