Alice Springs and the Rainbow Valley: This weekend is our whirlwind tour of the hot, dry area in the center of Australia known as the Red Centre, home of Ayers Rock (Uluru), Alice Springs (the largest town for thousands of kilometers around) and other attractions. Yesterday morning LJ and I left from the Sydney airport on a 9:05 (more like 9:35, by the time we left) flight to Alice Springs. We had one of the notoriously late VB flights (Virgin Blue, not Victoria Bitter, as is the common use of the abbreviation VB here in Oz). But what can you expect when you’re getting a cheap deal on airfare? Certianly not free drinks. *ASIDE: That’s right, on Virgin Blue even the glass of Coke costs you $2.50. They also sell hats and other things, including a deck of cards (which will make another appearance in this travel story) and coloring books, which were a real money-maker for VB on Easter Sunday when a million billion kids and their parents were flying back from holiday.* We got to the Alice Springs airport, had yet another painless Avis rental experience—rental cars, at least from Avis, are done right here in Oz. They should be, for how much we’re paying for them—and went out to get our 4WD-enabled Nissan X-Trail. We actually rented something smaller, like a Suzuki, but they gave us an X-Trail. We could have fit a lot more stuff and people in it than the couple carry-on bags we each brought with us. If we had sleeping bags, we could have saved some money and slept in it.
We drove the 15 k’s into Alice Springs and got lunch at a take-away café. After lunch, we checked into our hotel, the Swagman’s Rest (bit of Aussie lingo: a swag is a bedroll and a swagman’s is a man who traveled from town to town, carrying a bedroll and looking for work), and headed off to see the Rainbow Valley, which was ~100 km south of town, 22 of it on a dirt road. Rainbow Valley was supposed to have lots of color early in the morning or in the late afternoon near sunset, so we planned to do some hiking in the afternoon and stay through sunset. The main road (I use the word “main” very lightly, since it’s a two-lane strip of bitumen run straight across the desert) was empty, save a few cars and trucks, and the dirt road to the valley was even emptier. I was pretty gun-shy about dirt roads after our Tasmanian experience (read the last post for more on that story) and did not manage to de-stress until we were almost at the valley. After ~20 km, we got to a gate that closed off the park. We weren’t but a few hundred meters up the road (in this case, I use the word “road” loosely, when it’s just a strip of dirt about three cars wide) when we came upon a rear-wheel drive shuttle van stuck right in the middle of the road in some loose sand in a one-lane section where we couldn’t just go around them. They had been stuck for only about five minutes when we got there. They asked us if we had a towrope, which we didn’t. (We did find we had a full-size spare, which made me happy.) Within a few minutes, a tiny Suzuki came back from the valley area with a towrope. After the vehicles were hitched up, the Suzuki got going and the van finally got pulled out of the sand after a couple tries. I’m not sure how they got back from the valley, but since we didn’t see them in the parking lot or stuck in the road when we left, they must have made it out.
We parked at the carpark, headed over to a viewing point and took our first solid look at the Rainbow Valley, which had some nice variations in the rock colors due to the minerals (mainly iron) dissolved in it. We got our stuff (cameras, tripods, water, sunblock, etc.) and hiked a short trail out to the Mushroom Rock, which, from the right angle, does look like one (you should be able to find it in the pictures I posted). We were pretty disappointed in the place overall, though, since there was only the one short marked trail to that rock and no other trails. The signs said we could go off in any direction we chose, but that seemed a bit foolhardy to me. Instead, we sat under the rock and played Gin Rummy with the deck of cards I bought on the VB flight (after our time in Melbourne—see last post—I thought it was a good idea to own some cards) to pass the time for an hour or so. *Editor’s note: Okay, maybe it’s a bit lame to sit in a park and play cards, but we were out of options. There’s no way we were going back to town to see the sunset from our hotel room, and we couldn’t get to any of the other parks before dark, so we stayed and killed some time. At least I got better at rummy as time wore on.* We headed back towards the car near sunset so we could get the good sunset pictures. The rock colors didn’t change that much, although the sky did.
Flies, flies everywhere: The whole time we were there, we were incessantly hounded by little black flies. These flies would NOT leave us alone, flying into our faces and alighting on any surface they could find—skin or fabric, it didn’t matter to them. I must have killed at least 20 or 30 by smacking them dead on my arm or clapping my hands in the air with one between them. The flies only got worse at sunset. I can understand how people can just go crazy in the heat in the summertime if they’re also hounded by flies.
