Farewell, and Hello

I'm sitting here watching the sun play over the surface of Uluru. A fitting end to my four month trip around WA and NT. Now I head south, back to Adelaide and home.

Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park, NT

I've driven just over 20,000km, spending $4,500 on petrol. More importantly, I've walked over 600km on a dozen or more trails, spending five weeks - over a quarter of my holiday - on walking trails. I've been to many special places and met some cool people. Maybe I've learnt a thing or two as well. Australia is much vaster than I imagined, it is full of life, there doesn't seem to be any emptiness out there.

Thanks for all your comments and emails along the way, I'm glad you've enjoyed reading my blog as much as I have writing it.

Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park

It's an image every Australian has been overexposed to. Uluru. The Rock. I didn't have high expectations, but when I first saw it on the horizon, I was still left breathless. It really is awe insprining.

Uluru - Kata Tjuta National Park, NT

The rock climb. I'd be interested to know, how many Australians who visit the park do the climb. Is it mostly internationals? The climb is not noted on the map amongst the other walks, the distances and times are not mentioned. There is no information on how to access the walk, only a request not to climb it, and safety advice should you wish to, including listing the symptoms of a heart attack.

The national park was created in the 1950s, the land excised from the adjoining Aboriginal reserves created in the early 1920s. In 1983 the federal government agreed to close the climb. In 1985 the park was returned to the local indig people, on the condition the land be leased to the government - to be jointly managed as a national park - and they reneged on the climb - it was to remain open. There is no longer any real discussion as to whether the climb should be open or not, it now a matter of when it will be permanently closed. Last year, in a draft of the next 10 year management plan, it was recommended that the climb should be permanently closed.

Uluru or Ayers Rock? Well, since dual naming was officially adopted in Australia in 1993, either, both. So in December 1993 Ayers Rock was renamed Ayers Rock / Uluru. Then, in 2002, the order was reversed, Uluru / Ayers Rock. Most Australians though simply refer to it as Uluru. The road signs are a real mixture, near Alice, Uluru or the dual name. Closer to the rock, they revert to using Ayers Rock. In the national park, exclusively Uluru.

Then there is Yulara, the town created in 1984 some 20 kilometres from the rock. When it opened, all the existing motels, airstrip and other buildings at the base of the rock were demolished and the land remediated. The road signs point to Yulara, but when you get there, you are left wondering if you are about to turn off into the town or not. There is no mention of the Yulara name, it is called Ayers Rock Resort. The town was created by the NT government - hotels, motels, caravan park, supermarket, all the hallmarks of a designer town. When the town in it's enterity was divested of by the government to a private company in 1997, that company adpoted the name Ayers Rock Resort. No Uluru, no Yulara.

Modelling the socks and sandals look, my feet were too injured for those hiking boots, I hiked the short circuits of Kings Canyon, Kata Tjuta / The Olgas, and a walk I was particularly looking forward to, the base walk around Uluru.



The Valley of the Winds walk, through Kata Tjuta / The Olgas, is pretty special. We are not overexposed to images of the Kata Tjuta, so it is all a pleasant surprise. Just 30 kilometres from Uluru, each visible from the other, they are similar, yet very distinct from each other. Uluru is an inselberg, the term monolith now frowned upon. Contrary to popular belief, it is not Australia's largest inselberg. Just down the road, it number three, Mt Cromer. Think western movie, Utah, the granite plug look. Over in WA, Mt Augustus claims the first prize. 1,000 kilometres inland from the coast, it looks every part a mountain, covered in trees and plants, and nothing like a single rock. Uluru, the second biggest, but every bit rock. Kata Tjuta is a different type of rock to Uluru, Uluru being granite, Kata Tjuta being conglomerate. It is a a series of 36 steep-sided domes, plenty of trees and grasses spread throughout it. Pretty special walking.

I saved the best till last for my four month holiday. I had been looking forward to this, the 10 kilometre base walk around Uluru. To see it close up, to see the waterfalls and vegetation that benefits from the rainfall running off the steep sides.



