Australia 2003-4

I have heard the latest reports from home and winter is coming! We, on the other hand are back to summer. Now we grumble if it cools down at night and we have to get out our sleeping bag. We are having a great time and the klicks are adding up; we have driven more than 9,800 km so far, and there are long trips to come.

The last you heard from us, we were about to set out from Cairns for our overland odyssey to Alice Springs. It was an experience, but not as difficult as we had anticipated. We didn't rush the trip, so it took us five days, travelling about 500 km per day, allowing time for rest stops and time to put up our tent each day in a Caravan Park.

The roads were all paved, but for at least 70 % of the time, the pavement only extended to one central lane with wide hard packed shoulders on each side. That meant that you had to go half onto the shoulder to pass another vehicle, which happened infrequently, traffic was sparse. The biggest vehicles we had to pass were the Road Trains. These are big 18-wheeler trucks hauling three regular sized trailers full of cattle or other goods. When you are approached by one of these suckers, you get entirely off the road and let it roar past, each of you waving hello.

The other obstacles you might encounter are cattle wandering across the road, as this is open grazing country, or the occasional kangaroo bounding to the other side. We evolved a system whereby the passenger was in charge of giving Moo and Roo Alerts. Consequently, we had no unforeseen collisions, although we saw the results as road kill all along the road.

The roads were mainly long and straight with up to 200 km between small towns. Sometimes all that existed was a Roadhouse, the local watering hole for the residents. Many are owned and operated by local legends and are decorated by testimonials and memorabilia left by passing travelers. Reading all the comments gives a colourful history of the establishment.

The campgrounds we stayed in were on the primitive side, although there were toilets and showers available. By the way, if you ask where the washrooms are here, they look at you strangely; the term is toilets. The toilet in one campground didn't seem to have flushed very well when I used it the previous evening, so I gave it a pre-flush in the morning. I let out a scream as a lime-green frog fell from its hiding place under the toilet rim and tried its hardest not to be flushed down. I should have been warned. At the next campgrounds, I gave the toilet a good kick and rattled the tank before sitting down. This time, when I flushed the toilet, two lime green frogs fell into the bowl and scrambled for dear life to avoid being swept away. That was worth two screams. Ray later told me that one toilet in the Men's had four resident frogs. The lesson is: always pre-flush toilets.

Jimmy Hooker - story teller

Evening treat - Witchetty Grub

Tennant Creek, our last campsite before Alice Springs, receives our strong endorsement - good facilities, no frogs, a shaded clean swimming pool and entertainment in the evening. Eight of us turned up to hear Jimmy Hooker present his Bush Tucker (food) and Bush Talks. Jimmy is an original. He never did learn to read or write and spent most of his life in the bush, prospecting or driving cattle. He knows all the edible fruits and berries and brought several varieties along for us to sample. They were all quite tasty but the pièce de résistance was the Witchetty Grub. This is the larva of a huge moth, several of which were flying around our campfire that night. Jimmy dug them out of a hollow branch of a tree and brought them along for our dining pleasure. He roasted them over hot coals and then invited us to have a nibble. They tasted quite good. Some people claim they taste like peanut butter, but I thought they tasted like peanut butter, but I thought they were more like buttered popcorn.

Jimmy isn't only a Bush Tucker expert. He composes and performs poems about his experiences in the outback, has won at least one story telling contest, and has even recorded a CD of his epics. He was most entertaining. One of his poems describes his trip to town to vote in an election. When asked for his address he had to admit he didn't have one. A friend waiting in line solved the problem for him. He called out "Gumtree 69!" and that has remained his address ever since. He has even had mail delivered to that address.

Finally, after five days driving, we rolled into Alice Springs (The Alice) and checked into a hostel, to sleep in a real bed for a change. The double rooms, in old, permanent caravans set up in the backyard, are quite comfortable as long as you are less than six feet tall.

Alice was a pleasant town to rest and explore. We took a day trip to the nearby West MacDonnell National Park to hike in Ormiston Gorge, where we saw small black-footed rock wallabies hop like cats up the sides of the sheer cliffs.

Ormiston Gorge

Bearded Lizards

Back in town we visited the Reptile House, a small but interesting collection of snakes and lizards. If you visit at feeding time, you can hold a Bearded Dragon or a Scaley lizard and drape a python around your neck. They claim that Bearded Dragons make excellent house pets. They don't shed, bark or meow, and they eat all the bugs unlucky enough to stray into your house. We saw how efficient they were when we fed them juicy mealy bugs and big black cockroaches. Doesn't that just get your taste buds tingling?

