And so to Alice Springs, which to me has always epitomized an Outback town. Nick and friend Martin were last here 35 years ago, working on the railways for a week while hitching round Oz. When we arrived we found the fortnightly Sunday market in full swing in the mall, and Nick was keen to find the shop were they’d both ordered (and paid for) T-shirts all those years ago as they’d never received them (slogan: ‘Alice Springs Surf Life-saving Team’…).
Ironically it was in this town in the middle of the desert that we had our first rain of the trip, and so decided to bail out of camping and checked into a campsite motel room. Between showers we headed off to the railway yard to revisit Nick’s old haunt, and were lucky enough to catch the Ghan train, just about to make one of its twice-weekly departures for Adelaide. Very tempting to hop on board, where uniformed flunkies served Pimms and hot towels to the passengers who were rejoining the train after a couple of hours in Alice. A few days previously a 76 year-old woman driving through town had decided to play chicken with the train as it crossed the street (no crossing gates, just warning bells and lights as trains cross the main road). Luckily only her car was a write-off, and the headlines read “Gran meets Ghan”.
Next morning in bracing winds we left Alice and headed out to the stunning Standley Chasm. As we left there were flashes of lightning, and a short while later we were in the teeth of a short but severe storm, the temperature dropped from 31C to 17C in the space of 10 minutes. This was followed by the sky turning a weird green and yellow with poor visibility, as an extensive dust storm hit us. Turning on the radio we found that Alice had been hit by the rainstorm at lunchtime, which was severe enough to tear off roofs and bring down power lines, and as powerful as a no 1 cyclone.
That night we found our final bush camp of the trip, sheltered in woodland and while the winds sighed around us we watched the amazing greenish dusty sky meet the sunset.
Next morning we woke to 10C, and Nick made a small fire to keep us warm while we had breakfast. Hard to believe that just 2 nights previously we found it hard to sleep because of the heat. On the way south to Kings Canyon we stopped off at a meteorite crater, Gosse Bluff, formed 140,000,000 years ago. As it is an Aboriginal site of great religious significance we could only walk on prescribed paths round it, but it was hard to take in the age of this particular piece of the outback.
From the mind-boggling to the bizarre: I was driving us along the deserted dirt-track road when we spotted a police car coming in the opposite direction. He indicated for us to stop, and we thought he wanted to see the permit we’d had to obtain to drive this part of the route. However, with the words “This is really going to annoy you” he whipped out a machine and little white tube, and I found myself being breathalysed for the first time in my life – in the middle of the desert at midday on a Tuesday. The irony was that for perhaps the first time on the trip, we hadn’t had a drink the night before as the cellar was down to its last beer, and the sommelier had forgotten to put it in the fridge.
Things got even more surreal as I said to Nick that I would really like to see a camel in the wild. Within a minute we came across two separate herds of camels – just weird to see them ambling through the bush, turning to look at us with arrogant eyes and nostrils as we stopped to take photos.
We camped that night at a park near Kings Canyon – good facilities but we were rather cheek by guy-rope with the next tents, all vying for a little piece of the grass. But a good pizza and a couple of glasses of red at the bistro, and I wasn’t even aware of the school groups whooping it up a few yards away. Kings Canyon provided us with one of our favourite walks, beginning with some very steep natural steps in the rock, a challenge in the wind that still hadn’t let up. At the top was a 7 km walk round the rim of the crater, stunning colours in stripes that reminded us of The Bungles. The walk had been marked out brilliantly, with wooden steps and rails to assist on the very steep bits, and a boardwalk that took us down into a small chasm called The Garden of Eden, lush with ferns and palms, with a beautiful pool at the end of it (no swimming here, the water was much too cold). And then it was on to our final ‘must see’ destination, Uluru, or Ayers Rock.
Ironically it was in this town in the middle of the desert that we had our first rain of the trip, and so decided to bail out of camping and checked into a campsite motel room. Between showers we headed off to the railway yard to revisit Nick’s old haunt, and were lucky enough to catch the Ghan train, just about to make one of its twice-weekly departures for Adelaide. Very tempting to hop on board, where uniformed flunkies served Pimms and hot towels to the passengers who were rejoining the train after a couple of hours in Alice. A few days previously a 76 year-old woman driving through town had decided to play chicken with the train as it crossed the street (no crossing gates, just warning bells and lights as trains cross the main road). Luckily only her car was a write-off, and the headlines read “Gran meets Ghan”.
Next morning in bracing winds we left Alice and headed out to the stunning Standley Chasm. As we left there were flashes of lightning, and a short while later we were in the teeth of a short but severe storm, the temperature dropped from 31C to 17C in the space of 10 minutes. This was followed by the sky turning a weird green and yellow with poor visibility, as an extensive dust storm hit us. Turning on the radio we found that Alice had been hit by the rainstorm at lunchtime, which was severe enough to tear off roofs and bring down power lines, and as powerful as a no 1 cyclone.
That night we found our final bush camp of the trip, sheltered in woodland and while the winds sighed around us we watched the amazing greenish dusty sky meet the sunset.
Next morning we woke to 10C, and Nick made a small fire to keep us warm while we had breakfast. Hard to believe that just 2 nights previously we found it hard to sleep because of the heat. On the way south to Kings Canyon we stopped off at a meteorite crater, Gosse Bluff, formed 140,000,000 years ago. As it is an Aboriginal site of great religious significance we could only walk on prescribed paths round it, but it was hard to take in the age of this particular piece of the outback.
From the mind-boggling to the bizarre: I was driving us along the deserted dirt-track road when we spotted a police car coming in the opposite direction. He indicated for us to stop, and we thought he wanted to see the permit we’d had to obtain to drive this part of the route. However, with the words “This is really going to annoy you” he whipped out a machine and little white tube, and I found myself being breathalysed for the first time in my life – in the middle of the desert at midday on a Tuesday. The irony was that for perhaps the first time on the trip, we hadn’t had a drink the night before as the cellar was down to its last beer, and the sommelier had forgotten to put it in the fridge.
Things got even more surreal as I said to Nick that I would really like to see a camel in the wild. Within a minute we came across two separate herds of camels – just weird to see them ambling through the bush, turning to look at us with arrogant eyes and nostrils as we stopped to take photos.
We camped that night at a park near Kings Canyon – good facilities but we were rather cheek by guy-rope with the next tents, all vying for a little piece of the grass. But a good pizza and a couple of glasses of red at the bistro, and I wasn’t even aware of the school groups whooping it up a few yards away. Kings Canyon provided us with one of our favourite walks, beginning with some very steep natural steps in the rock, a challenge in the wind that still hadn’t let up. At the top was a 7 km walk round the rim of the crater, stunning colours in stripes that reminded us of The Bungles. The walk had been marked out brilliantly, with wooden steps and rails to assist on the very steep bits, and a boardwalk that took us down into a small chasm called The Garden of Eden, lush with ferns and palms, with a beautiful pool at the end of it (no swimming here, the water was much too cold). And then it was on to our final ‘must see’ destination, Uluru, or Ayers Rock.
Pics: Ghan away
Self-explanatory sign
Self-explanatory camel
Kings Canyon
Garden of Eden, Kings Canyon
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