Uluru Base Walk map

Download Google Earth KML file

Download kml file of the Uluru Base Walk to view in Google Earth or adapt to use as a navigational aid in a GPS unit

The Valley of the Winds Walk, Kata Tjuta

Download Google Earth KML file

Download kml file of the Valley of the Winds Walk in Kata Tjuta to view in Google Earth or adapt to use as a navigational aid in a GPS unit

Ten very stupid things

What would a travel blog be without a list of the ten most stupid things I have seen people do in these last four months? Well, here she is, in no particular order.

1. Two lovely, albeit stupid, Canadians cooking sausages over the fire, one sausage at once, neatly skewed on a 25cm wooden skewer - too short to be able to hold close to the fire. Result: burnt outside of snag, uncooked inside, hot fingers. They were lovely people but.


2. A backpacker provoking a snake with a stick. "It's safe," he tells me, "the stick is longer than the snake." It was, or so he thought, a rare yellow taipan snake, very poisonous, prior to the introduction of anitvenom in 1984 there were no known bite survivors.


3. Driving a 2WD car - not the stupid bit - wait for it, on the wrong side of a dirt road - the driver had found the so-called Sweet Spot on the road. Problem? Two relatively fast travelling 4WD's approach each other, the 2WD is lost in a cloud of road dust, head on collision between the oncoming 4WD and the 2WD. Bloody dangerous, bloody stupid.


4. Driving a 4WD vehicle on a 4WD track, 4WD mode not engaged - to save fuel - tyres at full bitumen pressure - too lazy to deflate - and with a very inexperienced dirt road driver - second time on a dirt road. Result? Vehicle roll-over, a 3,000km emergency medical airlift for a fractured vertebrae victim, uninsured car a write off, a true holiday-ruiner (I didn't see this, a friend of a friend.)


5. The Top End. Asking at a roadhouse for the weather report. Reply? "Look outside, same tomorrow as today. Same next day too." To be honest, I almost fell for this one too, but I goofed out on asking, I had an instinct if I might be ridiculed.


6. Hiking 12km in thongs along a rocky path in Katherine Gorge. Maybe this one is undeserved, I've spent the last three days walking in sandals due to my injured feet. Maybe he was just a very tough guy, or just stupid, dunno.


7. Driving with a broken windscreen. Not a problem if you do it right, I saw a few cases. This one though, exceptionally stupid. Shattered but intact windscreen, 20cm hole punched through driver's main field of view, covered in a clear - well, clear-ish - plastic bag. Vehicle seen driving out of a major town in the NT, one where I know there was a windscreen replacement workshop.


8. Driving a 4WD with over-inflated tyres on a sandy track. Common advice, let the tyres down to 20psi. They were very clearly struggling to drive the vehicle, I followed them for many kilometres. They had reduced their tyre pressure by 10psi, to 35psi, the recommended tyre pressure for the rear wheels on a bitumen road. Same car model as mine, so I was quite familiar with the recommended tyre pressures. Even when they asked me, they decided to disregard the manufacturer's label on the car concerning tyre pressure, and 20psi, that's absurd, or so they thought. Keep battling mate, and damaging every track you drive on.


9. Dropping stones off a cliff into the Katherine River, to test the water depth - as if they could even hear the rock in the water - so they could jump the eight or so metres. Incidentally, a saltie was found in the river a few weeks later.


10. Free camping in Kakadu National Park, on Aboriginal land. Stupid, but it gets better. Lighting a campfire, which was easily seen from the nearby official campsite with the ranger in attendance. There is a $5,500 fine per person for leaving the road and being in an unauthorised area, including free camping. And this before we even mention the respect thing, it is, after all, the local indig folk's land they are letting us cross.

Fuel economy of a 1997 Mitsubishi NJ Pajero

This is, without doubt, the most boring blog post ever. I include it here, tucked between some more interesting posts, not for my friends to read, but so the great Google can gobble it up and spit it out to fellow travellers who might, like myself some six months ago, want to know these details.

The fuel economy for city driving for a 1997 NJ Mitsubishi Pajero is 15.0L/100km, for country driving 14.9L/100km. I include that statement for Google's benefit, the detail to explain that is below. I don't have the foggiest idea what it uses in city driving.

