Sunset at Uluru

Check this out, 13 July, 2008.

Uluru

We spent the day in and around Uluru on Saturday, 12 July. The weather was beautiful again, as it's been in the desert so far - sunny, blue skies. We walked some trails up to and along parts of the rock, just revelling in the splendour of it.
Bill Bryson is an author that writes very witty books about his travels, often finding the funny and obscure in anything and everything. But I found that in his book on Australia ("In a Sunburnt Country"), he was virtually tongue-tied when it came to Uluru. He was talking about the fact that Uluru is very far from anywhere. He and a friend were going there from Alice Springs, and here's the quote, his travelling companion was speaking: "Well, I suppose we'd better go and see if this bloody rock is worth a 600-mile round trip." All Bill has to say is, "It was."


















We spent part of the morning exploring a rock formation not too far from Uluru, called the Olgas, although the Aboriginal name is Kata Tjuta (means Many Heads). There was a 7.4 walk around one of these cones of rock, and that proved to be a wonderful walk. We had to bribe the girls with chocolate on occasion to keep them going, but we had fun and even built a little inukshuk, just to leave something Canadian behind (you have to look closely in the picture to see it).

Coober Pedy

The next town after Woomera was Coober Pedy, 369 km away. We stayed two nights there, in order to get to Uluru in one day. It was nice to have a break from all the driving, and Coober Pedy was such an interesting place. It is the opal capital of the world, and if Canadians think Sudbury is a moonscape, they haven't seen this place! We went on a tour of the town the morning after we arrived, which included an opal mine, plus some of the 'buildings', most of which are entirely or partially underground. The name of the town is derived from the Aboriginal words "kupa peti", commonly assumed to mean "white man in a hole." The early settlers lived in dugouts to escape the summer heat, with the bonus that the homes were warm in the cooler winter months. These underground houses maintain a year-round temperature of about 22 celsius.



We had a look at a couple of churches, one of which is an old opal mine, plus an underground hotel and a house. They are very cave-like (obviously), but interesting. On this tour, we also went noodling for opal, which is just like fossicking, or looking on the ground or in discarded debris from mines. We found a few little pieces of opal with a few flecks of colour, but nothing valuable!

Serbian Church

















Roman Catholic Church
























There is also a golf course in Coober Pedy - oh, did I mention that there is no grass in this town? Well, the school playing field has grass, and two houses had some greenery in their yards, but the rest of the town was dust. Likewise the golf course. For each hole, there was a raised platform with some artificial turf for the tee off, the fairways were just beige sand, and the 'greens' were black, as they had been sprayed with tar to keep the sand from blowing away. They were still called greens though. And true to the Aussie sense of humour, there was a sign that read "Please keep off the grass"!














I really liked Coober Pedy, and after spending a day there, we began to see where there were more housing developments tucked into the hillsides. It was a very interesting place.





Sunrise, 11 July

Onwards and Upwards

After Adelaide, we headed north and slightly west up the Stuart Highway through Port Augusta, the "Crossroads of Australia". There was a roadsign there that had an arrow pointing west that read 'Perth and Western Australia', and an arrow pointing north that read 'Darwin and Northern Territory'. So we headed north. This is where the real desert and outback begin, the roads were straight and level, although what appeared to be a flat landscape wass actually more undulating than we thought, as we drove through some hillier areas. Someone had said that they planned this road to traverse the more interesting parts of the country, to keep the drivers occupied. One thing we also noticed is that almost everyone we passed waved, and this happened all through this part of South Australia and into the Northern Territory, with bigger greetings among the Britz caravan drivers! The landscape varied more that I thought it would for a semi-desert, with some areas having more low vegetation that others, and many large, flat salt-pan lakes.
We took a detour into Woomera, about halfway up to Coober Pedy, and 8 km off the highway. The roadhouse on the highway at Pimba (petrol prices had been creeping up and it was $1.89 per litre here!) was just like out of a movie - low ceilings, a long bar across the back and the walls were covered with licence plates from mostly Australia, but there was one patch of international plates, including a couple from Ontario.


To get back to Woomera, it is in a former prohibited area, and I will quote the tourist brochure: "The Woomera Prohibited Area is the largest land-based missile and rocket range in the Western world... with firing ranges (mapped out) in 1947. Initially a joint project between Britain and Australia, the site continues to host a raft of space activites. NASA operated a deep space tracking station at Island Lagoon (near Woomera)..." So that is its history. It was a very quiet, bleak place with not too many people around. We continued on our way...

We're Back!

Hello again, we are back both internet -wise, and from our holiday. The last two weeks were the second of the school holidays, between second and third terms. School resumes tomorrow, Tuesday, although teachers were back today for a pupil-free day. Keep checking back in the next week, as I will be chronicling our trip to the Red Centre of Australia.

To start with, we rented a campervan in Sydney on 6 July and started the long drive across the country to Adelaide. The first leg of the trip took us through the Blue Mountains to a town called Orange (the girls really wanted to go to a place called Orange). We had a good look at some of the spectacular scenery of this mountain range, including a stop at the lookout for the Three Sisters.














We saw a bit of the Outback as we drove through western New South Wales, including a herd of cattle on the road that we had to drive very slowly through.

We drove through the town of Hay and on to our second camp site, at Balranald. There is a fruit fly exclusion zone around this part of Australia, so we had to be careful to buy only what we could eat and not bring any fruit across the borders of this zone. There were lots of fruit fly signs at the side of the road, warning about transporting fruit across borders, including ones about the war against fruit flies. I guess it would be funny if they really weren't serious about this problem!


Entering South Australia, we were in a small wine growing region around Renmark, which was a really beautiful place along the Murray River, but the most beautiful part of the trip so far was the Barossa Valley, north west of Adelaide. We took some time to explore and went to a few wineries for some tasting and purchasing. This area was so much better than the Hunter Valley, it was bigger - there were vineyards as far as the eye could see in places, and more beautiful. We stayed there one night and then went on to Adelaide.




























Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, and is a city of about a million people. We visited Ayer's House, the residence of Henry Ayer, seven-time governor of South Australia and the namesake of Ayer's Rock, now known as Uluru.

Happy Canada Day!

Firstly, we just want to let you all know that we are still around, but not blogging as much as we would like because our internet has been down again - the latest fly-by-night internet provider has been bought out again, and I refuse to give money to a company called Supernerd (the people who bought out Blitz telecom, our second provider), so we are patiently awaiting the local telephone network to come through with service - might take another week, though. Anyway, we are in Sydney, ready to head off on our next adventure - the Outback, Uluru and Alice Springs, but first, Happy Canada Day!

We had a party last Sunday, the 29th, to celebrate our country's birthday. The dress code was red and white, and it was nice to see that most people willingly complied with our request. There were a couple of other Canadians at the party, John's sister came down from Sydney, and there is a couple on exchange in a town 25 km south of us that also came. We enjoyed an afternoon of good food and good company, the weather was awesome (winter here, I hate to tell you, is just beautiful - the sun shines almost everyday, and although the mornings are chilly, around 5 degrees, the days warm up to almost 20).