Contributed by Mike Slattery.

There are many things the traveller comes to realise as having particular importance on his journeys. Sufficient food and water, backup parts and spares for the transport, sun protection, spare rolls of film, all of these and more have impressed their urgency at one time or another. However, I will confess that I never really gave much though as to the potential disaster of being only vaguely aware of what day of the week it is. Sometimes, in an unforgiving environment, missing the smallest detail can leave you up the creek, even if there isn't a creek for a hundred miles in any direction.

First though, back a few days... WARNING. Rabbit Flat Roadhouse Closed Every
Tues-Wed-Thurs. Last Fuel Yuendumu (From a sign at the southern end of the Tanami Road).

There's something almost soporific about long-distance driving in Outback Australia. At least there is on those sections of the road not made of sand, discarded machinery and dead kangaroos, leaving your backside tenderised and head-shaped indentations in the roof. A landscape that stretches for thousands of kilometres in every direction without any visible alteration makes concentration a challenge, even for so experienced an off-roader as my travelling companion Dr Roche, a multi-trip veteran of the unforgiving blank that is Death Valley. (California, Roche? You big wuss.)The decision to journey across the Tanami desert had been made over the previous few days, aided greatly by the fact that our hired car had turned out to be a four wheel drive. The demand for standard cars at AVIS Alice Springs is negligible to the point that, when we arrived to collect ours, there were none in the lot. Anxious to avoid a fuss, they offered us the other vehicle instead. We reluctantly agreed, hiding our glee at the fact that this enabled us to make far more of our time in the Outback, at about half the potential cost.

The Tanami desert stretches away to the north-west of Alice Springs, edged at the South by the McDonnell Ranges, notionally to the east and north by highway, and to the west by the Great Sandy Desert. There is, at first glance, nothing here, a couple of settlements and roadhouses and a gold mine being all that was marked along the road, a stretch of just over 1000 kilometres that veered north-west to the border with Western Australia, soon turning north to join up with the Great Northern Highway, close to the little town of Halls Creek. Well stocked with provisions, water and spare tyres (both personal and for the car), we hit the road early one Saturday morning.

All bar the first 150 kilometres or so would be unsealed road i.e. a dirt track. We were surprised to find that, for the most part, the Tanami road is about as wide as a standard motorway, with a surface of compacted dust, corrugated in places by the wind but generally not bad. We soon learned, as many others had found, that the best way to cover the ground here is straight up the middle of the road at a decent clip of 100kph or so, otherwise every single bump on the road goes up your spine like a kick. The road is graded (cleared of the larger loose stones and more or less levelled) and generally quite safe given the relative lack of traffic.

As the sign above noted, the roadhouse at Rabbit Flat no longer opens midweek. This is more or less the halfway point of the crossing, so that a great deal of those who decide to make the journey now set out on either Friday or Saturday, from either end of the track. As a result, even here in a relatively deserted part of the Territory, we never went as much as an hour without seeing at least one other vehicle, many of them four wheel drive adventurers like ourselves, more rarely the battered veteran hulks of the few locals. While this lessens the sense of splendid isolation, it's certainly a comfort that help is readily available should it be required.

From time to time, the huge bulk of a road train would loom over the horizon and rumble past. These are enormous articulated trucks, generally with three or four trailers, the only practical way of transporting bulk goods overland in this part of the world. These monsters are an amazing sight, and of such size and momentum that from full tilt they can take as much as two kilometres to come to a complete halt.

We reached Rabbit Flat shortly before sunset, the trip having been punctuated by a refuelling and lunch break at Yuendumu, and stops to check out the local wildlife. To go by what we saw, the most common animal here is the dead kangaroo, this being a marsupial that has been walloped by a passing truck. We saw at least one of these every five minutes during our two days on the track, the carnage seemed amazing to us. It seems that they are attracted to the lights of trucks, and have not yet learned to associate the roaring of the engines with danger. The population is high enough that, thankfully, even this level of destruction makes no real impact.

