Back in Time

Of all the places I saw in the outback, Watarrka National Park was my favorite. It contains the George Gill Range and Kings Canyon.

Here is a picture of the range from a distance.

Here it is close up.

This place was totally fascinating (and beautiful of course). The rocks are sandstone, and hold the very limited water like a sponge. Vegetation grows out of the stone, sending its roots deep into the cracks and crevices.

The strangest thing was that where the rocks had broken apart, you could see that they were made up of the white sand that covers Australian beaches. They think that millions of years ago there was a sea in the center of Australia (where the outback is now), then as the global climate changed it turned into tropical rainforests. Today, those rainforests are now only in the northern parts of Australia. The center still has remnants from those days, such as the palm trees and what they speculate could be an old coral reef (see the picture below).

They call that place "Lilliput." I kept imagining, thousands of years from now people walking around on the Great Barrier Reef with a guide explaining how this used to all be under the ocean. Crazy.

Supposedly during the wet season, one of the cliffs turns into a waterfall. (I definitely need to see that to believe it). The water runs down into the canyon and there is enough moisture that it maintains a waterhole all year round. It is quite green and lush in that area, so it has gotten the nickname "The Garden of Eden."




It was a magnificent place. We began our hike up to the rim of the canyon at sunrise, which is really a good thing since it gets very hot by midday. The hike began with a steep climb up the side - surprisingly nice despite having just woken up. The air was so clear and even a bit cold. I like that about the desert. No matter how hot it gets during the day, it always cools off once the sun goes down.

During the five hour drive back to Alice Springs I sat up front by our guide and asked him a gazillion questions about the area and what life is like there. It sounds like such a strange mix of people. One fourth are aboriginal, and from what I understand they hold most of the land rights now (sounds a bit like in Fiji). Another quarter are Americans involved in the Pine Gap project. I didn't know what Kevin (our guide) was talking about and I felt too ignorant to ask, but I just googled it and it is some sort of military base that is run primarily by CIA agents. Woah. The rest are Australians, plus lots of tourists passing through, with the largest groups being German and Japanese.

Add all of this into some of the most beautiful landscapes I have seen, and it becomes clear that Alice Springs is a town that I must get to know better.

Monoliths and More

While in the outback, we spent time at the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. The land there was beautiful, with that rich red soil and very flat land. Kata Tjuta, also called the Olgas, is a series of large roundish rocks that rise up out of nowhere.

Kata-Tjuta is a sacred site to the Anangu Aboriginal men, and as such a lot of the cultural significance of the area is not know and not accessible to the public.

A close-up picture of the rocks.

Here is the famous monolith, Uluru (aka Ayers Rock).

I had seen many pictures of this place before going there, and to be honest I never knew what the big deal was. When you see it in person, though, it is amazing. The size alone is hard to comprehend, and only 1/3 of it is visible above the land. The surrounding area is completely flat, making it even more mysterious trying to understand what this is and how it got there.

The walk around Uluru is great with caves and waterholes appearing as you round each curve. It took about three hours for us to circle the rock, about 10k total.

It has become a big tourist attraction to climb to the top of Uluru. Despite notices everywhere from the Aboriginal landholders asking people not to do this because Uluru is sacred to them, people continue to do it.

It is a tough climb, too, and several people have died of heart failure on the trip to the top.

The sunset at Uluru was really cool. It began as a bright orange-red. Then, as the sun started to go down, it developed a purple hue. As the purple faded, the shadows got really sharp. Eventually, it faded into a dusty brown. We tried to document this transition in photographs.

Four-wheeling in the Outback

For our adventures into the outback, we decided to err on the side of safety and go with a group. It is possible to rent a four-wheel drive and trek out there on your own, but I hear a lot of stories about people whose cars break down and they never return, so I thought I should not risk it. At least not on my first trip out there. :)

We started out with a day trip around a few historic sites and national parks. Here is the vehicle we travelled in.

It was half bus, half army tank. The terrain is pretty rough, so you need a machine with power.

That's Michael posing on the mamouth vehicle.

The first place on the itinerary was Hermannsburg, a former missionary town which has kept part of the town as a museum giving a bit of history about the role the mission played in the lives of the aboriginal people living there. The museum made it seem like all of this happened very peacefully, with the missionaries learning the Aranda language and the aboriginals learning German, though I get the sense it was not that easy. There is a lot of racial strife going on all around that area which was not brought out in the open for tourists (obviously), but people I talked to tiptoed around the subject and made it pretty clear that there is a lot going on under the surface. Very intriguing.

