The Route

Day 1
-pick up route and sign up and pay fees before heading out of Adelaide

-headed into the Flinders Ranges where we hiked up to see some aboriginal cave painting. Very cool how that has lasted for thousands and thousands of years. It’s also interesting when you understand what some of the symbols mean and you can imagine what they might have been trying to say.

-swim in a community pool; looking for ways to cool down became one of the priorities.

-bush camped in kangaroo land. Bush camps are spots in the middle of the bush where there is no camp designation per say. You just pick a spot and camp. No one else around. Ben, having done this for 3 years, already has great spots all picked out.



Day 2
-long hike at Wilpena Pound. This is an important spot for the aboriginal community. There is a legend that goes with it that I don’t remember very well. The area is a “mountain” range shaped in a horseshoe. In the legend two large snakes end up forming this range. We hiked up at one end so we could see into the horseshoe valley. It was a long day. Settlers had also settled here in the 1800s but in the end conditions were just too harsh to grow crops or keep enough livestock. Remnants of that time can also be found there.

-evening at Iga Warta. This is a small aboriginal community, campsite run by Terry and Judy and their family. They were very hospitable. After a swim in their pool and cooking dinner on their fire, we sat around it for an evening of aboriginal storytelling and singing. Terry plays guitar and writes his own songs. They were simple songs though in English the lyrics were often a bit awkward but we all got into singing along. A favourite was “All we need is love to live in peace and harmony.” We translated it into the different languages that we spoke and went around the circle singing it many times. The other we’d often sing for the days after was “Oh my walla, is rumbling, is tumbling. Oh my walla is rumbling like a big bass drum. Do do dodo, do do do do.” (Walla=stomach)

While we were busy singing and storytelling, bread called damper was busy baking in the coals and the ash of the fire. We ate it later with lovely outback jam and cream. It was very delicious.



Day 3
-Iga Warta. In the morning Terry took us out to the ochre quarry pit and we participated in a spiritual ceremony where we got our faces painted with the different colours of ochre. Each colour represented a different element. White is a spiritual colour, yellow represents the sun, red the earth, pink breath and purple cleansing. In this ceremony we were asked to connect with our spirit, the mother earth who gives live, the breath and air around us and in us and cleanse through our bodies. The ceremony felt very spiritual. It was genuine. It was something personal and important that Terry wanted to share with us, it helped to bring us together. His big message was “Share, Care and Respect” both each other and mother Earth. That seemed to be what was most important to him, that we leave with that message imprinted in our brain and hearts.

-stopped at Lake Eyre, a huge salt deposit lake. It’s funny how they have creeks and rivers and lakes and signs up for them all but there’s actually nothing there. There’s an area that looks like there should be a creek there or a lake but there’s no water. Of course that’s because the water has all been dried up and if they were to get substantial rain fall (which they haven’t had for 8 years) the creeks and rivers would flow back into the lakes.

-thermal spa bath at Coward Springs, a very small little natural pool spa from water that springs from the earth here. There’s a deep underground water table that allows plants to grow in this very dry arid land.

-Williams Creek, population of 6 was having their annual Gymkhana. We got a bit of the tail end of it. Basically it’s a rodeo. Cowboys and girls from all around the outback come and race their horses and motorbikes and I’m not sure what else. It was strange to be in rodeo world. There were a couple hundred people there and many were excited to see new faces. The ‘mayor’ of the town greeted us and sat with us for a bit and the outback version of George Clooney chatted with Ute for a long time. There was a dance in the evening and after we’d had our dinner of kangaroo fajitas some of us went back to go dancing. I was too tired and crawled into my swag instead.



Day 4

-flight in a little plane over the painted hills

-crossed dingo fence. This is a 9600km fence that they’ve built through the country to keep dingos out of their sheep farms. They were fed up of losing their sheep to dingos so they built a fence.

-Cooper Pedy. We stopped for lunch here. The pizza was so good. We’d driven a far way and we were very hungry. Cooper Pedy is an underground opal mining town. We got a tour of the mines and the underground homes. People built their homes in the empty mine shafts to make use of the space and resources and also because it’s quite a bit cooler. They all live underground here.

-we stopped for pictures on the moon landscape we drove through at some point on our way to our next bush campsite.



Day 5
-had arrived to camp in the dark and left in the dark

-saw sunrise and had breakfast in the painted desert. We watched as the colours changed as the sun rose. Very beautiful. Someone had built a cairn (pile of rocks) at the top of this crest. I added an Inukshuk. Everyone in the group was curious and fascinated by it.

-did a little hike in the area

-spent much of the rest of the day in Oodnadata, a little community of 100something people. We visited their little museum, had lunch at the pink roadhouse and swam in their pool for a lot of the heat of the day. Ben got a visit in with his girlfriend who works at the Pink Roadhouse.

