Part 7 - Alice Springs

March 25 - 27, 2005

Friday, March 25th: Ayers Rock to Alice Springs

We got up fairly early to make the drive through the desert from Ayers Rock to Alice Springs, a distance of about 273 miles through the middle of nowhere. I filled up the SUV with diesel while Julie got ready, we turned in our cabin keys, and hit the road. There's literally one turn between Ayers Rock and Alice Springs - you take one road east for a couple of hours, then turn north on another road for a couple more hours. Not too far out of Ayers Rock, we came across a bit of a rest area and scenic overlook (really just a turnoff with a composting toilet). To the south was a view of Mt. Connor, which is apparently frequently mistaken for Ayers Rock even though it doesn't really look the same. Across the highway you could climb a hill for a view of Mygoora Lake (salty and dry in this photo, which also shows the fine, bright orange sand that made up the soil in the area).

We continued on, passing through a couple of settlements that weren't much more than a gas station and restaurant and couldn't have had a population of more than about 5 people. The most common scenery was corpses - lots and lots of kangaroos that had been hit by vehicles lying on the side of the road, and a lot of free-range cattle that had presumably been hit by road trains, giant semis pulling up to three trailers that really have no way of stopping should anything get in their way. The dead animals were picked over by scavengers and dried out by the heat, leaving what looked like desiccated leather bags of bones by the road. (We also saw a few live cows, some horses, and some vultures or buzzards working on fresh roadkills.)

There was very little traffic on the road, and eventually we came to a region where there was no speed limit. That was nice, but we really didn't drive too fast in our lumbering rental SUV on the relatively narrow highway. One sight that puzzled us was the frequent sightings of piles of apples alongside the road. All over the place there were what looked to be bags of apples tossed out on the side of the road. It was very strange - if the intent was to feed them to the animals (wild or domesticated), luring the animals up to the very shoulder of the road seems like a bad idea. We never did figure out what the deal was with the apples.

Eventually, we came to the turnoff for the Henbury Meteorite Craters, a cluster of 12 craters, ranging from 6 to 600 feet wide and up to 60 feet deep, that were formed by meteorite impacts about 5,000 years ago. The craters were about 8 miles off the highway, along a really rough, washboard dirt road. The drive out rattled our brains and rattled my digital camera so badly that its orientation sensor stopped working for a while. The walk out to the craters was hot and bright, since by this time it was midday, but it was pretty cool. The craters had been worn down by millennia of erosion so they weren't all that dramatic, but it was still cool to think that they had been formed so long ago and have persisted for so long. One of the craters was full of larger, greener vegetation than the others, apparently the result of a spring that's captured by that crater.

As we walked back to the car, we spotted a solitary camel, resting in the shade of the one tree in the area large enough to provide any shade. Once we shook off all the flies (don't forget about the flies) and got back in the car, we decided to try 4WD and see if it made the ride any smoother on the return trip to the main road, and the experiment was a success - the ride was much less jarring. Along the way, we spotted a herd of camels hanging out beside the road, and stopped and took a picture of them.

We headed on into Alice Springs, passing by some kind of radio observatory station, and stopping for gas and lunch at Subway, before heading out west of town to do a little sightseeing. There was a string of things that I wanted to see, but due to the fact that it was getting late in the evening, we didn't go all the way out to the more distant things. The scenery in the area was really rugged, with a lot of low, extremely jagged and rocky mountains, a lot of brushy vegetation, and a lot of dry creek beds. I'm really curious what the area looks like when it rains, because the creek beds are pretty big, there are flood warning signs all over the place, and nearly every SUV you pass is equipped with a snorkel. That's just fascinating to me, that it could suddenly get that wet in this very dry area.

Our first stop was Standley Chasm, a gorge cut bya small creek and located on privately owned land. The ticket was something like $6.50, and it was totally worth it. The trail through the canyon was really pretty, with the bright blue sky contrasting with the vivid orange-red rocks and the green and white trees. The chasm itself was a vertical cleft that was only about 20 feet wide and about 250 feet deep. It was late afternoon when we arrived, so the chasm was in shadow, but they say that for the 15 minutes a day that the sun shines into the gap, it's really quite spectacular. We only walked as far as the chasm, because the trail beyond was really just an uphill clamber over giant boulders, and we had a few more stops we wanted to make before dark. We returned to the car, stopping to watch a goanna stroll across the parking lot, and drove back out to the main road, stopping along the way for a closer look at one of the many dry creek beds in the area.

