Stuart Highway near Tennant Creek, Australia
Close Encounters in the Outback
When I see the wide blue sky and rust red dirt of central Australia, I don’t even bother driving around. The continent is too big, the roads too long with too few signs, so I just pop my marker down somewhere in the middle of the Red Center and pray.1 In this round, I ended up about 729 miles away, which I consider to be a pretty solid score.
Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, Australia
The nearest town to my location is called Tennant Creek, and even that was still over an hour away. But in the Northern Territory of Australia, this hardly registers as a drive. Northern Territory tourist websites boast about how national parks are a mere three-hour drive away from the capital of Darwin, and a popular attraction in the parks is a helicopter or small plane flight, since wide swathes of the region are nearly impossible to access any other way. Most of these websites are focused on the Top End of the Northern territory, the southern boundary of which, the Katherine region, is still a six-hour drive from where I was dropped.
The road I was dropped on is called the Stuart Highway, which runs from Darwin in the north 1,690 miles through the center of Australia down to Port Augusta in the south, and is sometimes referred to simply as “The Track.” Outside of the Top End, there is no speed limit. A couple doing a travel vlog insists that drivers on the highway wave and honk at each other to make sure that they’re awake on the long, lonely stretches of road, but when the following three cars don’t courtesy wave (even a guy who we are assured “will do it for sure” because “he’s in a land cruiser”), the driver says “aur naur,”2 exactly like how Americans say it when we make fun of them.
What To Do
If I have learned anything from countless viewings of Planet Earth, it is that when in the desert you must look for water, and the water here is good. The swimming holes that are scattered throughout the region are deep green against red cliffs and cool even in the summer. Australian families bring their bright pool noodles and inflatable rafts to the swimming holes at Itwelepenty/Davenport Ranges and seem to have a great time splashing around and looking for tiny crabs that live along the shore of the creeks and pools.
Just up the road from the ranges, there is an opportunity for another great desert activity: looking at large rocks. The rocks here are called Devil’s Marbles by Australians, so named because they are round (like marbles) but very large (and so must belong to the Devil, who is big, I guess). They got their English name from a Scots-Australian who working on setting up the telegraph that ran the length of the highway, who said “This is the devil’s country; he’s even emptied his bag of marbles around the place.”
The aboriginal name for the park, Karlu Karlu, translates to the much simpler ‘round boulders,’ although the Alyawarre dreamtime myth about the region has similar themes:
Arrange, the Devil Man, came from Ayleparrarntenhe and travelled through the area. During his journey, he was making a hair belt (as worn by initiated men). Twirling the hair into strings, Arrange dropped clusters of hair on the ground.
Both cultures, when confronted with large rocks in the middle of the deep desert of Australia agreed that they must have been left there by a very large, very evil man, who hardly cared for the objects he left strewn around the desert, which we now find so astonishing. Most tourists suggest coming here to watch the sunset or sunrise, when the rocks glow red in the light.
Where to Stay
Something is in the air along the Stuart Highway, something to do with both the man-made structures and the landmasses, with electricity and tectonic plates, all of which create something appealing to extraterrestrials, who would otherwise get too muddled by the noise and static coming from the cities. The area has been known as a UFO destination since soldiers began to see strange lights during World War II, and news stories like “We’re seeing one UFO every night,” “It’s just another UFO in Wycliffe,” and “UFOs: they’re back!” have made Wycliffe Well a destination for encounters with otherworldly phenomena.
In 1985, a man named Lew Farkas got wind of Wycliffe’s desirable location and converted a lonely gas station into a motel and tourist destination. It is the platonic ideal of a roadside attraction: gently dilapidated, covered in faded murals and thickly-painted statues, offering alien merch, cheap gas, and cold beer in the middle of the loneliest stretch of road in Australia.
It is surprisingly hard to find specific stories from Wycliffe. There’s one from someone on Reddit asking for verification about an event he heard from his cousin, who in turn heard it after a stay at Wycliffe Well Road House in 1997. The cousin’s car had broken down on Stuart Highway late at night and his car was towed to Wycliffe Well. When he got there the place was teeming with people, supposedly scientists and government officials, who were investigating an event from a few days earlier when a “bbq/piss-up at the camping ground” was interrupted by the appearance of a huge UFO that descended and sucked up all the water. No one in the comments was able to verify the story.
Another story comes from a woman, obsessed with aliens, who went to Wycliffe and saw “a strange oval-shaped ship gliding away into the sunset like the cowboy at the end of a western. We could only stare, frozen and slack-jawed as it disappeared.”
In 2009, Lew Farkas sold Wycliffe Well to spend more time with his family3 and since then, the beloved stop has fallen into a bit of disrepair, although that might even add to its charms. For now, it is still there for visitors who want to spend the night and look for strange lights under the ley lines of the Australian sky, to see if there are any devils who might pass by, dropping their marbles on the barren landscape once again.
Where to Eat
Carpenteria Grill, “the only licensed restaurant in Borroloola,” has 4.8 stars and is very adamant about how licensed it is.
I refuse to look up what being licensed means within the context of Australian food regulations. Regardless, it has good reviews for steaks and, according to one reviewer, the best barramundi in the Northern Territories.
I forgot to screenshot the Geoguessr game so this is just a screenshot from Google maps.
“Oh no”
When asked if he regretted spending so much time and money in Wycliffe Well, Lew Farkas responded “If I was to do it again, I would do it differently. With the same end result, but I would have done it all differently.”