-we stopped on the Foggerty clay pan for a lesson on boomerang throwing. Perhaps some of us would have been more successful if the wind hadn’t been as strong.

-camped by a waterhole in the Pederka Desert.



Day 6
-lazy morning by the campsite, hot cross buns for breakfast

-Ben had caught yabbies (crabfish) overnight in his nets. We cooked a bunch and ate them. With the rest we had yabbie races as we returned them to the water.

-stopped at a ghost town on the old train line

-stopped at a great billabong (waterhole) where some went swimming. It didn’t look particularly inviting but everyone raved about it and it was certainly good for a mud fight.


-in the red sand of the Simpson Desert we made a stop at the geographical center of Australia

-made quick stops in Finke and Kulagera before setting up camp at the foot of lovely rocky outcroppings. We stayed away from the aboriginal women’s business that was going on in the area. The aboriginal communities have times in the year that are perhaps like spiritual retreats it seems. They’re separated for men and women. They call it men’s business and women’s business. The time of mourning is called sorry business.



Day 7
-start seeing tour buses as we head closer to Uluru (Ayer’s Rock)

-stopped in a little shop at Mt Ebenezer along the way and also to take pictures of Mt Connor (aka Fooluru) and a nearby Salt Lake.

-picnic lunch at Uluru. Ben had to take off and get the brakes of the car fixed that had died at some point during the morning. He did a very good job keeping that quiet and not noticeable and stopping safely nonetheless. We spent the afternoon relaxing at the foot of Uluru and checking out the visitor centre. By the time the other driver he sent to find us and take us to our campsite, had actually found us, Ben was also back with the newly repaired car and everything was back on track.

-sunset viewing at Uluru with thousands of other tourists. We sat on the top of our truck and made a spectacle of ourselves. There might be just as many pics of us having fun as there is of the rock at sunset.

-this campsite had a lot of ants. In trying to avoid them we all ended up sleeping very close together. Reiner liked that best.



Day 8

-Uluru sunrise with breakfast and Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) in the distance. We’d actually gone to the sunset viewing area instead which was brilliant because no one else was there.

-9km walk around Uluru, very beautiful but very hot and it was one of those days where I wasn’t feeling so well and I had a terrible headache.

Some of us were skeptical about Uluru. After all in some ways it really is just a rock with many tourists. But once we got to know the rock, once we communed with it, once we began to understand bits of the rock’s story we began to appreciate it more and more. It was beautiful to walk around it. Ben came with us for a bit of the way and told us the stories about certain areas of the rock and how they were used for different aboriginal ceremonies or customs. These stories made the rock come alive. Not many others did the 9km walk around it so they missed out on many beautiful areas and colours and sounds. I liked the story of how they would hunt for kangaroo at the waterhole. The hunters would watch all the kangaroo come to drink and then they would watch them all jump away again and then they would kill the last one, the slowpoke so that all the other kangaroos wouldn’t know what had happened therefore never figuring out that the billabong is actually not a safe place to be. Uluru is a sacred site for the aboriginal people. They ask that tourists not climb it and the vast majority seem to respect their wishes. None of our group wanted to do the climb anyway but it was closed the days we were there because of extreme heat.

-lunch at the same picnic spot as the day before

-short afternoon hike at Kata-Tjuta

-long drive to our next campsite, Reiner and I sat in the front and had good conversation while the others discoed and sang in the back. We saw many wild camels and kangaroos at the side and sometimes on the road. Beautiful.

-dingos howling at our campsite, cool windy night by the campfire.




Day 9

-March 21 first day of autumn, very odd for me

-King’s Canyon. We did a huge hike here around the top of the canyon. It took a large part of the day. We weren’t in a hurry to pass by the beauty of the place. We stopped at a waterhole half way in a place they call the Garden of Eden. Very beautiful and ancient looking. The species of palm trees that grows here is still a species left over from the days of the dinosaurs.

-declined shower opportunity later in the day and drove to a scenic lookout and had lunch instead. We were too hungry after that long hike.

-good drive to next campsite, saw many wild camels, horses and donkeys, also a bush turkey that flew across our path caused much excitement

-stopped to view our last sunset together, though it was cloudy and not very spectacular we still appreciated that it was our last.



Day 10
-packed up camp slowly and with some melancholy

-visited a huge meteorite crater from 140 million years ago and read about the Milky Way baby legend

-stopped at 3 beautiful waterholes to swim, cool down, relax, prolong having to get to Alice Springs

-watched several beautiful lizards wandering about

-drop off in Alice Springs in the early evening, quick goodbye for me. We were all itching to have a shower and get clean.