Somebody told us that the roads in Northern Teritory are better then those in Queensland. It might be generally truth but we can’t confirm it. While the Queensland’s roads were mostly without any corrugations the NT’s unsealed roads mostly have them. This fact lead to the need to stop roughly every 30 minutes to let the rear shocks to cool down and to a lost bolt and nut that holds the main support for my right fuel tank and pannier. I repaired it with a garden wire and I'm happy to say that it still holds well after another 250 km.

So now we are in Northern Territory. There are two noticeable new things – big (even huge) termite mounds and the landscape now has a mountain range to our left so it is not so flat anymore.

The town where we were heading to refuel and refresh turned out to be only a station. Regardless we had our refreshments and we refueled. The price of fuel here is double the price at populated areas. No wonder – it is very far from anywhere.

As yesterday we managed to find a pond of water and had a dip. These things are neither deep nor clear, but the water is very cool and that is their most important attribute right now.

Not far behind the border we noticed (really not too hard to do) quite spectacular termite moulds We thought the first one was big. Well, then I saw one next to which Tanja was just riding about 150m in front of me. I thought to myself "No, that one is BIG". Well, as it turned out Tanja wasn't riding next to it as I thought but still had a couple of hundred meters left to reach it. I actually just cought up with Tanja when she reached it. This thing wasn't big - it was HUGE!! (See my photo album for more photos.)

Something was loose on my bike and it was ringing while I was riding. I couldn't figure it out. I checked the bike at the station where we were refueling and nothing... Well, it took only abut 15km ride from the station when I finally found out what was it. It was the main support column for my right pannier frame!! I somehow managed to loose the self locking nut together with the bolt that it was on. I managed to repair it with 2 meters or so of a garden wire (a very handy item to have with you indeed).

(275km)