We drove back to Alice Springs and had dinner at a nice little Italian place (as I said before, Italian is almost always safe and not weird, unlike Asian food this close to its roots). We woke up this morning to find that our power was out in our hotel room. Luckily, the sun here is bright and brutal enough to give enough light for us to get ready and leave the place. The power came back on in our room before we left the hotel, but when we went into town to buy groceries, we found that the power was still out there. We were still able to buy our food, since the Coles grocery store had backup power for the lights. The power came on while we were in the store, so we were able to go buy petrol (what the Aussies call gasoline—gas here is LPG, liquid propane gas, that some cars are fitted to use) before we left town. Petrol is an important thing to have enough of when it’s hundreds of kilometers between service stations. Water’s also important in this semi-arid region.
Off-road rumbles: We took the exciting unsealed Ernest Giles Road across the middle of nowhere to cut off 200+ km of driving. As mentioned in the Taz post, unsealed really means a cruddy dirt road that can be rougher than the trails I’ve mountain-biked near Boulder (is it time to start biking again, Jen W.?). Good thing we had the 4WD, because even though the signs say that you can drive it with a 2WD, I sure wouldn’t want to do it. We stopped at the Hanbury Meteor Craters on the way. The craters were really, really old, so all kinds of trees and plants had grown there. *ASIDE: so that reminds me: The Red Centre really seems pretty green to me. So much of the land is covered in brush and grasses and trees. I was expecting the area to be really dry and empty, like the Sahara, but this region gets rain sometimes and the clay pans (clay-bottom depressions in the land) hold the water like a tub.* We then drove the rest of the way to the next sealed road. Unfortunately, once we got there, we discovered there that the 4WD was stuck on and the ABS was broken. I’m guessing that the bumpy road must have rattled some things loose. Since we won’t be traveling any more unsealed roads, all we really care about is that our mileage doesn’t go to heck from the SUV being stuck in 4WD. We ate lunch at the end of the unsealed road before we continued on our journey. We had brought a packable cooler with us from Sydney (I got it last week realizing that in the undeveloped desert, we might not have very good access to food sources and would be better off carrying our food with us) in which we stored our lunchmeat and Gatorade on ice. J
We paid HOW much for this?!?: We got to the Kings Canyon National Park and checked into our double room at the Kings Canyon Campground. I was thoroughly underwhelmed by what we got. LJ said later that he had hoped for more but expected what we got. I, on the other hand, had no idea of how little we would get for our money. For AUD$85 (should have been $100, but the woman I made the reservation with gave me a discount for some unknown reason—boy am I glad she did), we got a tiny 3 m x 4 m room with a dodgy old double bed. The air conditioning I was promised is evaporative cooling, which seems to work very well but means we have to keep the window and drapes open for it to work. The bathroom is not connected to the room, as expected, but I would have thought they would be in the same building, not a 30 meter walk away. Then again, I’m sure that the lodging in Yellowstone, or (ironically) Kings Canyon National Park in the US would be similar to this in what you get for the money. (We saw Kings Canyon in the US with Daniel when LJ and I lived in CA back in the summer of 2000).
We then drove to the Kings Canyon itself. The carpark is down at the valley floor level, with the rim 100-130 m above that. The hike around the rim was supposed to take 3-4 hours, which, at the time we started (4:30 pm, with sunset around 6:30 or 7 pm) seemed to imply we’d have to walk a great deal in the dark. I was not at all keen on that idea, but LJ pointed out that we probably walk faster than the time they gave, so against my better judgment we went up. The hike began with a 100 m climb that was like climbing stairs. I felt very woozy and sick at the top, but as the wind blew on my sweat, I cooled off and felt better. (I love dry climates for hiking.) The views from the top were amazing, although I didn’t see all of them since I get vertigo standing too close to a canyon rim. (I learned about my vertigo issues at the Grand Canyon two summers ago.) We made the circuit in 2.5 hours, even with lots of stops for picture taking, and saw the sunset colors on the rocks at the edge of the canyon. This evening we then ate an overpriced dinner at the Outback BBQ (NOT the Outback Steakhouse, which many of the Aussies hate as much as the Crocodile Hunter, both for the image of Australia they give).
