We finally arrived in Alice Springs on the 22nd of January after our 3000 km drive. The drive actually wasn’t that bad spread out over 4 days and between two drivers.
Alice Springs is located right in the centre of Australia and is a long way from everything else. It is about 1000kms to Darwin, about 1000kms to Adelaide, 3600kms to Perth and 2260kms to Melbourne. Luckily Alice has all the shops you need and has lots of things to do and see around the area.
Alice springs was initially built as a repeater station for the overland telegraph line. This ran from Adelaide to Darwin and then to the rest of the world. It sent Morse code messages to others. The actual Alice ‘Spring’ is at the old telegraph station and is not really a spring, its juts a waterhole in the mostly dry Todd river. The Todd river runs through town and is surrounded by river red gums and ghost gums and lots of wildlife. It is a large sandy bedded river and has some water in it at the moment because of all the rain this year. Sometimes in really heavy rain it does rage a torrent but this is uncommon.
We have seen a fair bit of the town in the last 2 weeks. We can drive around, get to work etc without getting lost. It is actually quite small and all the shops and businesses are in a small area.
On our first weekend we drove out along Larapinta Drive into the West MacDonald ranges. We had a BBQ for dinner at Simpson’s Gap. This is the first stop on the drive from Alice and is a large gap in the range. The temperature was about 38-43 degrees for our first week so it was a warm BBQ but a beautiful spot.
Corinne BBQ-ing some Prawns, as all good Australians do.
The approach to the Gap
A magnificent River Red Gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) in the sandy river bed the exits from the gap.
There were some small ponds around the gap, from the recent rains
Corinne admiring
No editing or saturation changes, just a circular polariser, real colours.
Reflections
A dark. mysterious and slightly sexual gap
The walls forming the gap, great sunset colours on the red rock of the west macs
Look back out from in the gap, a beautiful afternoon. There were a few tourists (we are locals) waiting to see some black footed rock wallabies. Unfortunately there were also some kids there, possibly drunk and on speed (kidding) that were amazingly active and noisy, so there weren’t gonna be any wallabies. Still beautiful, even with the humans.
Beautiful country.
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