As we continued on our way, we passed the salt flats.

Remarkably similar to the one I saw in Utah. Oh, I wish I had my photos from my trip to the southwestern US. I would love to look at these side by side.

Hey - check out these awesome lizards with their camouflage.

We drove down into the Finke River. That's something I found really odd. We passed all these "rivers" that had no water in them. Supposedly during the wet season they do fill up and even flood, though I have a very hard time believing that. The drive down into the river bed was really rough. We were belted in, but even with that we were tossed all around our seats going over these huge bumps and dips.

This is me walking in the Finke River. I think I'll have to come back during the wet season. They say it looks entirely different.

We hiked up to this peak to look out over the river.

Here are some views from the peak. That is me trying to get out of the shot (Michael was the photographer for the trip.)

Once we managed to get out of the river valley (another rough ride), we drove to Palm Valley. Way back, 200 million years ago this area was covered with rainforest. Some of the vegetation has survived, creating places like Palm Valley.

We hiked along here for a few hours, then had a picnic lunch. A great start to our trip.

The Heart of Australia

I took my nephew Michael on a trip to the outback. Alice Springs is the town right in the heart of Australia, and it serves as the hub of the outback. Yes, it is not "a town" in the outback, but rather "the town." It wasn't until the 1980s that there was even a paved road into Alice Springs. The isolation is incredible.

We took a flight to Alice Springs from Sydney (which is on the coast and in New South Wales, which is the state where Rachele's family lives, for those of you who don't know about Australian geography). The flight took three hours, and throughout the majority of the flight Michael and I looked out the window and marvelled at the fact that all you could see was a huge expanse of red, dry, cracked earth. You really feel like you are going out into the middle of nowhere.

When I stepped off the plane in Alice Springs, the first thing that hit me was the intense heat. It was about 1pm, and the sun was beating down. Even the wind was hot. The air was so dry you could almost feel it pulling the the moisture out of you. You don't need to bother drying your hands after you wash them, just step outside the air does it for you. The earth is bright red, and it gets into everything and leaves its mark. My formerly white sneakers will now forever serve as a reminder of this trip. Worst of all are the flies. The place is swarming with flies that are not shy about crawling all over your face, into your ears, nose, mouth and eyes.

And for some reason, I fell in love with this place. It might have something to do with the beautifully bright sky, the crystal clear air, the stunning sunsets and sunrises, and a night sky that is so thick with stars you feel like you could reach out and touch them. It is a place where you can literally drive for hours and see nothing but the little two-lane road you are on and land rolling by on either side. You pass at most a handful of other vehicles, the drivers of which all smile and wave. Of course they do; who knows when you will see another person? It is like no place I have ever been.

A glimpse of the outback.

Check me out - I'm petting a dingo!

(Please ignore the fact that it is chained up, tame, and asleep.)

Alice Springs is home to two unique and quite impressive systems developed to deal with the isolation of the people living in the outback.

There is the "School of the Air", which consists of teachers instructing students all across the outback via radio. They have recently started doing it by satellite so for the first time these students are actually able to see their teacher. On standardized testing these students score well - usually in the top 10% - then often go on to boarding schools for high school.

Alice Springs also serves as a base for the Royal Flying Doctors Service. This was started in 1928 to provide emergency care for people in isolated places. I read a story about a man who was in a farming accident, so they brought over a neighbor who had done a first aid course. This man then contacted his first aid teacher in Perth who instructed him how to do surgery through morse code, using only a pen knife. The man actually survived the surgery, but died of a burst appendix during the many-day trek to the nearest hospital. It was stories like this that prompted the development of RFDS.

Here is the Alice Springs base. Inside there is a small radio control room where they take the emergency calls. They have doctors and nurses on call to fly out and help these people, treating them in the on-board emergency room then taking them to the closest hospital. The RFDS services an area the size of western Europe.

Many of the homesteads have a medical kit which contains a chart to help the patients describe their injuries. There is also a medical chest that contains a variety of medicines which are each assigned a number, so the physician can easily prescribe the medicine they need.

This is the body chart. In addition to the grid, it lists words to describe the kind of pain they are experiencing (sharp, throbbing, etc).

This is a medicine chest from the 1960s. There was a joke in the museum about a man who said they had run out of #9 pills, so he just gave his wife a #4 and a #5 and she was just fine.

Needless to say, I really liked Alice Springs. I will write about all the adventuring into the outback in the next post.