It feels like we’ve been away forever, but it’s only a week! Driven 3500 kms and burned through god knows how many litres of overpriced petrol, and I regret none of it 🙂 It’s been amazing.
Quite a few piccies under the cut. Click on them to see them full size.
The drive from Brisbane to Walgett (first stop) was a pain because of road works, and I wish we had not gone through Toowoomba. However, we saw lots of emus, parrots and birds of prey (mostly blackshouldered hawks.) The roadworks meant we arrived in Walgett after sunset, which is very dangerous in the country, especially in a drought year because of the grazing livestock and kangaroos. Came this close to hitting a couple of roos, and after we left our (incredibly basic and somewhat horrible) motel next morning (when it was 1.8 degrees celcius!), we saw the carnage caused by trucks who couldn’t afford the luxury of stopping overnight as we had. At least a dozen fresh kangaroo carcasses within the first five minutes’ drive out. Horrible.
On the other hand, the birds! So many lovely birds we had very little chance of identifying or photographing, but we saw at least one Major Mitchell cockatoo and some gorgeous bright green parrots, as well as black fronted buzzards and a wedgetail eagle, as well as more emus.
Walgett was just a place to stop, with nothing going for it. Broken Hill on the other hand, has history and quirkiness, with a fucking great silver mine right in the town itself (for some reason I thought it would be further away, like the one in Mt Isa.) It’s rather pretty town if you can ignore the fucking great silver mine, and the motel we stayed in was modern, clean and downright lovely – cheaper than the one in Walgett too.
Day three, and more long hours on the road (thanks RACQ trip planner for nothing, underestimating travel times by up to two hours per leg.) Had to sacrifice a whole bag of oranges in South Australia because I forgot about the quarantine rules, and Doug and I had to stuff ourselves full of mandarines and cherry tomatoes to prevent those being tossed too. (Then we had to stop every hour to wee 🙂 ) Because of recent rain, the number of corpses on the road dramatically decreased as the animals had the entire desert to graze in instead of the grass on the verges, and the amount of grass and green dramatically increased. I’d promised Doug harsh red desert, but the desert was looking surprisingly lush and lovely. It was also fascinating how much variation there was in vegetation, just because one section got a little more wind or rain, or more or less grazing.
We stopped briefly outside Port Augusta to have our picnic lunch at the Australian Botanic Arid Lands collection, and discovered it is in fact quite lovely. So we’ll be stopping there for a proper visit on the way home. Took our first pictures of the trip there, but they were dull. I’ll do better on the second attempt.
Stayed overnight in Woomera, which, as some of you will know, was involved in tracking of the Apollo 11 mission, and is still an RAAF facility. The ELDO hotel is actually the old military barracks, and is best thought of as student dorm-like accommodation with a rather good pub attached. 🙂 More comfortable than the Walgett motel, it was still rather primitive in some aspects. It did offer some unusual scenery though 🙂
Woomera to Erldunda via the opal mining town of Coober Pedy was the next leg (we’ll be staying in Coober Pedy on the way back.) Nothing to say about this as it was just a place to stay for the night. We have been running into (not literally) dozens of bikies on their way to the Ulysses club AGM/charity fundraiser in Alice Springs starting tomorrow – up to 6000 people are expected! They’ve all been lovely men and women, all pissed off about the demonisation of bikies by our state premier and the associated hateful laws, and all much older and gamer than me (three hours in our new car and I’m screaming for mercy – sitting on a motorbike for eight plus hours a day? Forget it!) A lot of them were heading to Uluru as we were before the meet.
On the road from Erldunda to Uluru, I made the newbie mistake of thinking Mt Conner was Uluru. You can kind of see why though:
Now we get to the fun part. Uluru! Red Desert! Helicopter ride! And the nicest damn resort and hotel I’ve ever stayed in. It’s stunning, everything both new and beautifully designed with indigenous art everywhere, like staying in a posh gallery with very comfortable beds 🙂
We managed to book a helicopter flight on the day we arrived, a 55 minute trip over Uluru, Kata Tutja (the Olgas), and Lake Amadeus which is a large salt pan lake recently filled but now drying out again. The landscape reminded me of the indigenous dot art but of course it existed long before any Aborigine could have taken to the air:
That evening we had also booked ‘Sounds of Silence’ which is a sunset view of Uluru and then a fantastic meal under the stars (or clouds as it was most of the evening) with indigenous entertainment and bush tucker food. And lots of booze 🙂 Not exactly cheap – $200 a head – but worth every cent. It was fun and the food really was amazing, with excellent and attentive service (which we have also found at the hotel – really superb.)
Next day we went to Kata Tjuta to do one of the shorter walks, but I had to give up after half an hour as I was out of breath (cannot shake this bloody cold). I went back to wait for Doug who should have been back in half an hour. An hour and a half later….
Turns out he missed the first look out where he should have turned back, and hared off on a much longer walk without realising. Dumbass. But beautiful scenery.
The little crows provided brief entertainment, making calls I’ve never heard before from a crow, and being food thieves
And the powers that be considerately (more considerately than spouse, grrr) provided these lovely wooden seats for forlorn wives:
Did I mention the amazing included breakfasts at our hotel? This might have had a small something to do with my lack of stamina 🙂
Spent big on indigenous art and art-printed items at the cultural centre in the national park. I wish I could justify – and had the wall space for, which is the much bigger problem – buying much more than we did. I almost could throw out all our existing art and fill the spaces with stuff from here, it’s all so lovely.
Today we did some of the walks around the base of Uluru (which the Anangu owners ask you not to climb for cultural reason and I wouldn’t anyway.) It was really quite cold when we started out, and windy, which at least kept the bloody bush flies away. Honestly, mere words can’t express the beauty and majesty of this place. Even as an atheist, I was tempted to kneel and worship the inate spirit of the place. It’s an intensely moving experience, being right up against the rock.
We even saw some rock art – clearly not the most precious, fragile kind but still awesome
The desert really is very green and lush right now, still with some of the flowers which would have been at their height a week or so back:
and from the lovely hotel gardens, a Sturt pea:
We heard lots of birds but I only got a single photo of one, a white plumed honey eater, we think:
We did see this teeny nest which must belong to a wren – it was all of two inches in diameter:
And these peculiar nests in the ground, carefully surrounded with a carpet of acacia leaves. We have no idea what creature made them but there were a lot of them, all just as neatly decorated:
Last night tonight, and we’re chilling. Off to King’s Canyon tomorrow for another helicopter ride, before driving back to Erldunda as our night’s accommodation.
Those pictures of the scenery are beautiful! They must’ve been breath taking to see it in person.
Is that a hole in the center of the nests on the ground? Were they all like that? How fascinating, and an interesting mystery of what it was that made them. 🙂
Looks like your trip has been pretty fun so far. I hope the rest is just as good.
It’s a hole about 1 – 1-5 inches wide. All like this, and no idea who or what made them.
It’s been a blast so far 🙂