FUEL ECONOMY	4WD TRACK		CITY	DIRT ROAD	OPEN BITUMEN ROAD
	20km/h	40km/h	60km/h	80km/h	90km/h	100km/h	110km/h	130km/h
No roof rack		22.5L				13.4L **	14.9L	18.2L
Roof rack*				15.0L	14.1L	14.6L	17.4L
*Roof rack loaded only with additional spare tyre **Out of interest, with a fierce tailwind, this dropped to 11.8L/100km (100km/h). The 18.2L/100km for the 130km/h was into a headwind, so might be lower in normal driving conditions.

And also useful, is a table of tyre pressures. These are useful for when you need to deflate the tyres for a 4WD track, or to reinflate them to bitumen road pressure after leaving a 4WD track or dirt road. The pressure reading will be different depending on tyre temperature, so reinflating the tyres after leaving a dirt road or 4WD track can be a little troublesome.

TYRE PRESSURES	NORMAL LOAD				HEAVY LOAD
	FRONT		REAR		FRONT		REAR
	COLD	HOT	COLD	HOT	COLD	HOT	COLD	HOT
BITUMEN	26psi		29psi		30psi	31-34psi	35psi	36-41psi
					11 seconds 2		15 seconds 2
DIRT ROAD 1 80km/h & 4WD high-gear mode					26psi	30psi	30psi	35psi
4WD TRACK 4WD mode					17psi	20psi	17psi	20psi
1. The dirt road pressure is 10% below bitumen road pressure. This helps to keep tyres intact on dirt roads with sharp rocks and improves grip on the slippery surface. On worse roads, deflate by a further 10% or more to suit. 2. Time in seconds of how long to deflate tyre from bitumen to road pressure to reach dirt road pressure. As a guide, every 30 seconds 9psi is let out of the tyre.

These pressures are as per the manufacturer's recommendations.

An abrupt end at Ellery Creek

Like I said, my hike of the Larapinta Trail (see earlier blog post) came to rather an abrupt end midway along it, at Ellery Creek. I'm at pains to describe exactly what happened, but one moment I was excitingly opening my food drop package, and moments later it seemed to game over.

Larapinta Trail, West Macdonnell Ranges, Alice Springs

I didn't want to taint my previous post about the Larapinta Trail with this ending. It was with great reluctance and disappointment that I decided to exit the trail here, at Ellery Creek. I had hiked five days and 100 kilometres, six days and 120 kilometres remained.

At the campsite, the open food drop box beside me, I removed all my various foot bandages, some merely for protection, others for injuries. What I saw had me a little gob smacked, for I knew this could only mean the end of my hike. As some of you know, my immune system conspires against me. One author of a novel I read when talking of a similar condition, described the double edged sword that medication treatment held, "it was not so much pain relief with side effects, but effects with side relief."

Ellery Creek was a good spot to exit the trail, the main bitumen road lay just one and half kilometres to the south. The following morning, I bid farewell to my new trail friends, as they continued on eastwards. I plugged in my iPod, I hate it when I see hikers walking with iPods, but my hike was over and I needed cheering up. If anything, it helped me remove myself from the natural world, an attempt to pull me back to our world of cars and cold supermarkets. I walked slowly, hiking boots carefully attached to my pack, crocs on my feet, out to the bitumen road. I stopped by the emergency phone, checking out the criteria for it's use. On the road I hitched a ride into Alice Springs with a local retired butcher doing some plumbing work for his son. He had spent almost his whole life in Alice, he had seen it transformed from a town of 1,500 people with an unreliable railway to the south, and a hastily constructed world war two single lane bitumen road to the north, to a town with 25,000 people. He recalled from his childhood how the train came almost to the main street, how there was just one house on the other side of the Todd River, now there is urban sprawl.

In Alice I phoned each of the four medical clinics in town. None could fit me in for a further five days. One rather hopefully offered me an appointment on August 26, some 14 days away. In terms of infections, five days was an eternity, 14, well, at least four times an eternity. So I had no choice but to wait four hours in Emergency, simply to get some antibiotics.

The following day I decided I would pay a little visit to the Old Telegraph Station, which is where I would have finished hiking the Larapinta Trail. The trailhead stood some distance from, and well out of sight, of the Old Telegraph Station. Shunned to a obscure corner of the carpark, the trail's presence was left unmentioned amongst the short walks trailhead in the Old Telegraph Station's grounds.

