There were only 14 passengers on the 115-seat Qantas Boeing 717 that flew us from Cairns to Ayers Rock on Australia Day. As we flew away from the Queensland coast the thick stormy clouds melted away and revealed the hard red earth that Australia is so famous for. Due to the plane being virtually empty the captain would instruct the passengers when to swap seats to the other side for the best views, meaning the landing at Ayers Rock Resort involved a sharp bank to the right to get a glimpse of the Olgas before straightening up and landing with the famous rock on the left hand side. Our good fortune continued on the ground as it took approximately 90 seconds for us to retrieve our bags and make our way to the Hertz desk where we received a free upgrade from the bog-standard Toyota Corolla we had booked to a giant Toyota SUV, which looked capable of marauding over even the toughest rocks.
Stepping out into the Red Centre sunshine the first thing that hit was the dryness of the air there, especially compared to Cairns, 37°c and not a drop of sweat. Most people have seen dozens of photos of Ayers Rock (these days known as Uluru) but this is no preparation for seeing the rock up close and personal. The photos don’t reveal the hundreds of square kilometres of virtual nothingness surrounding the rock, nor do they expose the ripples and roughness of the surface or the changing colour of the rock as the sun passes overhead, probably reaching optimum beauty around sunset. Neither do the photographs do any justice to the sheer massiveness of Ayers Rock, the reason why you can see it from miles around.
The only other scar on the otherwise stark landscape is the Olgas, forty kilometres from Ayers Rock. Remnants of the same mountain range as Ayers Rock these are a collection of smaller, rounded stubs of rock, but glowing in the same red hue. Wandering around the Olgas is perhaps more impressive than Ayers Rock itself as it is possible to insinuate oneself into the gorges and valleys winding between the rocks, one of the most impressive being the Valley of the Winds, named due to a ghostly breeze passing through that expires at each end of the valley. Peering over from one side of the Valley to the other gives the impression of having just discovered the future world revealed by H.G Wells time machine. Another aspect that is surprising when visiting this area is the amount of green around, the rocks are strewn with small plants and bushes, growing where it does not make any sense for anything to grow, and the ground around is covered in bushes and trees. It just adds an extra colour to the palette of the landscape.
It is common mistake made by visitors to Alice Springs that they could just drive over, or even walk, to Ayers Rock, not realising that the half-inch on the map is actually about 500km. The journey along the Lassiter Highway is through stark desert with only the occasional isolated roadhouse along the way. It would be a waste to drive that distance however without making the 3-hour detour up to Kings Canyon. Here the wonder is revealed from the top of the canyon rim, a short, steep ascent from the floor of the canyon. A 6km walk along the rim has become a highlight of many visitors trips to the red centre so Monika and I jumped at the chance to join them. The popularity is justified, the views showing rocky outcrops and what looks like a city of beehives sitting on top of the canyon. This stunning landscape completes a fitting trio with Ayers Rock and the Olgas.
We arrived in Alice Springs along the Stuart highway, a road that we had last travelled on almost two months ago on our trip up to Coober Pedy. We re-joined it about 900km further north than we had been before and completed our journey to Alice Springs. This is a famous city but nobody is really sure what it is famous for, being miles from anywhere? We did see some evidence of this - the School of the Air, the Flying Doctor Service, the Telegraph station and the views of the town from the top of Anzac hill confirmed the same isolation. Nowadays Alice Springs is becoming infamous for a spiralling crime rate. There are real problems around the town with alcoholism and substance abuse amongst the local aborigine communities. Due to this, throughout the Northern Territories petrol stations serve Opal fuel rather than Unleaded. Opal can be used in Unleaded vehicles but it has no fragrance so cannot be abused. I am not sure if this is the correct way to handle the situation but it does suggest that the problem is pretty significant. In fact just after we arrived at round 7pm I went out to the fish‘n’chip shop just round the corner. Along the way I heard bottles being smashed and women shrieking at each other and once I arrived at the chip shop the owner closed the steel window shutters behind me.
It was with some relief then that we flew out of Alice Springs the very next day. There are only about ten daily flights out of Alice Springs and it was with some luck that the flight taking us up to Darwin left just five minutes after the plane carrying my Mum took off back to Cairns, in fact we virtually walked side by side out to board the planes.
