Tilmouth Wells to Rabbit Flat over the Tanami Track, 420kms of dirt road.  The Tanami Track has a reputation for being rough & it lived up to it.  Corrugations, dusty, sandy, road train tracks, muddy, boggy, water over the road, washouts, potholes, stones, it had it all & then some.  We started to wonder why we were putting ourselves through all this.  The day was fairly long & tough, some places we could do 80km/h, other places we were crawling our way around and through the water over the road.  It is lucky that we were held up in Alice Springs for a few days & it dried up, if we left any sooner it would have been an absolute hell.  Some of the scenery (mainly flat) was absolutely beautiful, particularly the wildflowers & bushes out in flower.  Some of the scenery was fairly drab, scrubby bushes at the side of the road.  At other times we saw forests of giant termite mounds amongst the spinifex on the treeless plains.  It was never boring because you had to concentrate so much on the road, most of the time we drove on the opposite side or the middle of the road to try & go against corrugations & watch out for dust in the distance for an oncoming vehicle to try & work our way back to the right side through soft sand, ploughed up mud or water.

We stopped regularly to check tyres & shock absorbers & to make sure everything was holding together with all the shaking it was getting.  The walking & stretching also eased the muscles from sitting so long.  There are quite a few abandoned & stripped cars at the side of the road, some the victims of crashes where it was more cost effective to just leave them there.

We passed a very substantial gold mine on the way, the Granites gold mine, the scale of operation is huge.  After a very long day we finally came to the turnoff to the Rabbit Flat Roadhouse, a very rubbish strewn intersection with a couple of abandoned cars for good measure.  The short road into the Rabbit Flat Roadhouse was extremely corrugated & rough.  In there we met a few other people refuelling & looking to camp the night & we had a bit of a chat with them about the road conditions.  We had a good chat with Bruce, the owner of Rabbit Flat & our friend John passed on the regards of a mutual friend.  Bruce said that his camping area was still too wet to camp at & suggested another spot about 3km further along the Tanami Track. We also met a bloke riding a bicycle along the Track, I had seen bicycle tracks on the road as we were driving but had not expected to see anyone.  He was doing it tough with all of the corrugations & was planning to ride to Broome.  We refuelled,  $2.30 a litre, then headed off to find the camp site before dark, with another few travellers.  We camped amongst a small mulga clump about 500m off the Tanami Track,  settled into our customary cheese, bikkies & wine before a nice dinner of BBQ marinated chicken.  We invited two young German tourists in an old Holden station wagon join us for an after dinner wine, they were traveling Australia & were on their way to Alice Springs.  We had a good discussion with Johannes & Christianne before wishing them well on their journey. The stars are absolutely amazing out here, you can see stars from horizon to horizon & the Milky Way is so distinct.