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Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a series of articles about Darwin, Alice Springs, and the quirkiness that is the Northern Territory of Australia by Jack Brown. You can read Jack’s first, second, third and fourth posts to catch up on where the road’s taken Jack.

An important consideration when travelling is always ‘how am I going to get there?’ And the answer may not always be as straightforward as it seems.

Darwin to Alice: Not always straight, not always forward

Something as simple as a cow on the road, a blowout or a roo in the headlights can be enough to slow your travel plans to a standstill. My colleagues and I encountered this recently on departure for a spell up the track, heading up towards the Never Never country (Mataranka, as you may recall from before) via the mighty Gulf of Carpentaria.

Now, on our previous journey up this way, cutting south from Tennant Creek, we learned that a front wheel is a car’s best friend – showing you can only drive a car if it wants to be driven. This time, we’d all just been out bush the week before in a mate’s canary yellow fourbie - the idea that the embarrassing Pajero could have been “mustard coloured” was in his mind only – and we did have a small run in with that particular car, but it was still quite happy to stay a car. But that’s a story for another time.

So, this new 4WD had just had a broken engine mount fixed by the hire company. This did raise the question of ‘what kind of ute breaks its engine mount?’ But, not to worry, we loaded her up like a Christmas sock, ready to brace ourselves for the quick jaunt up the Stuart Highway. It wasn’t to be, as we discovered when a light, not so big - but a strange shape and a foreboding shade of orange - lit up on the dashboard.

“Better bring her back in,” the hire-guy shouted over the phone.

After a quick look, which, as I recall it, didn’t involve seeing the car, he hooted, “You can’t drive it, it’ll blow up,” as if I were Bruce Willis flying through the air in it to bring down a helicopter from a burning building with his geriatric ute.

We left it and him there, and so begins a stupidly long start to what should be a simple trip. Pack car. Sit in car. Start car. Go forward 500 kilometres. Turn right… and so forth. Simple.

But, somehow, the next morning, I woke up on the side of the road in a creek bed barely wide enough for a swag, wondering how I got there and why my car is there, as well as what I call a “high-speed whitegood” (one of them white Mitsubishi sedan things that fly like a spaceship and probably defrost your meat pie, too). Seems someone suggested taking what was left of my battered sedan so we could fit the hefty load into two cars and still make the pick up for the second 4WD in Tennant Creek. Brilliant idea at the time, but leaves my car 500 kilometres from home. Sort that one out later. Car count in one week so far: Four (two sedans, and on to the second 4WD).

Through the dusty haze of roadside desert hangovers, we pulled together and piloted the anonymous convoy up the highway and made a successful switch into the target ute (all part of a cheap deal that we had negotiated to take the hire car one way from Alice Springs to Darwin, thereby avoiding an extra fee for not returning the ute to the point of hire, but it seems on the way acting as envoys for a truckload of other vehicles).

Heartbreak on the Barkly

With our eyes on the Never Never, hoping it wouldn’t be the Maybe Maybe should this car look like it fancied a heart attack too, we took our first turn east and shimmied up the Barkly Highway. Plenty of burnt-out country was laid out ready to greet us heading out toward the plateau, the barren red earth host only to a plain forest of scorched sticks standing as once trees might. The darkened earth only occasionally pricked by the odd blades of inch-long green poking forth, signalling the coming regrowth sparked by the rage of a bushfire’s blaze days before. We were making good time and the wide horizon once again beckoned and promised our personal infinities as far as the pedal stayed to the metal and eyes on the faraway prize.

Like stranded handbags of a long forgotten people, rows of unemployed cows would line the distant plains when we least expected it. Like vegetarian activists at a barbeque, the cows would stand and mope and sometimes moo with a hint of bereft menace. Among the upside down signs warning of “Floodplains” (where there looked like rain had never fallen) and “Crest” (where the road barely broke its day long flatness), never had we seen a sign for “Blank Looks” and “Standing About.”

Moo, with a hint of menace

In our halted vehicular advance on our outback travails, both confronted us til the mournful browbeating from the skinny herds sunk in - the price for our moral decline among the watchful desert brethren for our former steak-eating ways. The promise for our safe passage came with final parting of the bovine blockade and never to let a hamburger grace our dry lips again: we were finally off what best be a good lentil stew for dinner.

The way up north from the Barkly Roadhouse on the Capricornia Highway set us on a path straight for Cape Crawford, or as it is also known: the “Heartbreak Hotel.” In place of any stories about “Heartbreak”, as its known, the Hotel had become legend in our minds. As it was a Friday by this stage, following our planned Wednesday departure from Alice some vehicles back, the legend that awaited became, in our thirsty minds, a great bellowing three-storey wooden den of iniquity and a boot-scooting-good-time for a country lad in search of some fun at the end of the working week of rustling and choking on bulldust. Eager as a lamb on its first born day we jetted up that near 400 kilometre stretch of tar, ready for that first beer that would signal a night on the only visible part of whatever town there may be there. By 5pm, as the light took on that dozy tropical tinge and the shadows began to lengthen, we had the sign — Cape Crawford, 20kms — in our sights and it shifted round to Beer O’Clock.

As we rounded into what was a one-horse town without its one horse, we saw for ourselves why it was called Heartbreak. Some 550 km from Tennant Creek and over 1,000 km from Alice Springs, near the edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria and feeling like a million miles from anywhere, the lone building stood. And it truly was a Heartbreak – pre-fabricated architecture straight from the back of a truck with a shabby 1980s wooden verandah that lacked character almost as much as the price of their fuel. After three beers we were set for bed, the shock of the disappointment now dulled.

We argued about who’d drive and then, again in a creek bed just 10 minutes from nowhere, we bedded down, only to discover it was 7pm and it had indeed been a big night.

–Jack Brown

If you missed Jack’s first installment of Darwin to Alice by road, you can read it here. Planning a trip? Browse all of Viator’s Darwin tours and things to do in Alice Springs.