Once again it is another entry about me going up to Tennant Creek. I've been going up quite a bit lately and next week will be heading up again. It's getting easier and moping up the few properties that weren't done due to people not being home means most afternoons, at the hottest part of the afternoon, has a large component of it in the air conditioning of the car.
From house to house we went spraying, tipping and sweating through the yards of the houses. The neat, the messy, the clean, the putrid. We went through them all with a smile. Sometimes people were happy to see us, other times they were not. While we could only speculate on the reasons, (usually drug related as people didn't really seem to worry about any mess) and that was why we weren't allowed to enter.
This last trip up was different from the others. Only because on the way up and back I had to drive through flood waters. It was a stormy week in Central Australia and there were several large downpours over the week. When I was driving up the dark clouds were ahead of me. The blur in the sky told me that there was rain. I had now idea how much. One storm on the way up lasted maybe half an hour. That's half an hour of torrential rain, not being able to see out of the windscreen as the rain was falling so hard. On several occasions the rain lifted slightly but for most of the time I was driving blind. It became particularly hazardous when the floodways started to flow. I passed through several some relatively shallow, some not so. The deepest was probably around 40 cm deep (found out by the depth signs on the side of the road). I made it through but several car could not, and were pulled up on the side of the road waiting for the waters to subside.
Me driving into the storm
On the way back I left Tennant Creek early. The road was closed at Aileron (400km from Tennant or 100km from Alice Springs). It would take 5 hours to get there so I just hoped that the waters would have gone down by the time I got there. Despite the rain falling pretty much all the way back to Alice Springs, the water at Aileron was only around 10-20cm deep as I passed through. It certainly made for a more interesting drive.
