Update Map
Big Trucks and Big Rocks
G’Day from Uluru (or Ayers Rock for you colonialists).
As you’ll see from the Update Map above, we’ve made a proper leap inland and really got some distance under our belts over the last couple of weeks, about 2500KMs. It’s been great being back on the road watching the generally flat scenery change day by day and made us reminisce of the long days driving through Central Asia. They were a nightmare at the time, but we can now look back on them fondly!
For those who like to look at a map, the route we’ve taken from Townsville was the Flinders Highway to Cloncurry, then the Barkly Hwy into Northern Territory to Three Ways where it meets the Stuart Hwy, which runs from Adelaide in the South to Darwin in the North. We went South through Alice Springs and then West on the Lasseter Hwy to Uluru. Or as satnav would say “In 4 days, turn left, then after 3 days, turn right”.
It took us a week to get to Alice, along the way just stopping for fuel and spending the nights in free rest areas. The stop on the first night was the most amusing, being the hotel carpark in the town of Prairie. The bar here is full of sporting memorabilia, cattle station tools, old hats stapled to the roof, a rusting 1960’s Vespa and there’s chandeliers and metal kids trikes hanging in the front veranda. But weirdest of all, there’s three old shop mannequins dressed as cowgirls - one stood at the bar, one in a riding saddle and one in an antique dentist’s chair! All this while the rather truculent landlord played obscure 1950’s LPs on a turntable and shouted “Who sang this then?” at his bemused clientele, and seemed annoyed that none of us had a clue!
Here we met Jack Sammon, a Cowboy Poet as he called himself. He spent most of his life “droving”, working for the immense cattle stations moving thousands heads of stock over thousands of miles. Now he writes songs and poetry about it and gives talks here and in the States about Australiana, he says he loves giving talks in Texas as everything the drovers did was bigger than their cowboy counterparts and the Aussies were doing it for longer too. He was very interesting to chat to, but was quite humble about his own achievements and a grand old gent with it.
So, back to the road. The earth has slowly, but most definitely now turned red – everywhere is a terracotta hued sand. We’d been expecting the red earth because for days we were seeing termite mounds which have been getting increasingly red, but the topsoil has been light brown until quite near Alice. We were also expecting a lot less vegetation than we’ve seen, expecting Uluru particularly to be in an arid, sandy desert. In reality there is quite a lot of green and there are even trees and shrubs growing on Uluru itself.
There’s been countless eagles / harriers / falcons / kites keeping us company along the way, suggesting there must be many critters living in the bush, but we didn’t see any. There’s been plenty of ‘roo and cow roadkill though, some of it obviously very old and stripped clean by ants – just piles of bones under a leather blanket. One day we did see a dingo strolling along the roadside and then a feral cat too, but hardly exotic fauna. The termite mounds have been interesting as some have had clothes put on them, old T-shirts, hi-viz tabards, hats, sunglasses, one even dressed as a waiter with a tree branch for an arm holding a serving-plate-like-hubcap. Bloody tourists with too much time on their hands!
We’ve seen some of the famous road-trains – the multi-trailered trucks over 50 metres long and some of them have got 70 wheels! Imagine the manager of your local Kwik-Fit seeing one of them pull up - bet they would still say they needed new brake pads too! We got a photo of Mario parked next to one, just for comparison – they’re huge! We’ve had no problems with them though, we‘ve just let them overtake and get on with it. We wouldn’t want to come across one on the unsealed roads though, where they throw up so much dust you face the choice of carrying on blind and hitting something, or stopping and getting hit!
The main annoyance has been the flies. They’re everywhere and a bloody useless pain in the arse. Every stop you’re accosted by them, attracted to your mouth, eyes and ears – horrible things. Then they ride along on your back, hoping you don’t know they’re there so they can get in your vehicle with you. Running round in a large circle before getting back in the truck has become our latest form of exercise. Talking of parasites, the fuel prices between the main cities is a bit steep. Whereas we were paying about $1.35 a litre on the coast and even in Alice, between the main centres it can be over $2! We appreciate they have to get the fuel to these remote places, but come on!
So enough waffle, where have we actually been? Well, the first place we stopped of any significance was Tennant Creek, which according to local folklore was founded when a wagon carrying beer broke down there, so the drivers stayed and drank the cargo. In reality it was formed as a supply town to the neighbouring cattle stations which cover an area the size of the UK! We were hoping for rather a quaint little town with perhaps a bit of history. We got rather an unwelcoming place with lots of security shutters, many police for a small town and the grubbiest supermarket we’ve been to this side of China. The trolley looked like it had come from the bottom of Birmingham canal.
Then it was on to Alice Springs where we did some museums, mostly as one cheap ticket covered the lot. One was of local art (not just indigenous) where there was a real mix of exhibits - paintings, ceramics, furniture, clothing, digital media – and it wasn’t too big so you could actually take time to look at stuff and read the little cards next to them. Caroline liked a brightly painted vase as the detail work on it was incredible, and some clothes that had plastic in them to make them sparkly. Bry liked the abstract sculpture of the women with 3 boobs.
Next was the Central Australian Aviation Museum, which focuses on the brave chaps and chapesses who not just risked life and limb flying those new-fangled aeroplanes, they did it over the unchartered territory of the Outback with little hope of rescue if or when something went wrong. Flying open cockpit planes made of string, wood and cloth which were hopelessly overweight due to the extra fuel they had to carry and no room for food or water, in 40 odd degrees across a feature-less desert - cue lots of stories of derring-do and some sad tales too.
