Scary Movie and corrugations

We reluctantly said goodbye to Kununurra and headed through Halls Creek, which was quite nice and nowhere near as bad as we had been led to believe. One thing we have learned on this trip is to check a place out ourselves and make our own observations, rather than listen to other travellers opinions. I guess everyone is looking for something different from a place.
From Halls Creek it's only a short hop to the start of the Tanami Track, a 1045km 'shortcut' through to Alice.

 Most of it looks like this!
Our first night camp on the Tanami was at Wolfe Creek Crater. Jo was happy we weren't the only campers there, but I maintain each extra person increases your chance of getting murdered! Anyway, we didn't, and it really is a nice camp spot, with new long drop dunnies, and some kind person had left a heap of cut firewood ( no campfires allowed here)  which we took with us and made use of a few days later when it dropped below 40c. we got up at 5am next day to walk into the crater before it got too hot. Wolfe Creek crater is the second largest meteorite crater in the world and around 300 years old.

You can just see Jo at the top of this pic. It is a steep and fairly long climb down into the centre of the crater, that the signage says you shouldn't do, but I wasn't coming all this way not to stand in the bottom of the crater! The climb was worth it. It is strangely calm in the crater with a slight sound echo.

Our camp viewed from the crater rim.
We left Wolfe Creek, unmurdered, and drove into the aboriginal community of Bililuna, 50k down the track. although we had refueled in Halls Creek, only 140k back, we needed to have a full tank as there is  600k between fuel availability since Rabbit Flat roudhouse closed for good in 2010. Apparantly it was for sale for 18 years, and when you see the location, it's not surprising!
Buliluna is.....interesting.

Buying fuel here, at $2.60 a litre is a challenge. You have to buy a fuel card which is sold by the $ not the litre. The biggest you can buy is $90.00. We grabbed a $90 and a $20 which gave us 42.5 litres and pretty much topped the tanks. They don't sell petrol and the diesel bowser is locked in a huge steel cage. But at least there is diesel there, it would be beyond the fuel range of most vehicles to cross the Tanami without the good hearted souls at Bililuna!
Onward onto corrugations galore! There are a few sections of lovely smooth dirt, and even a couple of short stretches of bitumin, but the majority is very heavily corrugated dirt road. I think perhaps the corrugations are more noticeable because the terrain is boringly monotonous! Nothing broke or fell off the car or trailer, although 3 beer cans burst. There is a sweet spot around 85-90kph where the car seems to glide across the tops of the corrugations, but then the steering doesn't really work!
we saw upwards of 20 crashed or broken cars on the Tanami, some quite new. I think it costs more to recover them than the cars are worth in many cases.

We had to stop once more on the Tanami, and we saw a camp spot marked on the map at Renahans Bore so we planned to stop there around 4pm. When we got there the place was a disgrace with a million discarded VB cans and general rubbish and graffiti everywhere. Neither of us felt comfortable there so we pushed on. Temp was nudging 45c anyway so the airconditioned comfort of the Landcruiser was the place to be.
We found a great, clean camp spot, not marked on the maps, about 500m off the track just before sunset, and spent the night there.

Our 2 iphones, ipad and laptop are all displaying different times!! I think they are confused.

You just get out of the way when these guys come through! We found them all very courteous.
There are two more fuel stops on the southern Tanami, the aboriginal community of Yuendumu and Tilmouth Well. We pulled into Yuendumu with the fuel light on. Dirt roads and corrugations increase fuel consumption by around 50%. After a quick tour of the 'town' which the sign proclaimed the locals were 'proud of ', I decided to run the fuel gauntlet and get to Tilmouth Well.

This is a typical Yuendumu dwelling, not the worst by far. If you want to know how Julia is spending your tax dollars, look no further. Millions of $ have been spent here, they have a new, very nice sports centre and a swimming pool complex, and a community centre, all of which are better than any I can think of near home. All the homes have solar hot water, and all the roads are new bitumin. And covered with litter.
We made it to Tilmouth Well thanks to a jerry can of diesel we were carrying, and refueled at a more reasonable $2.15l.

After 17,000km, most of which has been off road, we got our first puncture on the bitumin in Alice Springs! We made it to a caravan park and I changed the wheel there, and had the puncture repaired in town next day