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plaashoender: Enige Single SA mense?


plaashoender

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Hi,

Ek is nuut op die forum, en is oppad om die Northern Territory te gaan verken. Is opsoek na enige enkellopende SA vriende.

Almal wat lus het om te skryf, is welkom.

Groete

Plaashoender

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Guest Seoul Sister

Hi daar plaashoender,

Welkom op die forum. :) Ek is nie single nie, maar ek wou net gou inhop en sê Wat 'n cool naam ! I love it !! :) Hoop ons sien meer van jou en dat jy die avontuur baie gaan geniet !

Groete

Seoul Sister

:)

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Hi Plaashoender!!

Sterkte met jou avontuur in die NT! Ek is oud en getroud maar dit is verbasend hoeveel jongmense hier in Aus is - ek is seker jy sal 'n hele paar van hulle oral raakloop. 'n Backpacker Hostel is 'n goeie plek om jongmense te ontmoet - selfs al bly jy nie in een nie, het hulle gewoonlik 'n kuier area waar almal kuier en bymekaar kom.

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Mate!

. . . if I were twenty or thirty years younger, I'd be heading north to the Northern Territory. I wouldn't muck around with Sydney or Melbourne or another city in Australia.

The Northern Territory is one BIG adventure story.

The territory alone is the size of South Africa.

South Africa has 60,000,000 people. The Territory has about 300,000 . . . so . . . don't expect to run into too many Aussies up there.

My wife's cousin has lived there for over thirty years and the family can't get them back. They got married and just drove north from South Australia in their Holden car in 1972 to the Northern Territory never to come back down south. Alan, the bridesgroom is a mechanic.

We visited them in 2000.

The stories they had to tell of living on cattle stations (ranches) in the Northern Territory are something out of an early settler's diary to Africa or Australia . . . . the abundant game and outdoors lifestyle . . . hunting buffalo, shooting crocs, living for days on end under the open skies with the Southern Cross overhead rounding up cattle and working on machinery, experiencing cyclones that destroy 90% of the town, floods that keep you in for weeks . . . you name it.

The best thing are the people there. They make life seem like it's to be lived and the challenges overcome . . . . like the Voortrekkers hauling their waggons over the Drakensbergen.

Where else on this planet do you still find life like that?

Enjoy!

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Bob, now you've got ME all excited about NT! Can't wait to visit! (So many places to see, so little time......)

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Sheez Bob are you sure you don't work for tourism Australia! hehehe... you have a way with words!!

Now I wanna go too!!! Just to visit I think!!

Travel BUG!

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We went up in April 2000, from Adelaide to Darwin . . . some 3,200 kms

It was the very end of the "wet" season up in the tropics, so there was still a fair bit of sticky humidity around.

We stayed two weeks in Darwin with the air conditioner on each night, so we could sleep.

Everyone in Darwin was saying how the humidity had come right down now that the "wet" was coming to an end. You could have fooled me!

We swam in the "billabongs" (water pools) in Litchfield Nat. Park, about an hour south of Darwin. There are warm pools high up in the rocks, away from Saltwater crocodiles, fed by tropical streams and are about 20 metres across. The place was full of German tourists.

There were young backpackers everywhere in Darwin and Alice Springs (1,600 kms south) from Britain, Canada, Europe and America. They were working in restaurants like MacDonald's, shops and stores, so it is very much a young person's ideal place to hang out.

We went to the "Wetlands", an hour's drive east of Darwin, where a Park Ranger had been the week before with his son. The 10 yr old boy was playing by the water's edge. When the Ranger found out, he quickly pushed the boy up the bank.

Up the creek about 100 metres, a bus load of Japanese tourists were looking over the bridge and witnessed a huge croc take the Ranger. It came up out of the water and got the shoulders of the Ranger ripping his head clean off, while spinning him upside down. The tourists were all in shock at the sight.

On our last evening, Alan and Virginia took me and my wife out on Darwin Harbour in their yacht. I remember hearing, on the wireless, about a cyclone off the coast of Western Australia. Seas were high with 50 metre waves. I thought nothing of it. The night was warm and balmy . . . perfect.

