The next day we drove five hours across the Australian Outback to Alice Springs. The stark desert land is beautiful to behold, with the highway cutting a straight seam from one horizon to the other. We arrived in Alice Springs around lunch time and sought out a cafe in the Todd Mall, an open pedestrian area in the town center. Alice Springs is a fairly large town, with streetlights and roundabouts. I can't say the food is very impressive. Most cafes are of the sports bar variety, with a couple in the deli/coffee shop style. The latter seem to have more variety, but that isn't saying much. The Woolworth's in Alice Springs is a well-stocked grocery store and even had a large selection of gluten-free products for Susan. [Susan: Yay, chocolate chip shortbread cookies! They also had a variety of pastas, cereals, granola bars, and presumably even bread somewhere though we didn't look for it. We've been using rice and corn thins covered with peanut butter as a substitute. :)]
We drove another hour and a half out of town and ended up at our accommodation for the next three days, the Glen Helen Resort in West MacDonnell National Park. The drive is through a gorgeous desert countryside of spinifex grass (imagine grass made out of cactus needles) and acacia and gum trees. This park reminds me most of Big Bend National Park in Texas, one of my favorite places in the world.
Glen Helen Resort is nestled against the red cliffs of Glen Helen Gorge. It has a bit of a summer camp atmosphere. The old rooms, with cinderblock walls and lace curtains, are quaint and charming. The staff is friendly. Wifi is hit and miss – you have to walk outside towards a work shed where the router is mounted on a roof somewhere. The password will cost you $10 for the day. They have a bar and a restaurant, both are pretty good, and live music some nights.
Today we woke up with the sun, as we've been doing each day, to get an early start on the desert heat. Our goal was to visit lots of sites on the east side of the park, between our resort and Alice Springs. A few sites in the park are at the end of dirt (aka unsealed) roads. Some require 4WD. I wanted to make sure we could get to these, so I made sure to rent a 4WD vehicle. But when we picked it up yesterday, they told us we could only travel on the dirt roads, but not the 4WD roads because we had an "intermediate" 4WD vehicle (a Nissan X-Trail). Here's how it works: regular rental cars aren't allowed on dirt roads. Intermediate 4WD trucks are allowed on dirt roads, but not on 4WD roads. Full-size 4WD trucks are allowed on all roads.
We visited several gorges and chasms along the rocky range of the West MacDonnell. About a billion years ago, this area was home to a mountainous region as tall as the Himalayas. After hundreds of millions of years, incredible forces stretched, compressed, and twisted this land. Now much of the geologic record has been turned on its side and eroded, so that simply walking South to North lets you move through time. I was amazed to be standing on rocks that were 850 million years old. In Alice Springs there is gneiss rock that is nearly 2 billion years old. Incredible.
[Susan: Cool things I learned at the park: The red dust is basically just rust. The iron in the rock that became the dust has oxidized. Spinifex grass is basically like nature's firestarter. They are filled with resin, so they quickly burn. The Aborigines would burn the spinifex at certain times of the year (probably when there was about to be a lot of water). Lots of green plants would grown up where the spinifex had been, providing food and bringing wildlife (more food) into the area.
Also, if you love birds, you must come to the desert. They are so numerous and easy to spot due to the sparse vegetation, and as a bonus there are lots of colorful ones. Although we saw a lot of varieties at the park, we've seen almost as many at the natural sights we've visited. Of course I always forget to carry the binoculars. My favorite spot was at the Ellery Creek Big Hole--very creatively named. One branch on a tree had 20 or so tiny birds that flocked together with rainbow bee-eaters swooping about, and some duck-like bird swimming in the pond. Awesome.]
After a long twilight drive back to the resort (which I don't recommend because you risk smacking a kangaroo), we're now relaxing with some more Australian red wine and some gluten-free chocolate chip cookies we picked up at the store. We tried the grill-your-own experience here at the resort, but were disappointed. Gas grills here are thick metal plates that take forever to heat up and can only cook by conduction, so the vegetable skewers they provided failed to launch. But the fish was good.
Tomorrow we set out for the west side of the park and we plan to drive an old dirt road up to the Tropic of Capricorn. I've never driven to the tropics before, so this should be fun.
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