The Red Centre and the Top End


This year I decided that the time has come to leave overseas countries alone for a while and explore the country I live in. The plan at his stage is defined rather vaguely - take two months off work, pack the car, head north on the Stuart highway through the centre and the top end of Australia, and see what happens.

13/07/2011 - I added a few pictures from the Centre of NT. I also mapped our trip onto European scale (the very first picture) - I am sure that people who get to a different country when they go on a two-hour drive will be amused ;-)

26/07/2011 - I added pictures from Devil's Marbles, Daly Waters, Katherine Gorge, and a few random notes.

26/08/2011 - I've been home for two weeks and finally got around to sifting through the pictures taken in Lichfield and Kakadu.

South Australian outback

The first 1000 kilometres from Melbourne to Adelaide and then to Port Augusta are not particularly interesting - just the familiar gently rolling plains stretching from Victoria to South Australia. The only pleasant change is leaving winter rain behind somewhere between Adelaide and Port Augusta. However, north of Port Augusta the landscape quickly changes to dry steppes and the soil turns red, marking the transition to the outback.

Coober Pedy is the first interesting stop on the way north. It is a small town of around 4000 people. The main reason for its existence is opal - 95% of world opal is mined here. Living in the relatively populated and civilised eastern seaboard of Australia one forgets how big and rough the centre of Australia is. The very road we are driving on (Stuart highway) has been paved only twenty years ago. The road between Adelaide and Darwin was just a rough track before 1987, and Coober Pedy was accessed either by air or by a slow and bumpy road. TV has been available in the town for about twenty years, and running drinkable water for even less than that. Coober Pedy has a rough climate with temperature ranging from -5 in winter to +50 in summer. These temperature extremes combined with the absence of local building materials (trees do not grow here) prompted people to dig their houses into the sides of the hills. Today most people in Coober Pedy live underground, enjoying constant temperature of +25 year round. Apparently some of the underground houses are huge (the biggest house is 450 sq m) and have all modern amenities (except for windows, that is).


The Red Centre - Kings Canyon, Mt Olga, Rainbow Valley, MacDonnell Ranges

The centre of Australia and the outback is usually associated with the general vicinity of Alice Springs (give or take 500 kilometres), so we started entering the area only a few hours after leaving Coober Pedy. After an eight-year draught, the centre of Australia has got a record amount of rain in the last two years. As a consequence, all plants are growing like crazy and all animals are taking advantage of the available food and are breeding in record numbers. One of the most noticeable animals turned out to be the common mouse. We started seeing them while driving, running around (or lying flattened) on the highway. There were quite a few at the lunch stop somewhere around the border between the South Australia and Northern Territory, scurrying around the tables searching for crumbs. But it was not until we drove into the beginning of the Simpson Desert (Rainbow Valley) that they came out in real numbers. They are not at all afraid of people, and while their running around was quite entertaining, we had to constantly be on the lookout for the mice trying to get into the food boxes. I would not want to be afraid of mice and travel in the central Australia at the moment. I saw a British tourist at one of the roadhouses on the way to Ayers Rock, sitting on a bench with her feet held up in the air and the expression of disgust on her face. When a local farmer noticed her, he chuckled and said 'Mate, she will develop her some real good stomach muscles in the next three days'.


Alice Springs to Katherine Gorge

We left Alice Springs and started moving further north. There is not much between Alice Springs and Katherine Gorge except a lot of savannah plains, a few quirky roadhouses, and Devil's Marbles.

Devil's Marbles is one of the iconic images of Central Australia, and as always when visiting iconic destinations I was a bit worried about being disappointed by it. However, it turned out to be really nice. The only catch is that one has to spend the night there to truly appreciate it - the place did not do much for me until about 30 minutes before sunset, when all rocks started glowing red.

Daly Waters is a very quirky place (I think it is too small to be called a town or a village) that takes pride in being in the middle of Australian nowhere. The permanent population, i.e. people who remain there in the Wet when all tourists disappear, is around 5 people (plus a girl who has been there for three years, but who is still not sure whether she counts towards permanent population).