We drove back toward Alice Springs and stopped at Simpsons Gap. The gap itself was a really impressive gap between two towering cliffs. (In this photo, Julie is at the base to provide a bit of scale.) There was some standing water in the shadows of the narrowest part of the gap, but the creek through the gap wasn't flowing. The rocky cliffs are home to a colony of black-footed rock wallabies, and we saw a couple of them hopping around the rocks in the distance. (This is the best photo I could get, using some digital zoom.)

Continuing back toward Alice Springs, we stopped at the grave of the Reverend John Flynn, who founded the Australian Royal Flying Doctor Service to provide medical care to residents of the Outback. The black spot in the photo is one of the omnipresent flies that actually landed on the camera lens while I was taking the picture. The rock on the grave was the subject of some controversy. Apparently the original rock was sacred to the Aboriginal people, so after much wrangling, that rock was returned to them and traded for another rock.

Back in Alice Springs, we walked around the downtown area a bit. The area was pretty deserted, since it was getting to be evening and it was Good Friday. We window shopped a bit, then climbed up Anzac Hill, a big hill in the city that's topped by a war memorial. We watched the sun set and watched a huge full moon rise, then headed back down while watching the moon continue to rise in a pretty pink and purple sky. We stopped at one of the few restaurants that was open and had a good dinner (I had a BBQ chicken pizza and more of my favorites, potato wedges and sweet chili), got some ice cream and ate it in the car, then found our hotel.

It figures that the whole hotel thing would come together at the very end of the trip, in a hotel that we were only staying in for one short night. We stayed in the Crowne Plaza Alice Springs, and it was absolutely wonderful. The hotel was great, the room was fantastic, the A/C was awesome, and the laundry facilities were superb, so we washed all our clothes in preparation for packing up for the trip home. We spent the evening doing laundry and repacking for the next day's flight back to Sydney, then turned in for the night. I would have loved to spend a bit more time in Alice Springs, as it was a very pretty area with a lot of stuff to see and do, and we didn't really do it justice in a single afternoon. Plus, I would have loved to have spent more time in the Crowne Plaza, which as far as I can tell is the best hotel in Australia.

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Saturday, March 26th: Alice Springs to Sydney

We had an 11 AM flight from Alice Springs to Brisbane, continuing on to Sydney, so we woke up and reluctantly checked out of the Crowne Plaza. In the gift shop, I finally succumbed to the lure of the dreadfully cute stuffed wombats that we'd been seeing all over the country, and bought a big one. Luckily, Julie had room for it in her luggage, because mine was pretty full.

We topped off the fuel in the SUV and went to the airport just outside of town. Now, you may recall that when we rented this vehicle in Ayers Rock, there was some confusing information coming from the rental agent that I never did get completely sorted out. The gist of it seemed to be that if we returned the car before some time, we'd get a discount on the rental. So I wasn't really sure exactly how much the rental was actually going to cost (the price we'd reserved the car at, or less) and wanted to get a receipt when I turned the car in. (Getting a receipt would also help Julie and I sort out how much money she owed me when we got home in a couple of days, because I'd been paying for most everything on my card to rack up frequent flier miles.) Unfortunately, the booth was unmanned - all you could do was drop off the keys and information. All the other agencies' booths were manned (go figure), but not the one we needed. So I picked up the courtesy phone and explained my situation to the woman on the other end of the line. She couldn't help me, but she said the agent was over in the car washing area and she'd send somebody over. Fair enough. So I waited, and waited, and nobody ever showed, so I went back to where Julie was waiting on me to tell her what was going on. Shortly thereafter, though, I saw somebody that looked like a rental agent come walking through, and I followed her to the counter and explained that I wanted a receipt.

Well, strangely enough, she couldn't give me one. According to her records, the car had already been rented to somebody else, so she couldn't close my file and get a total. I suppose that's why they were saying they'd give me a discount or something if I returned it by some time, because they'd already rented it to somebody else. And we could have, in fact, easily gotten the car there by that time if we'd been clear on exactly what was going on. So, I turned in the keys and she took my cell number and said she'd have her manager call me with the total later in the day, which never happened. (I eventually found out how much it cost by checking my online credit card statement when I got back home, and thankfully it was the rate that we'd been quoted when we reserved the car in the first place - I wouldn't want to have to argue over price from half a world away.)

