The only Outback city
The drive to Alice Springs was long and boring. Mountain ranges sometimes appeared to the left, but the terrain was mostly flat. Halfway there, the road crossed the Finke River. The Finke river is a kind of anomaly. Its tributaries come from Watarrka to the south and the Tanami Desert to the north. From these two points, the rivers meet in the middle of the West Macdonnell Ranges, cutting deep gorges on the way, such as Simpsons Gap, Stanley Chasm, Ellery Creek, Serpentine Gorge, Ormiston Gorge, Redbank Gorge, Finke Gorge, and Glen Helen Gorge. Then the now mighty river flows southeast, for five hundred kilometers, only to vanish entirely in the Simpson Desert. It does not even have the chance to be full for more than a couple times a decade. When we passed, it was bone dry, and plants were growing in the riverbed.
Hills and mountains
Lunch was in the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens, in Alice Springs. The Olive Pink botanic garden was an assortment of acacias, wattles, and malees, the only bushes which can grow in the botanic gardens. But up the hill, a view of Alice Springs.
Outback mountains are all made of quartzite, a strong, sparkly rock made of compressed sandstone, mica crystals, and, of course, quartz. The rock is very strong, can make for very steep slopes and cliffs on the sides of mountains. I had a good view of them on top of the hill, for Alice Springs is entirely surrounded by steep, tall, glittery quartzite mountains, many for the most part bare in vegetation, and some, like the one I was standing on, solitary peaks in a sea of houses and parks. To the north I saw the shopping area, followed by a pass in the mountains which the highway takes to Tennant Creek and beyond. Somewhere in the pass is a historic telegraph station by a pond the town was named for. To the east, Alice Springs Desert Park, its main tourist attraction, backed up by the East Macdonnell Ranges. To the south, the rest of the botanic garden, and the pass the Stuart Highway comes through. To the west, the mighty West Macdonnell Ranges.
The Alice Springs Desert Park
After lunch, the next stop was the Alice Springs School of the Air,
the oldest School of the Air in Australia. The school was first operated
through the radios everybody used to have in the outback to communicate
with the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which serves as a "hospital of
the air"(We visited their biggest base in Broken Hill). But the flying
doctor service is literally on the air, in airplanes. The School of the Air has to do with computers and radios.
Despite
it being a school, the students can graduate at year 7 after doing an
hour or two of work a day, less than I do. And the whole school is only
about twenty or thirty students spread out across the Northern
Territory.
The Alice Springs Desert Park is a good model of three desert
environments; one a place where it rains a little, a place where it
barely rains at all, and a place half way in between. There is a large
nocturnal house, some enclosures, lots of information boards and plenty
of walk-in aviaries. There was a bird show that I thought was better
than the one at Taronga Zoo, Australia's biggest zoo. It is a great
place for tourists, especially if they have not had the time to drive
to Lake Eyre on the Oonandatta Track. (that accounts for just about
everybody!) The rest of the day was spent exploring the desert park.
The campground did not meet expectations. It was small and crowded. It did not have many facilities. So, on the next morning, we packed up the tent and turned our focus to the West Macdonnell Ranges.
Glen Helen Gorge
Not long out of Alice Springs, it felt like we were in the middle of nowhere again. But there was no feel this was a barren plain that looked just like the surface of Mars, except much hotter and flatter (look at pictures of the Coober Pedy Moon Plain). It felt like Uluru, close up, at sunrise. Golden beams of sunlight struck low, jagged peaks and then the plants in the valley. The variation of light and color, the vaguely dark orange color of the peaks mixed with the much brighter orange of the sun's beams in early morning. Few people were on the road with us. It felt empty.
At long last we arrived in the campsite at Glen Helen Gorge Resort, a block of apartments surrounded by grassy campgrounds. The camp was in easy view of fluted cliffs. We pitched camp, and set off for Ormiston Gorge, which was supposed to be the most impressive gorge in the mountains. On the road to the gorge, we watched a dingo dragged a dead kangaroo across the road. Dingoes are now very rare in Australia, so it was very lucky we saw it.