Of course Alice was just a warm up to the biggest draw in Oz, Ayer's Rock or Uluru as it is more properly named. We had heard about another attraction in the vicinity of Uluru and decided to make a side trip to visit King's Canyon in Watarrka National Park. Uluru is about 400 km SW of Alice and as the crow flies and King's Canyon is about 100 km north of Uluru. If you had a 4WD and the roads were dry, you might be able to take some shortcuts, but Priscilla is not up to those rough roads, so we took the longer paved route, just a small 300 Km detour.

At King's Canyon we took a scenic rim trail around the canyon, admiring the steep sandstone sides of the gorge and unusual beehive shaped rock formations on the top. There is also a leafy oasis at its base with a cooling waterhole big enough to swim in.

We were at King's Canyon for the night of the final Rugby Football game between Oz and the UK. We had watched two semi-final games at campgrounds enroute to Alice, so we rushed through dinner in order to be at the campsite bar to watch the game. The campground seemed almost empty so we were surprised at the size of the crowd assembled for the final game. It seemed to be equally divided between Aussies and Brits, so it was a lively, friendly crowd and the game was close and exciting. We shared a table and some stubbies (beer in bottles) with an Aussie-British couple we had met earlier, so it didn't matter who we were rooting for.

The next day we drove to Yulara, the service village, really just the Ayer's Rock Resort complex, about 1 Km from the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. The prices at the resort are outrageous. Even the camping is expensive, but at $25.20 per night, we had a bargain. We met a Canadian couple who paid $400 per night, without meals, for the equivalent of a Holiday Inn room. They were not pleased, but we were fine, as the campsite facilities were good, there was a nice swimming pool and we cooked our own meals.

Uluru did not disappoint us. Our first afternoon we explored the Olgas, now properly called Kata Tjuta in Aboriginal, which translates to 'many heads' . They are a collection of huge boulders, some higher than Uluru, about 45 km away. Like Uluru, they stand in the middle of a vast desert plain, but they are very different geologically. Kata Tjuta looks like someone rolled all their marbles in red sandstone clay and gathered them together to dry in the sun. At Uluru, someone threw a red sandstone slipcover over a box, arranged folds artistically over the sides and smoothed out the corners.

Kata Tjuta Olgas

Colours of the Olga rocks

There was a nice 8 Km hike at Kata Tjuta to the Valley of the Winds in their middle. It was especially pleasant as we had the place to ourselves. There is another, shorter walk at Kata Tjuta that the majority of tour companies take their clients to. We finished our walk and drove over to the start of the short gorge walk. It was crawling with tour buses and walkers, what a contrast. Ray decided there were too many people to make it enjoyable so he waited in the shade while I made my way past the tourists to a small narrow gorge between the rocks. It was OK but not as nice as our previous walk.

But back to Uluru, the main focus of the area. We visited at sunset and at sunrise to see the colours change on the rock with the movement of the sun, and we walked all around the base of the rock. Before starting the base walk, we attended a free guided walk with a park official. We learned more about the cultural significance of the rock and saw ochre drawings on several of the cave walls at the base of the rock. Uluru represents the story of creation, according to Aboriginal dreaming stories and was the site of many sacred ceremonies in the past. Uluru is no longer used for ceremonies but Kata Tjuta still is, but the reasons for the ceremonies are only known to a privileged few of the local aboriginals. They pass the dreamtime stories on only when and if a person in their tribe is selected for their maturity and other special qualities to be the next keeper of the stories.

Our guide led us around Uluru

Path to the top of Uluru

I would like to say that the reason we did not climb to the top of Uluru was because we were being culturally sensitive, but that would be a lie. All the literature we were given on Uluru asks you to please not climb the Rock as the peak is the site of one of the most important male initiation ceremonies. The walk up is a steep one-hour climb so best done in the early morning. We planned to climb after our sunrise visit, but had to go away disappointed. It had been closed that morning due to high winds at the top. At the base of the rock are several plaques commemorating the deaths of climbers in the past. To prevent such accidents, the path is closed whenever it rains or the winds are too strong. Instead of climbing, we returned to our campsite and packed up to leave. We were still hoping the trail would be opened before we left, but no such luck. A few days later we met a young man who had camped next to us. He too had been turned back from the walk, but had managed to stay around long enough for the trail to reopen. He said the views from the top were spectacular. Oh well, such is life.

Next: Episode 3: Page 2