After Daly Waters the weather finally started changing. Surprisingly, the weather and temperature remained almost unchanged throughout the whole 2,500 kilometre drive from Port Augusta to the vicinity of Katherine (an equivalent of a drive from London to the south of Spain). It got warmer and the nature changed from desert to sub-tropics in the last three-four hundred kilometres before Katherine (and then it changed from sub-tropics to tropics in only another 300 kilometres). Katherine Gorge is a beautiful gorge carved by Katherine river through the old plateau. Normally it is possible to kayak through the gorge. Unfortunately, a large salt-water crocodile remained in the river (the rangers usually catch them and move them to other areas, but this year the process was taking a while), so kayaking was not possible. I did a few hikes to the upper sections of the gorge - the scenery is just beautiful.


Grey Nomads

Australia has a fairly unique social group nicknamed 'grey nomads'. Grey nomads are people who reached retirement or took long service leave, bought a caravan or a motor-home, and drive around Australia. One can see them everywhere but in more populated places they get lost in the crowd. In Central Australia and the Top End there is hardly any local population, so grey nomads really stand out. Walking around camp grounds or caravan parks has a feel of attending a leisurefest exhibition - one sees everything from small cars with a tent, to massive four wheel drives loaded with all kinds of recovery gear, to huge three-bedroom-two-bathrom-and-jaccuzi motor-homes. We met a lot of interesting people: a couple in their 80s still camping and touring off-road in their old Land Rover; a couple who were touring around Australia for three years and did not have any plans of going home (I am not sure the concept of home still applies to them); people who have done over 20,000 kilometres through Australian outback on a motorbike. A very popular thing to do seems to be displaying owners' names and UHF channel of their radio on the back of the caravan or motor-home to allow fellow travellers to talk to each other while they are on the road.


NT News

Northern Territory feels quite different from the rest of Australia, and it is reflected in the news. Reading the local newspaper, a couple of strong themes quickly emerge:
- being pissed off at having a territory rather than a state status and being governed from Canberra
- being pissed off with the current Australian government (I agree with them here generally, and the current debacles with beef export and carbon tax are probably affecting NT more than other states)
- wildlife news featuring crocodiles being removed from swimming pools, snake bites, barramundi fishing, and stupid tourists
- local events that would be lucky to make it into the local community newspaper in the southern states.

NT is rather quiet news-wise, so events that are considered newsworthy here are often a bit unusual by Melbourne's standards. A few days ago a man in Darwin happened to capsize his boat when taking it out of the ocean, then bogged his ute trying to pull it out. A person who was passing by tried to help, but only succeeded in bogging down his own ute too. This happened at the low tide, so the incoming tide sank the boat and the cars. Granted, it was a rather unfortunate, embarrassing, and costly event, but I did not expect it to be featured in the central NT newspaper for five days in a row, two of them on the front page!

And here is today's front page news: 'NT soldier is blown up in a dunny explosion!' (that would be a toilet to the Americans and the British). Apparently, the guy went to the toilet, lit a cigarette, and for the reasons yet unknown the toilet caught fire. This news item occupied the whole front page of NT News, in spite of the fact that it was is just text (mercifully, the pictures were not available) and that it did not even happen in Northern Territory (the guy is stationed in Queensland).


Kakadu and Lichfield national parks

The last part of the trip was exploring the national parks at the top end of the Northern Territory - Kakadu and Lichfield.

I will not write much about Kakadu as I found that the park is interesting in a way that appeals more to the intellect than the visual senses. If you are interested just do a google search, there is a wealth of information about it online. A very short summary of it is that Kakadu is a rather unique monsoonal ecosystem, which goes through dramatic changes every year. It goes from almost completely submerged flood plains and raging rivers and waterfalls in the Wet to the widespread fires and dry creek beds in the Dry. However, it is not possible to see what makes Kakadu unique at any particular time of the year, as one will not see the process of the seasonal nature changes. To do so, one needs to either spend a year there, or read books, watch documentaries etc - something one can do without leaving home. I do not want to make the impression that Kakadu is not worth a visit. It definitely has its share of lovely spots - waterfalls, swimming holes, wetlands that are quite spectacular. However, the combination of relatively long distances between accessible places and the climate that makes exploring these places on foot difficult (at least for me - I do not handle high humidity well) made Kakadu a "been there, seen that, and probably won't be coming back" destination.

Lichfield is often called a small Kakadu. It is a very appropriate description - it has most things Kakadu does, but it is smaller, more accessible, and prettier. I liked Lichfield a lot more than Kakadu - nature there somehow felt more welcoming and nice. The creeks and rivers of Lichfield are especially nice - crystal clear water surrounded by tropical forest and fed by beautiful waterfalls.