Around Oz with the Munchkins: Glorious marbles, a glued-up head, and a garden for the fairies

By the time we left Katherine, we almost felt like locals. We said goodbye to the library staff and hit the road. We were heading South on the next leg of the adventure. It was still stinking hot. We drove towards Tennant Creek and stopped for the night on a dry river bed a little way off the highway. The stars were out in force and we enjoyed being back in the open air again after our urban living in Katherine. Next morning we pushed on to Tennant, where we stopped at the excellent Cultural Centre - Nyinkka Nyunyu. We had been to the Centre on a previous trip and really enjoyed it and so decided to visit again. It has an excellent display on bush tucker, mission life, kinship and hunting. An audo tour took us through the stinking hot gardens and explained how various plants are used for medicine and food. We ate lunch and did school in the cafe attached to the Centre - then pushed on to camp for the night at the Devil's Marbles. We remembered seeing dingos and stunning sunsets when we stopped at the Marbles on our road-trip to Darwin last year and we weren't dissapointed this time either. The Marbles are really pretty spectacular - and fun to clamber around in the slightly cooler evening air. Bold dingos slink around the campsite in the afternoon and then snuffled around our foodboxes in the middle of the night.

In the morning, Zara and Kate went for a walk whilst Sasha and Bill road their bikes around the campsite. Unfortunately Sasha's wheel got stuck in some sand and he came off, cutting his forhead on a stone. Lots of blood and tears later, Bill had him patched up and smiling again. It didn't seem too bad but the cut was deepish and so we decided not to take any risks and headed back to Tennant Creek to have him looked at. After a short wait at the hospital, we saw a friendly young doctor who confirmed that the cut wasn't too bad but that he would glue it up anyway. We did a bit of a double take at that. Glue him up? But yes, they put some sort of glue on the cut that fell off a week later and showed a beautifully healed up wound. Sash thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. Zara also did although perhaps wished that she too had been injured and glued up by the doctor.

We headed back towards the Marbles and then inland to the Devenport Ranges National Park. It was a long, rough, dusty drive but we had been told that the park was one of the most beautiful in the Centre. We arrived late at a camspot called Old Policemans Waterhole - site of an old police station which was used to control the tension between early pastoralists and local aboriginal people. Indeed it was a beautiful spot - a big wide waterhole surrounded by little twisty white gums and plenty of birds including a couple of pelicans gliding on the water. We stayed for a couple of nights and spent a happy day swimming, reading, playing monopoly, making a very elaborate fairy garden, searching for the ruins of the police station and chatting to a couple of teachers from a nearby community. The only other campers were a strange group of middle age Chinese men who had missing teeth and very little English. They seemed to be collecting something from the water because we saw heaps of white shell things drying in the sun - but we never worked out what they were. The guys spent the hot afternoons standing around in their white underpants and running their generator (for which they apologised). Strange.

We could have stayed for longer at this lovely peaceful place, but we were running out of water and so packed up and began another long bumpy trek back to the Highway.