Moola: Did I mention how EXPENSIVE this trip will be? If we had decided that we couldn’t afford all the trips we planned, this definitely would have been the one to cancel based on finances alone. We had all kinds of expenses: flights out and back from Sydney to Alice Springs and a hop from Ayers Rock to Alice Springs; the rental car, which costs more per day than a normal rental AND there’s a $0.25/km charge on top of the rental fee. I’m sure the extra per km cost covers all the wear-and-tear the cars get with the rough dirt roads out here, but it’s still expensive. The other real expenses were due to the severe monopoly that the Kings Canyon Resort and Ayers Rock Resort have. When you’re the only gas and hotel for 100 km or more, you can afford to charge a 25% premium on each. People will pay it (as we did). I’m still glad we came here, if only b/c I won’t feel the need to see it on my next trip to Australia. (I am DEFINITELY coming back to this country. Have I mentioned that yet? J)
Ayers Rock and surrounds: Yesterday we drove from Kings Canyon Campground to the Ayers Rock Resort at Yulara (which I’m sure is Aboriginal for “enclosed lodging for wimpy white people”). I was much happier with this room than the one last night. We had to pay almost twice as much, but this room was bigger and had a double bed and two bunk beds, so you could easily stay there with three friends for a reasonable price. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who comes out here. We ate our lunch in the room—more of the sandwich stuff from the day before—and relaxed a bit before heading out to do some hiking. We wanted to make sure that we got to Ayers Rock—Uluru in Aboriginal—in time for sunset, so we planned to go hike at the Olgas—Kata Tjuta—during the afternoon. The heat of the day was sweltering. Since it was a dry heat, we soaked down our synthetic fiber shirts with water, which really helped keep us cool, especially when the wind began to blow in the aptly named Valley of the Winds. The winds really wicked away the water from our shirts to cool us off. (We learned to douse our shirts in water the summer that we went to the Grand Canyon, which saved us then as much as it did now.) We hiked an out-and-back trail to a lookout point that was breathtaking, both from the beauty of the view and the steep climb right before the lookout. The flies were just as persistent as they had been in the days before. Many people wore netting over their hats, and if I had known where to get some, I would have done the same. Aeroguard insect repellant, which works wonders on mossies (mosquitos), does NOTHING against these flies.
Returning from the Olgas, we drove back east on the road towards Ayers Rock. The sunset there was pretty, but not nearly as amazing as I would have liked. The lack of clouds in the sky meant that the rock just subtly changed colors for the hour or so that we watched it from the carpark. Last night we had a very reasonably priced meal, since there was a take-away shop at the overpriced resort. We tried to go to bed early since we were getting up early today to go see sunrise at the Rock.
The alarm went off much too early this morning (5:50 a.m). Sunrise was listed at 7 am, but since the hotel had been wrong about sunset the night before—they said 6:30 pm but the last light was gone by then—we weren’t taking any chances. We drove back into the park and around to the northeast side of the rock to watch the sunrise. Again, like sunset last night, the colors only subtly changed during the hour that we watched. The rock had a glow about it when the first sun hit it, but that was it. I would love to see it sometime when there are clouds in the sky for the light to reflect on.
This morning we caught a flight on Qantas from Ayers Rock to Alice Springs, and then a flight on Virgin Blue from Alice Springs to Sydney. (Routing this way saved us at least $200 each over a nonstop from Ayers Rock to Sydney.) Both these airports are really, really small. We got to the Ayers Rock airport over an hour early and couldn’t even find the Avis people to return the car to, since they weren’t in yet. There were no spaces that were obviously reserved for rental cars, but we found a couple other rentals and parked ours with them. We brought out the trusty deck of cards to kill time in the airport. After a short flight, we were in Alice Springs again. After a bit more time, we caught our flight back to Sydney.
Aussie rap music: I meant to mention this in the Taz post. At some point during our driving around the island (probably that first day heading south to Hobart), LJ asked me to turn on the radio and find some tunes. I clicked it on and on Triple J there was some Australian rap music. That music has to be some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever heard. Try imagining some classic clean-lyric, non-thug rap like DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (Will Smith in his days before he was known as Will Smith), and then have some white guys with an Aussie accent rap it. Just thinking about it right now, I’m almost rolling on the floor laughing. Aussie rap music is a very surreal experience.
National radio stations: Speaking of Triple J: Triple J is an Aussie radio station that is broadcast all over the country. I think that Triple M is another one. It seems that in Australia, radio stations are broadcast nationwide the way that TV stations are in the US. Everywhere we went we could find Triple J, even in the middle of nowhere outside Alice Springs.