On that sunny afternoon I gave up the idea of completing the trail. When I exited the trail, I thought I would spend a week recovering, checking out some Alice sights and the distant Uluru and Kings Canyon, but having partook of the convenience of the supermarket with it's boundless food choices, and realistically assessing the health of my feet, I realised returning to the trail in seven days time was impossible. I tallied up my time spent on hiking trails in the previous four months of travel, and it rather neatly totalled 600 kilometres. It had been, in anyone's book, an excellent hiking season.

Hopefully a few kilometres remain in my feet, I want to walk around Uluru and Kings Canyon, but we shall see. What else could anyone do. The Larapinta Trail will wait for me.

The Larapinta Trail

This is my first trip to the Red Centre Green Centre. Yup, very green Centre. This has been an excellent season for rainfall in central Australia, the infamously dry Todd River in Alice Springs has flowed five times already. Everywhere is green, and desert wildflowers are in bloom.

Larapinta Trail, West Macdonnell Ranges, Alice Springs

On the second day of the Larapinta Trail hike I met two girls from Alice. They were hiking the Trail because it had been such an excellent season. They assured me the landscape was covered in green plants, normally it was dominated by dry spinifex and red rock. One had lived in Alice for 20 years and knew her flowers well, some of the ones we were seeing are so rare she did not know what they were. They only flower after consistent rains, and that hasn't happened in twenty years. In the first four months of this year, it rained 372mm, last year only 116mm of rain fell, 302mm the year before that.

Almost every day I saw flowers I did not recall seeing previously. Some on mountain tops - many, some in open country, some only in sheltered gorges. They came in every colour: red, purple, yellow, pink, blue.

The Larapinta Trail took me somewhat by surprise, not least because of how green it was and the flowers, but also how magnificent the landscape was. It struck me as a kind of mixture between the Flinders Ranges and New Zealand. Dramatic red parallel mountain ranges, rocky outcrops, gum lined creeks - some with large pools of water, some dry. New Zealand? The mountain tops, vast windswept valleys with small, almost alpine like plants.

The weather in the desert winter is perfect for hiking. Warm, sunny days, between 18 and 20 degrees. Cold nights, about zero to five degrees. Nice for a small campfire, although, of course, we didn't have any, the collection of firewood is not permitted in national parks.

There are a few curiosities along the trail. Firstly, the debacle of Mt Sonder. All the literature and signage suggests you climb to the summit, when you do not. The cairn, marking the alleged summit, even states it is Mt Sonder summit, 1380m above sea level. You can't miss the Mt Sonder proper summit, laying immediately in front of you, across a small gully some 750m or so to the north east. The false summit is about 30 metres lower than the proper summit. This theme is continued, between Serpentine Gorge and Ellery Creek lies a trig, with a somewhat homemade look about it, which it would have, since it doesn't even mark the highest point of the low rocky outcrop, surrounded by larger mountains.

One website describes this section as "This is arguably the most boring section of the entire trail." Going further, "prepare to tear your hair out in frustration," referring to the constant hills and ridges the track follows, when there is a seemingly good route a few hundred metres to the south over flat land. "If you are a bird watcher or bushwalker this section may not be too bad," they state. Too right. Didn't mind a bit.

The trail regularly went up to the top of a hill or mountain, providing wonderfully scenic spots for breaks. From many of these Mt Sonder, and further beyond it, Mt Zeil, Northern Territory's highest peak, dominated the distant west.

I started from the western end of the trail, the alleged end of the trail. The trail starts just four kilometres north of Alice Springs at the Old Telegraph Station, running 223km westwards along the West Macdonnell Ranges to Mt Sonder. It made more logistical sense for me to start from the western end. I paid Alice Wanderer, a local bus company, $400 to transfer me from Alice Springs to the western end, which included two food drops along the way. The food drops are securely stowed in locked rooms, and they provided me with a plastic tub for each drop. If I hiked the trail out from Alice Springs, I would have to pay for the food drops to be driven out, and pay to be collected from the end. This would have cost something like $580, and I would have a schedule to meet.

I met several parties of hikers on the first day and night. The Mt Sonder summit (read false summit) hike is popular amongst day hikers. As it is a return hike, the campsite near the trailhead often has more people camping there: those starting out on the trail and about to undertake the summit hike, those just completed the summit hike, and those completing the trail and waiting for a lift back to Alice Springs. The campsite is not marked on the 2006 map edition, but is located just 200 metres from the trailhead, on the banks of Redbank Creek.