So we flew out of the dry, red desert and back into the soup of humidity in the Top End. In our hotel room in Darwin even the walls were sweating. Due to the wet season bringing this heat, humidity and the very real possibility of flooding I expected Darwin to resemble something of a ghost town so I was completely surprised to find the bars along Mitchell Street full to heaving as we arrived. Even a storm starting three seconds after we stepped into our hotel failed to dampen the spirits. This was what I expected to encounter along the East coast but never really saw it, I never thought we would find it here.
Other than the brilliant Library of the Northern Territory in the State Parliament building the main highlight of Darwin was the Museum and Gallery of the Top End seperated into three main sections. The first was an exhibit on all the dangerous, and not so dangerous animals of the region, including a 5m long saltwater crocodile named Sweetheart. The second exhibit described the terror of Cyclone Tracy, which decimated Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974, destroying virtually every building in the entire city. The dark room with a tape recording of Tracy playing over loud speakers was particularly spine-chilling. The final section, a gallery of aboriginal art was just as impressive and memorable.
Kakadu National Park is often touted as one of the most beautiful sights in all of Australia so we were disappointed to find it not so impressive. It is true that the wet season renders many sites off limits, even in a 4WD, which we didn’t have in any case. It may be thick rainforest and home to hiding saltwater crocs in the mangroves but even if we had of been able to visit Jim Jim Falls or the other sites it just didn’t quite get our heart rate pulsing the way other places had. The highlight for us was the aboriginal rock art paintings around the Nourlangie Rock area and the short, tough climb up the rock for a viewpoint of the surrounding landscape.
It seems as if our disappointment was felt as from here the climate and landscape changed. Heading South to Katherine we started to see evidence of the red centre exposing itself and the sky cleared for several days of virtually uninterrupted sunshine, the odd intense, relentless electrical storms keeping us entertained after sunset. Just outside Katherine is the entrance of the Katherine gorge, an area of real beauty. Walking along the trails through the gorge the scenery almost resembles that of an Arabian oasis, as did the searing heat. At the end of one trail we found a waterhole that is apparently croc-free, unusual in these parts. I was hot enough to jump in but I didn’t feel very relaxed swimming so it was a very brief dip! Just as inviting are the ‘hot’ springs on the edge of town but again here the crocs can turn up during the wet season!
From Katherine the scenery kept changing but remained constantly stunning, the rocks just becoming more rough edged and the ground glowing a deeper red the further into the Kimberley that we drove. We crossed into Western Australia and took note of the ridiculous time change and detoured off to visit Lake Argyle. This must be one of Australia’s best kept secrets, really. The red rocks, green undergrowth, white river beds and deep blue sky just making a mockery of my camera. It was a perfect place to spend a day relaxing by a (man-made) lake that is apparently 18 times the size of Sydney Harbour.
Everything is supposed to come in 3’s so I was not surprised to be letting out gasps of awe a couple of days later as we walked through Milima national park, right in the town of Kununurra. They call this national park the mini-Bungle-Bungles after the famous national park further south and it is obvious why. Hidden in a valley just 5km from the town centre jagged hills and giant domed rocks loom over the trail winding along the floor. Climbing up to the viewpoints was like seeing the landscape of another planet.
A few years ago I looked at a map of Australia and made a list of top 5 places I wanted to go. Alongside Coober Pedy (where we have been) and Kalgoorlie (where we plan to go soon) this list included the Bungle Bungles National park that sits in the Kimberley. Unfortunately the park is closed during the wet season from October through to April. Many operators offer scenic flights from Kununurra and other towns close by and ever since I found out that we would be here during the ‘Wet’ I had planned to take one of these flights. After seeing the Wolfe Creek crater in the movie of the same name I had added Wolfe Creek to the growing list of places to visit and there is one operator that combines both on a two hour scenic flight. I emailed the pilot from Darwin to enquire on availability, conditions, price etc and received an instant, positive reply. But then something happened, I had some sort of an epiphany. I was sat on a picnic bench one evening, somewhere between Katherine and Kununurra, watching the lightening flash all around me at intervals of less than one second. I suddenly realised that this is what I always look for, these experiences that you are part of and I was not sure if I could find that on a scenic flight, and I certainly didn’t want to stump up almost as much money as I have paid for a safari in the Serengeti to find out. It is possible that I would immerse myself in the dynamics of the flight and find satisfaction that way but I was suddenly scared that taking a scenic flight would be nothing more than browsing through a very expensive coffee table book of images. So unfortunately the Bungle Bungles and Wolfe Creek will remain unchartered territory for me! I was happy to find the ‘mini-Bungle-Bungles’ near Kununurra to get a taste of the real thing and for me that was worth more than flying over them for a snapshot.