So, with the car turned in, we boarded our flight for Brisbane, had a brief layover for a plane change, and then continued on to Sydney. The flight from Brisbane to Sydney was a little bit hellish, because we were sitting in the back of the plane with a gaggle of unaccompanied, unsupervised kids, apparently brothers and sisters about 8-12 years old. They yelled, screamed, pushed buttons, and generally made a nuisance of themselves, and none of the passengers close to them, nor the flight attendants who were in charge of them, really ever told them to settle down. It was pretty obnoxious.

We landed in Sydney a bit before 6, and kind of wanted to try to see the bats fly out of the botanic gardens at dusk. We retrieved our bags, and caught a taxi with a driver that seemed to know a lot better shortcuts than the guy we'd had our first day in Sydney. We were staying in the same hotel again (seemed simpler when we were booking to not have to check out two different hotels, so we found one we liked and booked it for both passes through Sydney), and the taxi ride was much shorter and cost like half of what we'd paid the first time. We got to the hotel, got checked in, and quickly headed out into the gathering dusk to run up to the botanic gardens. Unfortunately, the gates to the gardens were locked up by the time we got there, so we decided instead to wander down to the Hard Rock, which was located near where we'd first picked up our rental car in Sydney, within walking distance of our hotel, for dinner and t-shirts. Along the way, we passed through Hyde Park, with the trees now illuminated and very pretty. And as we passed through that area, we started seeing the bats flying by overhead, so we sat and watched them for a while. So we didn't get to see them take off en masse, but we did get to see a stream of them flying south over the park, which was pretty cool.

The wait at the Hard Rock was interminable, the service was slow, the food was sub-par, and they were sold out of the t-shirts that I liked, so that was kind of a bust. After dinner, we headed back to the hotel to make our final preparations for the long flight home.

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Sunday, March 27th: Sydney to Atlanta

It was Easter Sunday, so we were a little worried that we'd have hassles getting to the airport, but we got a taxi quickly and easily. The taxi ride was, again, quick and cheap. The rides to and from the airport in our second pass through Sydney were cheaper than just the ride from the airport the first time through. The check-in line was long and slow, and made a bit longer by Julie getting pulled aside for an in-line baggage screening, but we still got checked in with plenty of time to spare. Our flight left around 11 AM, and was a bit shorter (like 13 hours, I think) than the last hop across the Pacific. The timing was worse (leaving early in the morning rather than late at night), though, so it was harder to even try to catch naps along the way. I mostly listened to my iPod, read, and put on my blindfold and tried to sleep. I was also quite thankful that I wasn't sitting a couple of rows up and one seat over, because the girl sitting behind that seat found about 20 different ways to kick, punch, rock, shake, and otherwise bang on the seat in front of her, and both her parents and the woman sitting in the seat she was abusing just let it go on. I would have snapped before we even left the gate, when the girl was laying on her back in her own seat, and kicking the back of the seat in front of her with the bottoms of both her feet.

We arrived in LA before we left, at about 6 AM, having seen both a sunset and a sunrise in relatively rapid succession, and made our way through customs. The customs guy told me a Georgia/Georgia Tech joke that I really didn't hear because my ears were still stopped up, and didn't get when he repeated it, but I suspect it was vaguely insulting. But whatever, he's the guy with the stamp, y'know? We had a couple of hours to sit and wait, and my body was really craving like a chili dog or something, but I forced myself to have more breakfast to start getting back into the right time frame. The flight from LA to Atlanta took off at 9 AM and got in at about 4 PM, my parents picked us up at the airport, and our vacation came to a close.

This was, by far, the best vacation I've ever been on. The duration was nice, because a week plus a couple of weekends was the longest I'd been away from work for any reason since I started working. About halfway through, the whole trip started to feel like summer vacation when I was a kid, which was really nice. The trip itself worked out about as well as you could hope for. Aside from Julie's trips to the emergency room (which weren't a big deal, really) and the Melbourne flight fiasco, everything went smoothly and pretty much exactly as planned. The exchange rate made things relatively affordable, especially with two people sharing the costs. Although we didn't talk to that many Australians, everybody we did deal with was very friendly and helpful to us. The country itself was beautiful everywhere we went, and most of it was gloriously uncrowded and relaxing. Even the weather cooperated, for the most part. I really can't wait to go back to Australia, and really encourage everybody to go if you ever get the chance - you won't be disappointed.

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