On the second night, at the excellent Finke River campsite, I was enjoying the free gas hotplates in the evening light, the sun having set just moments before, when a solitary hiker stumbled in. Cutting it fine, he had only left Redbank Gorge to hike the 26 kilometres at 11am. He had to catch up with his son, who had started out three days previously. I met the son the following day as i passed through a campsite, and the pair of them stumbled into a my campsite further down the trail just moments after the sun sunk over the horizon. We had similar hiking schedules, so hiked and camped together for the following days.

The trail is well marked with blue arrows, and generally well formed. Only on the rocky mountain tops did I ever stray from the trail, and usually it was just a matter of looking for the rocks crushed underfoot, or the white dust from within the crushed rocks.

Trail facilities are generally good. The shelter at Finke River was particularly impressive, of a similar standard to the Bibblimun Track and Munda Biddi Tracks in Western Australia. It included ample roofing, sleeping platforms, a vermin proof cupboard for food, multiple water tanks, a picnic table and benches, and, yes wait for it, a couple of gas hotplates. This shelter isn't shown on the 2006 edition maps, so a little research pays off. A good website for that would be the larapintatrail.com website, look at the Sections page for details of camp facilities and an honest, if not brutal, appraisal of the trail terrain. A little overwhelming perhaps to sort through before hiking any of the trail, but regardless a good supplement to the maps.

Water seems readily available at water tanks, and we had to drink none of the bore water that was about. Naturally, with so much rain, there was ample flowing water in the creeks. Many of the larger rivers required detours of several hundred metres to skirt around the widest, muddiest sections of the large pools.

I wasn't sure how long the trail would take me. The trail is divided into 12 sections, but some of these are defined as two day sections, with campsite options midway. That said, they didn't seem to be uncheckable far apart for a hiker like myself, so I used that as my template. So the trail could be hiked in as little as 11 or 12 days, but many hikers take their time, using up to 19 or 20 days. I had food for 16 days, and a few options to spread that food further, and there was kiosk near the end with a few basic supplies.

That said, my hike came to rather an abrupt end at Ellery Creek. I had hiked five days and 100 kilometres, six days and 120 kilometres remained.

There are two albums this time, one general album, and one devoted to all the desert wildflowers I saw.

General album:


Desert wildflowers album:

Download Google Earth KML file of the Larapinta Trail

Download kml file to view in Google Earth or adapt to use as a navigational aid in a GPS unit. Download file in GPX format to directly upload to most GPS units. Tracks and waypoints sourced from two sources. Source 1: Sections 7 through to 11 (excluding the last 6km of Section 11) - handheld GPS device. Source 2:- sections 1 through to 6 and Section 12 - from www.larapintatrail.com

Stats	The Larapinta Trail
	Saturday	Sunday	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday
	07/08/2010	08/08/2010	09/08/2010	10/08/2010	11/08/2010
	Redbank Gorge to Mt Sonder and return	Redbank Gorge to Finke River	Finke River to Waterfall Gorge	Waterfall Gorge to Counts Point	Counts Point to Ellery Creek
Distance	14.55km	25.91km	22.86km	17.68km	18.97km
Start Time	10.36am	7.41am	7.51am	8.11am	7.10am
End Time	3.15pm	3.27pm	3.56pm	5.46pm	2.57pm
Moving Duration	3h14m	5h21m	5h35m	5h38m	5h24m
Stationary Duration	1h25m	2h27m	2h38m	3h57m	2h23m
Moving Average	4.5km/h	4.8km/h	4.1km/h	3.1km/h	3.5km/h
Overall Average	3.1km/h	3.3km/h	2.8km/h	1.8km/h	2.4km/h
Oodometer	14.5km	40.5km	63.3km	81.0km	100.0km
Overnight Low	-0.2C	1.1C	0.9C	2.6C	-0.4C

Um...

It is with great relunctance and dissapointment that I have been forced to exit the Larapinta Trail early. I have walked five days and 100km, six days and 120km remain.

Larapinta Trail, West Macdonnell Ranges, Alice Springs

A blog post of those five days to come...