The Pound walk was the longest walk in the gorge, so we took it. The walk began in grassy hills, dipping up and down, passing cliffs, crossing dry stream-beds. And then the walk went over a saddle, and below us was a large, flat valley ringed with jagged mountain ranges. There was not a single opening or gap in the whole circle. This is what Australians call a pound. The walk followed a riverbed out of the valley, toward the gorge.
The gorge was very narrow and long, and choked by boulders. And when you have noticed the track has disappeared into a boulder field, you see the waterhole. The waterhole takes up two thirds of the gorge if you are lucky, and at one point, the whole gorge (a deep wade is required.) But that did not stop me from admiring the gorge.
Once back, we walked into Glen Helen Gorge. Or we could have if a gigantic waterhole in the neck of the gorge was not there. Yes, there is lots of water in the desert, but not a drop that seems to be in the right place.
The Flinders Ranges
The night was spent in a cabin in Coober Pedy. Around lunchtime, we stopped in Woomera, which was founded as the head of a massive bombing range, but is now the creepiest town in the Outback.
I have no idea what makes Woomera creepy. It could be all the little metal shelters or the fact there is no house here which is made of wood. It could be the absence of people. Whatever it was, the dark, gloomy sky made it look even weirder.
Outside of the museum was a plaque commemorating Len Beadell, the last explorer in the world. In the 1950s, he surveyed land for several outback highways, and visited many places for the first time. There remain some completely unsurveyed parts of Australia.
Close to Port Augusta, there was a great view of jagged mountains to the east. These are the Flinders Ranges, a group of semi-outback mountains. After a very long and windy drive through foot hills and little villages and ruins, we arrived in the resort. Wilpena is a very large campground, and it takes fifteen minutes to walk from the visitor center, where the trails officially begin, to where the trails actually begin, on the edge of the campground. We had a fire, and cooked damper on the coals.
Wilpena Pound
The next morning was a walk to a lookout. After walking out of the campground, we walked through a narrow pass between two mountains to a homestead. In the 1870s, some prospectors found a valley, and called it Wilpena Pound because it would be be hard for any animal to escape from the valley. A whole bunch of farmers set up homes released sheep into the lush looking valley. Within two years, the sheep had overgrazed the whole valley and all but a small group of farmers moved out. A repeated pattern of drought, flood and fire convinced most of the rest to move out as well.
Now there was just one homestead left, which survived the onslaught of the elements for thirty more years before their luck ran out in 1920. The house is still standing.
We climbed to the lookout, which offered a great view of the pound. The pound was formed after the rock, deep under the ground, was tilted forty-five degrees, meaning one side of every mountain in the Flinders Ranges is craggier and steeper than the other, and gave mountain ranges the appearance of a saw or a row of teeth. Time made one mountain range wrinkle and bend, and now forms an almost complete circle that looks like, as the Aboriginal myth suggests, the backs of two serpents.
Mount Ohlssen-Bagge
What a weird name! It was given to the mountain closest to the Wilpena Campsite. We climbed it on the third day.
On the second day, we took a joyride in the national park. We drove down a gorge, forded a stream, and saw kangaroos and emus hopping everywhere we looked. I tried to count the ones we saw, but I gave up around number thirty. We stopped in the dusty outback town of Blinman for lunch and wrapped up the day with a view of Wilpena Pound, indeed the entire national park, at sunset.
The climb up the mountain was long and hard. It combined scrambles up rocky slopes with walks through scrub. At the top, a great view of the park.
We stopped at an abandoned homestead and a sacred canyon, stayed another night, drove to Mildura on the banks of the muddiest river in at least two continents. Drove to Cowra. And finished the whole vacation in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. It was the first three-week vacation I ever had in Australia.
THE END
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