Live kangaroos generally lie in the shade during the heat of day, well out of sight amongst the vegetation. The most striking about the desert of the Outback is just how unlike our mental picture of a desert it is. The usual image of rolling expanses of sand is soon gone, as the landscape is covered by wiry scrub grasses, low bushes and even some trees, with thin hardy branches and a few grey-green leaves. Effectively, this means that it is impossible to see much from the road for large parts of the journey, so we stopped regularly in the hope of seeing something more. And we did, including many different birds of prey, and vultures, tearing at the roadkill while keeping a beady eye on us.The roadhouse at the Flat is just that, a couple of petrol pumps and a shop, basic hot snacks and drinks available. We were greeted on arrival by the owner cycling out to meet us, a picture of the outback in bushy beard, singlet and shorts, long black socks and sandals. In an ideal world, he would be called Bruce. Wonderfully, he was called Bruce. We filled the tank, handed over the couple of bucks for a tent site (basically, pick a spot anywhere except on the road) and were soon sorted out for the night. The isolation and enveloping silence of night in the middle of nowhere was somewhat spoiled by the constant hum of the generator, just one more reminder that whatever about idealistic notions of loosening the bounds of society, there's a hot shower just behind those trees.

Next morning, hot showered (see?) and ready for action, we hit the road once more. We were soon at a large sign bidding us "Welcome to Western Australia", informing us of the precise location of the border, like that matters. One wag, none too impressed by his time in the West, had added to the sign "Set your clock back 30 years". We didn't, instead taking in the rare novelty of crossing into a new time zone on land, with not a human being in sight in any direction. Amusingly enough, the Northern Territory is half an hour behind New South Wales, and an hour and a half ahead of Western Australia, leading to all sorts of confusion for the unsuspecting tourist. As for us? No comment.

Next stop Billiluna, the only remaining fuel source between here and Halls Creek. An Aboriginal community run by some religious types, it closes down on a Sunday, which isn't a problem unless today is...

Bugger.

While my travelling companion Dr Roche furiously intercedes with the hot desert air (whose temperature suddenly seems to have gone up a notch), some quick calculations on my part reckon that we'll have enough fuel to make the rest of the trip, just, even if we take the planned detour of about 30 kilometres or so. Thus reassured, it's back to the road, and on to Wolfe Creek.

"On the edge of the Great Sandy Desert and the extensive spinifex grasslands of the East Kimberley lies the Wolfe Creek meteorite crater, the second largest crater in the world from which fragments of a meteorite have been collected. The crater is 880 metres across and almost circular. Today, the floor is about 60 metres below the rim. Although it has long been known to Aboriginal people, who called it Kandimalal, the crater was only discovered by Europeans in 1947, during an aerial survey. Dating of the crater rocks and the meteorite have shown that it crashed to Earth around 300,000 years ago. It would have weighed more than 50,000 tonnes..." (From the Conservation and Land Management site at <http://www.calm.wa.gov.au/>www.calm.wa.gov.au)

There is, it must be said, something unworldly about the place. A ring of raised rock about 30 m high on the outside encloses the crater, which has filled up over time. Inside, the scene looks almost artificial. The centre of the crater is home to a number of small trees, enclosing a clearing that, from the rim, looks almost white. Halfway from the centre to the edge, the trees abruptly stop, the rest of the crater floor being covered with tufty grass, dotted here and there with a bush or shrub. I had the impression that, from above, the whole thing would look disconcertingly like a giant eye, staring impassively into the sky, waiting for the next hammer blow from above.

Standing on the rocks at the edge of the crater, in complete isolation, with a wind blowing across an otherwise-silent expanse of land stretching uninterrupted and unchanging as far as the eye can see in every direction, you could almost be forgiven for wondering precisely what planet you were on. Then a camper van arrives at the car park, and you're down back to earth. Wolfe Creek took a lot of getting to, and getting back from, but it was definitely worth the effort.

The track back to the main road was one of the roughest of our time here, but mercifully brief, and a few minutes later we resumed the trek to the north. Our journey was interrupted when we saw something neither of us expected to see right in the middle of the road: a huge snake. Dead, of course. Still, it was as good a chance for as close a look as we were ever likely to get at one this size (about six feet long). There was one stream to ford, very shallow at this time of year, and we reached the highway once more at about 4pm.

Immediately we swung back onto the sealed road, just 15 km from our destination, the orange light warning us that our fuel was low blinked into life. There was still plenty in the tank for the journey that remained, although probably not too much more. A close call, and one we'd be sure not to repeat.

How come, four days later, we found ourselves cruising downhill with the engine off, 20 km from Alice Springs, with the fuel light blinking as it had been for the previous twenty minutes, is best left unsaid.