Then we went to the Natural History Museum. Usual stuff here, from meteorites found in the desert to dinosaur bones and remains of giant 3 metre high emu ancestors. Even a wombat the size of a hippo – even we’d have been able to spot that one! The best though was the stuffed and preserved animal section. There were the usual suspects – eagles looking majestic, little marsupials looking cute, dingoes looking fierce. Many were doing some sort of natural activity – owls disembowelling mice, fox disembowelling owls – that sort of thing, bit grisly in places, but informative. But the highlight, oh the highlight was the Cat (Felus Catus). Whoever was in charge of the exhibit was clearly a dog-person, as initially poor little Tiddles was included in the “non-native, introduced pest” section. If that wasn’t enough, the “natural activity” the moggy was doing was not eating some poor defenceless native bird, or even digging a hole in flower-bed, no – he was licking his arse! And not just gently, really getting in there! You can imagine the ‘phone call – “Hey Bruce, this here cat you want stuffing, what do you want it to be doing, mate?”. “Ahh, I don’t know mate, just have it licking it’s arse or something, will ya?”. Aussies, gotta love ‘em. Either that or that’s how the poor cat died, mid clean, from pure embarrassment at being caught.
Next was the Royal Flying Doctor Service Museum, which as you would expect gives the history of this incredible service. There were some touching tales here of people who have had their lives saved by the service, not just in emergencies, but things like organ transplants too. But what we found most thought provoking was the views of people who had never needed the service, they just appreciated it was there, just in case. One young mother living on a remote cattle station said in one video “I would never dream of bringing up a family in the Outback, if it wasn’t for the Flying Doctors Service”. Kind of brings home the reality of living in such remote areas and made us appreciate what we so often take for granted on our little island back home.
There were some amusing stories too. The RFDS issue a “medical chest” to isolated areas, like a super first aid kit, with lifesaving equipment and drugs, all of which are clearly named and numbered. The idea is a doctor will prescribe treatment or drugs over the radio to prevent the need for a visit or buy time before a medic gets there. One story was a farmer receiving instructions from the doctor to give his sick wife “One number 9 tablet”. The next day they spoke again and when asked how the patient was doing, the farmer replied “Well Doctor, we didn’t have any number 9’s left, so I gave her a 4 and a 5 and now she’s full of beans!”
We stayed in Alice for 2 nights at a proper campground, that had live music both evenings. They were a travelling band of 3 that just happened to be there the same nights as us, playing folksy/bluesy stuff and covers of rock classics. They invited anyone to join in, so a young lad played some Green Day acoustic covers and a local resident did some didgeridooing. More of a campfire sing-along than local gig, but a very nice way to spend the evenings.
So then it was on to Uluru, apparently the World’s largest monolith. We stayed for 3 nights in Yularu - the town that serves the National Park and the 400,000 annual visitors - at the Ayers Rock Resort, the only place to stay in town. We don’t mean that in any sort of elitist way, it really is the only place you can stay. Luckily it has a campsite.
We first went to The Olgas rock formation, traditionally named Kata Tjuta (meaning Many Heads) and did a couple of the walks. They apparently used to be one rock like Uluru, but time and erosion have now made it a series of separate hills with deep canyons and gorges between them – quite alien, moulded shapes sticking-up from the flat land. We thought one section looked like a huge red submarine surfacing. We stayed here and watched the sunset. It was quite cloudy, but for about a minute the sun broke through and the rocks glowed a beautiful bright orange.
The next day we were up early and saw the sunrise on Uluru from the campsite - which was nice - and then drove the 20km to spend the day at the rock itself. We started with a ranger guided tour for a couple of hours, which was interesting and explained some of the indigenous beliefs in the rock and how the various shapes represent their ancestors. We then set off and did some of the other walks ourselves, looking at what would be watering holes in the wet season and reading some of the information boards explaining more of the locals’ beliefs and legends. We found some of these quite hard-going as they were so fantastical, such as the mountains made by caterpillars and huge holes in the rock made be a little wallaby sticking his head up through it. But we guess it’s not easy trying to condense millennia of beliefs onto a few tourist-friendly story boards. It would be like the Church of England trying to condense the Bible into a few paragraphs on a sign outside St Pauls and then someone with no knowledge about Christian beliefs reading it and thinking, “Oh yeah, that makes sense, I can totally believe that happened”!
In the afternoon we visited the Cultural Centre, but by that time we had Cultural Fatigue so just enjoyed some cheesecake instead. We don’t want to sound like we have no interest in the culture, it’s just we would much rather see people actually partaking in it, rather than reading loads of information boards. All across the globe we’ve been fascinated and humbled by people’s acts of faith – we have no real want to understand the faith itself, they’re all as baffling as each other - but to see people demonstrating their belief is amazing. Unfortunately this is not possible here, apparently the males and females often don’t practise their faith in front of each other, let alone in front of outsiders.
We then waited for sunset and saw the rock changing colours as the Sun dropped, but again it clouded over just before the Sun went down, so we were denied that famous last glow, before the rock changes to charcoal. The weather had been changeable all day, starting out windy and cold (about 9 C), hot and clear by lunch, then cloudy later on. This meant we got to see the Rock in many shades of colour throughout the day and from different viewpoints too, as we drove round it twice.
Overall, we weren’t wowed by our visit to Uluru, probably The Olgas were more interesting from a scenic point of view. At the end of the day, it is just a big rock in a desert the size of Europe, so by comparison to its surrounding, yes it’s interesting. Move the red rock to the middle of Europe though, and it could form the perfect viewing platform for some real mountains! And it was cold. It even rained one day we were there!
So from here we head back to the Stuart Highway and will then pop down to South Australia, just so we have visited all the States. We’ll then backtrack through Alice and up to Darwin, hoping for warmer climes.
HooRoo!