Next day we drove south. We swam in the tropical pools at Mataranka, 300 kms south, with the palm trees draping over the pools and the paths.

We camped on the side of the road that night and slept watching the millions of stars overhead.

Next day, on heading further south, we saw clouds build up.

After an hour or two, it began to lightly drizzle, turning to light rain after an hour or so.

We pressed on, but I began to get worried because the towns are many miles apart . . . 100kms or so . . . up in the Northern Territory and it's a long walk if there is any trouble.

Eventually, pools of water began to form on the road after heavy rain and the road began to get covered from side to side with rainwater.

I was driving eventually, not seeing the road, between the posts on the side of the road, keeping to the middle of them and trying to find the shallowest part of the road.

We kept driving for hundreds of kilometres like this with the water getting deeper and deeper.

We had friends in Alice Springs and that was where we were trying to make, but the road was starting to get very deep for an ordinary car in the low spots where the water ran off across.

We'd slow to a crawl through the creek crossings, but at 16 Mile Creek it was too deep. We were only 16 miles (27kms) from Alice Springs and I was wading through the water up to my waist.

A bloke from Darwin towed me through with his Land Cruiser. He was a God send. We would have been stuck for days with no food or fresh water on the side of the road.

As it was, the water came up through the doors and all over our laps.

We made it into the "Alice" and had to stay for five days until the road opened. We watched three films in the local cinema in one day!

We met great people at the Alice Springs Baptist Church.

The United States has a satellite base, for spying purposes, just out of town, called "Pine Gap" and we became friends with an American couple working there and suggested they stay with us on visiting Adelaide some time.

They stayed with us in Adelaide for a few days, the following month when their daughter at University flew out to Australia to visit them.

After five days the road opened and we drove south for Adelaide (1,600 kms).

About three hours south of Alice is a bridge about 200 or 300 metres long. I remembered crossing the bridge on the way up two weeks earlier. The Finke River was dry and was about 20 or 30 metres below and about 200 metres wide.

The bulldozers had just finished pushing the silt off the bridge and there were big trees hanging off the side of the bridge.

The volume of water that a tropical cyclone can dump is phenonemal. It covered the whole of central Australia, 1,500kms from the coast.

We made it back to Adelaide in one hit. . . . . 18 hours solid driving and 1,600 kms later.

That was enough adventure for one trip to the Northern Territory for me and my wife. . . . and didn't even take the camera!

Edited by Bob
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Hey BOB,

Good story sounds like a really great adventure! Watched the "Amaging race" tonight which featured Darwin and surrounds.

Like the camping on the side of the road thing! Is that a common occurance in these parts? I mean could you do it without any problems?

Outback BUG

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I noticed a number of spots where travellers would pull over for the night in the bush. It's usually an area by the roadside with a barbeque table and a few trees for shade that you'd pull up under during the day, but as the evening falls, folks would pull over with their 4WDs and caravans and that would attract more caravans to pull over for the night.

Just over the South Australian border is a spot where cars and caravans pull over for the night and it's quite extensive. sometimes there can be twenty or so cars and caravans pulled over and the drivers and passengers having a chat and sharing a cuppa together.

Usually, however, it's only three or four vehicles that will end up pulling over for the night.

There's nothing to be frightened about in the Australian bush . . . . no stampeding elephants or marauding lions or crocs to worry about. Just don't camp near a river-bed once you get up in the top of the Territory where the crocs are. They can travel overland at night. so don't sleep on the ground like you can down the southern part of the Territory.

If there is a vehicle and caravan pulled over for the night, just pull in and feel free to introduce yourselves.

Mostly it's people from interstate that are visiting the Territory, so you can pick their brains for all the good spots to see and stay at, over a cuppa tea.

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Thanx Bob, sounds great ...... one of the things I like about Australia is that you could go to these remote areas and, as you mentioned, you could feel free and safe...even when you are camping/parking off next to a road. Relatively/Mostly free from predators of the animal and human kind.

I must however say that it will take more than that to convince my dear wifey of this relative safety with all those poisonous snakes and spiders around in Aus!

Harmless BUG

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