This has become a decision that I have not yet regretted in the slightest. The journey from Kununurra to Derby and Broom is not exactly littered with sites and sights and we were worried that we had too much time to spend between them, in fact most guys heading in the same direction seemed to be going more than twice as fast but with the landscape changing around every twist and turn necessitating photo stops and our journey being interrupted by swarms of grasshoppers crossing the road or the occasional giant lizard basking on the hard shoulder our progress has been very slow indeed. We picked up a couple of hitch-hikers – Robin from France and Matthias from Argentina - who provided us with company for a couple of days as well as amusing reports of travels through South-East Asia and elsewhere, Robin had come overland all the way from Paris.
There is not much evidence of civilisation between Kununurra and Derby, just a couple of really small outback towns – the uninviting Halls Creek and the much more impressive Fitzroy Crossing, which is also the gateway to surprisingly pretty Geikie Gorge. Katherine, Kununurra and Halls Creek all seemed to suffer from some of the same issues with the indigenous population (As they are now known) as Alice Springs – groups of drunks out in the streets or hunting shade in the parks, a lot of screaming and shouting and generally unpleasant behaviour. We wanted to leave each town almost as soon as we arrived. The worst example was probably the very small one-road township of Timber Creek where it seemed the whole community was lying around outside the bar, which is handily attached to the petrol station. The only advantage of this was that it meant the community centre was empty and we could take a shower there in peace! These have obviously been challenges Australia has been facing for many years so the snapshot Monika and I experienced is probably less than worthless but it just seemed to us that the government only try to control the problem, and the people, through either the Opal fuel technique or through alcohol purchase restrictions in the towns of the Top End and Kimberley e.g. most towns only sell drinks with up to 3% alcohol. It just seems to us that this does nothing to actually address the situation and it doesn’t take a genius to work out that home-brewing is going to thrive and is probably more dangerous. It is depressing to compare the lives of these folk to those of the Maori in New Zealand where the communities have really developed in recent decades and are an important part of the whole fabric of the nation. It is true that many aborigine communities were decimated long before Australia probably even had a federal government, whole villages killed off by alien diseases brought in by the convicts and it is also true that the majority of aborigine communities are in the harsh environments of the outback where nobody else really wants to live but it does seem to me that the various Australian governments have approached the situation with an almost apartheid attitude and this is really sad. I know that Kevin Rudd made a huge national apology when he was Prime Minister but really I think that so much more could be done inside these communities. It feels horrible to enter these towns with a sinking feeling of despair and to try to get through them as quickly as possible and unfortunately I don’t hold out much hope that much will change in the foreseeable future. As I mentioned, Fitzroy Crossing was a much more impressive town. Why? Because here we met indigenous people working in all the different shops and businesses of the town, including the Visitor Centre, the only place where this was the case.
The final couple of stops on our road trip across the Kimberley were the towns of Derby and Broome, both significantly bigger than any other town we had seen since Katherine. The weather had held ever since Katherine so the one worry we had, that the road would flood, thankfully never came to pass. Last year this highway was 7m underwater at some points so we had been dreading something similar this year. Reaching Cable beach in Broome was a very odd experience. After days of dry land, searching for water sources and hunting for some cool shade the road ended at an expanse of perfect turquoise ocean. It is a fantastic sight to see the red rocks of the Kimberley fall away, literally, into the sea. Of course nothing is ever perfect so we were not able to swim in the sea due to the presence of the same evil killer jellyfish we had left in Port Douglas, so again we rushed for the shade to get out of the searing heat that was pushing 40°. The one advantage of it being the wet and stinger season is that all the hotels have knock-down rates posted outside so after bush camping under the stars every night since Darwin we checked into one and managed to find relief in the resort swimming pool.
From Broome we fly down to Perth, missing the long drive down the West coast, which is a shame because we have just watched the excellent movie ‘Red Dog’ which was set in Dampier, a few hours down the coast and it would have been good to follow it up with a visit!
P.S. My camera died from the humidity back in Townsville so these photos are a mix of those taken on Monikas far-superior camera (and by a far superior photographer!) and those taken with my brand spanking new camera. Hope you like them. I think this last leg has been the most scenic so if you want to see more, go here - https://picasaweb.google.com/bigafricantrip/AllansRTWPhotosNorthernTerritoryAndTheKimberleyAustralia
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