The Devils Marbles are an absolutely remarkable group of weathered rounded granite rocks that just pop up out of nowhere as both a jumbled but orderly piles of earthy red boulders scattered in clumps and groups over a few square kilometres.

As with most of these places they are a significant sacred site to local Alyawarre indigenous people and neighbouring groups. There is a free-camp campground at the site, which is quite close to the main viewing area and is also the start/end point of some walking trail that takes you around the entire site for about 5km or so and crosses the Stuart Highway at two points.

The ‘marbles’ are huge granite boulders that have weathered and eroded over millenia into a series of groups and clumps of rounded balls, some of which are stacked on top of each other like a croquembouche tower.

Other formations create a string of marbles, while others have a single marble perched on top of another as though it is balancing in place. Each formation is completely unique and interesting in its own right.

A few of the boulders have split cleanly down the middle through expansion and contraction in the baking sun and cooler overnight temperatures. The split face of these boulders show a ring known as onion weathering as opposed to the weathering of the outside surface known as exfoliation weathering.

It is interesting to note that the original boulder on John Flynn’s grave in Alice Springs was sourced from the Devils Marbles. This did not have the approval of the local indigenous people and was a cause of great hurt to them. A reconciliation took place whereby the boulder was returned and re-placed at the Devils Marbles. The Arrernte people of Alice Springs negotiated this and replaced the boulder with one locally sourced from the Alice Springs region.

So we decided to pull into the roadhouse at Wycliffe Well to fill up with fuel…

But first… Wycliffe Well regards itself as the UFO capital of the outback and styles itself after a kitchy (somewhat lame) mashup of Roswell and Area 51 in the U.S. Their caravan park and campground has a number of alien statues and UFO related sculptures as well as a statue of Elvis Presley just to boost the cringe level…

Anyway… the cruiser fuel cap is on the driver’s side so we pulled into the right hand side of the pumps, which was very squeezy with the van on the back. There were about thirty bikers (as opposed to bikies) parked around the pumps and in front of the exit point from the pumps.

Two young women had their bikes lined up at each of the two pumps and were fiddling around and re-adjusting the loads on their bikes. Meanwhile two more vans pulled in behind us so we were effectively locked in.

The two women could see we were waiting but continued to fiddle around. Then after a couple of minutes decided to go inpay for their fuel, which took more minutes… They returned to their bikes and stood there yapping and then decided to fiddle a bit more with the panniers and load.

After a small eternity they moved their bikes away, which meant that we could move forward and fill our tanks. After filling our tanks and paying, which took considerably less time that the two women we were stuck in place with the vans behind and about a eighteen harleys in front of us blocking our exit. All of the bikers could see that we wanted to exit but nobody moved an inch preferring to stand around a lick their golden gaytimes…

At some point, one of the older bikers called out to the others that they needed to move their bikes so that we could get out. Well you’ve never seen such a set of looks of abject indifference to this request. Grudgingly one or two them shifted their bikes so that they were still just perfectly blocking us. Then another four or five moved theirs to a position that gave us about one inch of manoeuvering space. Rob kept inching forward and the bikers, one by one, kept shuffling their harleys forward so that they were still blocking us from exiting without ploughing over the tops of their bikes.

Now at some point, anyone with a brain would have moved their bike over to the two acres of empty space across from the pumps but not these intellectual giants who continued to play shuffle and leap-frog with their bikes, grumbling all the way…

So finally, after four or five micro shuffles, these biker Einsteins had cleared enough of an exit that we could get out with about 2 inches either side… Our van has a long turning point and it started to scrape a bollard as we inched through the gap.

So then a couple of their geniuses decided to help me with some (genuinely well meaning) help to reverse a bit so that I could get past the bollard without scraping and miss their bikes by half an inch… At this point Rob wanted to just plough into the bikes to start a domino chain effect but resisted the temptation on the grounds that he probably couldn’t defend himself against a mob of that size.

In all honesty, we both think that a bag of hair has more intelligence than this group of thirty dimwits… On a good day!

So… as mentioned in a previous tab, when Jo was booking us in later at the Devils Marbles Hotel, this merry band of Jobbernowls rode past. The receptionist ran out and asked Jo whether they were heading north or south, after which Jo explained that they were heading north and that we had had a minor but harmless interaction with them. She then proceeed to advise the manager who was on the phone to the Tennant Creek police to advise them of a group of bikers headed north. It seems that they operate as an early warning system for the Ketherine police of any potential nuisance or threat headed their way.

Nothing was to come of this particular event though… mainly because this group were bikers not bikies. They also didn’t have half-a-dozen brain cells between them…