The Red Centre, November 13-17, 2008

70% of Australia is desert or outback, and the town of Alice Springs is literally and figuratively right in the middle of it.  We stepped off the plane in early afternoon, after setting our watches back ½ hour.  We were now 1 ½ hours behind Sydney, and by the end of this trip, we will have visited 4 time zones, each separated by a ½ hour.  We wonder how business people schedule conference calls and the like with 30 minute differences in time zones. 

 

Kangaroo Island was hot, but Alice was hotter, as one would expect a desert to be during summer.  We had also been told that if we thought the flies in Kangaroo Island were bad, hah, just wait until Alice, as they would be much worse.  We would soon find out that both of these expectations were wrong.

 

In order to get the full “Outback Experience”, we eschewed the hotels in town, and instead opted for an outback ranch “B&B” 25 kilometers north of town.  That afternoon, we decided to spend time in Alice before heading north for the night.  Our first stop was the historic telegraph station, the primary reason Alice came into existence in the first place.  In 1872, the Alice Springs telegraph station was opened along the line from Darwin in the north to Adelaide in the south; on that very day news from Europe that used to take 3 months to reach Adelaide now took only the same number of hours, passed in Morse code along a series of lines connecting the telegraph stations.

 

The Outback is big, and the Australians have figured out some pretty nifty ways of managing its size.  We visited the School of the Air, a 50+ year old school which teaches correspondence courses via the internet to 114 elementary school kids within a 1,000 km radius circle from Alice Springs (the school started with two way radios and only converted to computers in the last 3-4 years, over). It is home-schooling with a watchful eye.

 

After the School of the Air, we headed to the very wonderful Alice Springs Desert Park, which recreated three habitats of the Australian desert, at the foot of the West MacDonnell mountain range.  What the kids thought was going to be painful actually turned out to be very enlightening for all, as we learned about the Sand Country, Riverbed, and Woodlands environments, and the many varied plants and animals comprising each.

 

Sweaty, dusty and hungry, and still having not seen any flies, we headed to the town square for dinner before driving north in total darkness to find our outback retreat (yep, it got dark over an hour earlier than in Kangaroo Island).  The Bond Springs Outback Retreat is very similar to staying at one of my dad’s “casitas” on his ranch in Arizona.  The topography of the place is similar (minus the cacti) and the feeling is quite the same; the main difference is the expansiveness of it.

 

To get a better feel for the desert, we headed for a bush walk the next day.  Driving back into the West MacDonnell’s, we stopped first at Simpson’s Cove and then at Standley Chasm.  Both were national park-type places with varying lengths of treks.  Scott describes our second stop:

 

Today we went to Standley Chasm.  It was very beautiful.  When we got there, the rocks forming the chasm were a burning hot red color.  On our way up, a man passed us coming down on a stretcher.  He supposedly had broken his ankle.  When we got past the chasm, we started to explore.  We climbed pretty far up until we got to a fork.  We went left and hiked for about 30 minutes.  There must have been a fire there because the rocks around us were pitch black from the smoke and ashes.  When we got to a dead end, we went back to the fork and headed up the other way.   That part was more fun because we were climbing up a pile of rocks.  We could’ve gone further, but we decided that we had gone high enough (parents!).  We had a nice day.

 

Back in town after our hikes and lunch, we spent a little time doing some essentials; Claire doing laundry, the kids doing their schoolwork, and I walking across the street for grocery shopping for our dinner “in” that night.  The afternoon also included a quick visit to an art museum to see an exhibit of aboriginal painting, a visit to the Royal Flying Doctor Service base in Alice (another nifty way to manage the giganticness of the Outback) and a little playground time for the kids.

 

The next morning we headed south and west for our drive to Uluru, to visit the world’s largest monolith (fancy word for rock).  This country is SO big and flat that “road trains” are common; in the U.S., a tractor-trailer may involve a road tractor and 1-2 trailers.  Here, there are 4 trailers attached as they barrel down the highway.  This is possible because in some a

reas, the road goes for many miles without a single curve or turn (and the railway from coast to coast has a length of 300 miles where there is not a hint of a curve).

 

The sacred rock of Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock), and its neighboring monoliths 40 km away, Kata Tjuta (formerly The Olga’s) were sites to behold.  Uluru itself is over 1,000 feet tall, and like an iceberg, most of it is underground.  And to top it off, we got three days of something so rare that very few visitors get to experience, especially in a desert in the summer – cold blustery and rainy weather  Again, to compare it to Arizona, imagine 3 straight days in early summer, (say, late May) where it feels like London.  However, we made lemonade out of lemons, and really enjoyed our treks, educational walks with the local Anangu people, and visits to

 the sites (albeit without the much-anticipated “Sounds of Silence” sunset dinner, where according to the brochure “one can watch the changing colors under the clearest skies in the world”)(oh well). 

 

 

 

 

 

Carson describes our first seeing Uluru (it wasn’t raining yet).

 

Today we saw an amazing rock called Ayers Rock.  It was a giant rock which had a lot of interesting lines and shapes carved in it.  Whenever the sun shone on it, it would change colors.  While we were there it also rained, and you could see the water slowly rolling down the sides.  With its enormous orange color towering over you, you could feel it moving towards you, slowly, but not too close to get you.  Then it stopped and we slowly drove away.

 

As we were leaving, we did have one little bit of excitement.  Our in-country travel agents had arranged for us to rent a car from Budget in Alice, and return it in Ayers Rock.  No big deal, except for the fact that there is no Budget in Ayers Rock.  After some prompt assistance from the travel agent help line, some negotiations at the airport, and a few laughs, we left the Budget car with the Avis people.  The rain was just beginning to clear, and we still hadn’t seen any flies; our $25 worth of very good looking fly-net-head-covers were packed away unopened, hopefully forever so.