G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 15. This one comes to you from Tjoritja - West MacDonnell Range National Park. It comes at a time in our trip when we’re needing a break from the road and there’s one only a few days away, thus ensues a struggle to avoid skipping tea to head straight for the sweets.
For those of you for whom this is your first letter, welcome! Good on ya for signing up and reading. Letters From the Road is the story of a family road trip in Australia, told using my journal entries written during the trip. This is what one might call a serial, in that it is a story told one installment at a time, in this case, once a week. So if you’re into that idea, you might head back to Letter #1 and start there. It’s a long trip, so no worries. We’ll wait.
You’ll probably figure this out, but I thought I may as well mention that the quoted bits in the letter below are my journal entries, and the rest is me filling in the gaps with road grime, a spare tyre, and a lot of red dirt.
If you’ve just joined us and want to catch up, you can find the other fourteen letters here, slightly damp from the rain.
Speaking of breaks, as we’ve reached one in the story, I figured it is as good a time as any for me to take one as well. Be waiting by your mailbox, as I’ll send another letter in two weeks.
At last, your letter.
Luke
Water means life. - Joe
I’m sure that phrase was coined by someone other than my friend Joe, but he liked to use it so often when we were growing up that I’ll give it to him. He’d work it into all cases when liquid was involved, like when we were drinking water at a break during soccer practice, when we were splashing little kids at the pool, or when he’d offer you a beer.
I’ve identified as a land lover for a while now. Swimming is a survival activity that’s not meant to be fun, and boats need to just settle down a bit to be useful. All that bobbing around and such just causes issues. But you’ve probably heard that our bodies are mostly water, and after hanging out in the desert for long stretches, I can tell you that I think we’re not just made up of water, we’re drawn to it. When you don’t have it, or it’s scarce, it brings energy.
19 October 2019, Palm Valley Campground
Felt quite lethargic yesterday. I also had a ravenous thirst, I couldn’t keep up with it. Kept gulping half litres then refilling the bottle and putting it in the esky until it was cooled off, then gulped some more.
Today I took a big 5723 after breakfast, and noticed some weird brownish red coloured stuff when wiping. Not sure what it is. Not sure if the things are related. Will keep an eye on it.
I remember that time, and remember that 5723 - which is a fairly civilised-yet-confusing way to describe a number 2. The four of us had adopted this moniker after staying at a campground in the U.S. where the code to the bathroom door was 5723. I think in this case, I was tired, hot, road weary, and questioning myself. Questioning the point of the next few days of camping in the bush, especially when there might be an easy solution: We were a short and painless 1-½ hour drive away from Alice Springs, the largest city we would have seen since Melbourne. And in Alice could be found urban splendours: Restaurants that served more than burgers, pies and sausage rolls. Fine hotels with air conditioning in every room, and doors to shut so that the flies couldn’t get in. Paved roads all round. Vast selections of beer on tap. A wonderland indeed.
It was all just over there, beyond those red mountains, down that smoothly paved road. Maybe in my torpor and yearning for a bit of normalcy, I was seeing things in the entrails, incorrectly reading the proverbial tea leaves, and they were saying that we needed skip the next bits and move on to more civilised, greener pastures.
We were leaving Palm Valley that day, and could make a decision after grinding out the 4-wheel drive track back to the main highway.
Went running this morning. 7k. It was hard, harder than it should have been. Am I really that out of running shape? I returned and was sitting under our awning, when the kid from the campsite next door stopped to say Hi. When I told him I had just run 7k, he was impressed.
‘Wow, for my cross country we only have to run 3k, and next year it only bumps up to 6k.’
After running, Oscar was watching me wandering through the kitchen, sweating all over the place. ‘Whenever you come back from a run, it makes me feel lazy,’ he says.
‘You can come with me next time, so you don’t feel lazy,’ I offered.
‘I think I’ll just go for my own run around the campsite,’ he says. And on went the shoes and around the campground he went, three times.
‘It was good,’ he said. ‘Got my heart pumping.’
We had to pass near Hermannsburg on the way to our next destination, and everyone in the car agreed that it was imperative that we stop at the Finke River Mission to purchase several loaves of bread for the road. The Finke River Mission Store in little Hermannsburg sold bread like none other, the finest brioche from a french bakery, in the form of a grocery store loaf of white bread from a tiny community shop. It changed our lives while camping at Palm Valley - until we devoured the entire loaf within the span of less than two days. I wrote to you about this legendary white bread in letter #13, but don’t bother reading it if you’re weak willed and cannot afford a plane ticket to Alice Springs on short notice in order to go get some for yourself.
The town was quiet again as we drove through, the heat once more stifling and chasing the residents indoors. We did not meander through town this time, it was easy to guide our car directly to the dusty parking lot of the Finke River Mission Store. No children with bottles of Coke met us this time. This will be a quick and easy trip, I thought as I went up to the door, only to find it shut, and locked. The lights were off. The Finke River Mission was closed.
Dejected, we left Hermannsburg and drove a short spell down the highway to a place called Tnorala - Gosse’s Bluff.
Since we’d left Melbourne almost 3 weeks ago, the weather had been consistent - consistently hot. If you remember from letter # 7, we stopped at a little town called William Creek along the Oodnadatta Track, where the bartender at the local hotel told us they’d only received 4 millimetres of rain in two years. Can you picture 4 millimetres? Neither can I; I’ve always struggled to picture measures of distance. So I dug out a measuring tape, and can tell you that 4mm wouldn’t even fill up your shoe.
Over the last three weeks, we had experienced a little snapshot of what those 2 years must have been like. The sun owned the sky, lighting it up like a grill in the morning, burning all of the colour out of the world by midday, simmering down in the afternoon and making the red rocks look like the smouldering coals of a campfire. And, of course, we’d not had a kiss of rain.
One thing that was very noticeable that morning I went for a run was that the sky was overcast. It did not end up helping my run, but it did give us some hope.
Tnorala - Gosse’s Bluff is the remnants of a crater created by a comet or meteor that hit the earth 140 million years ago, plus or minus a couple million. What looks to be a 5km (3.1 mile) circular ring of hills, is thought to be the middle of the crater, what’s called the central impact. The 20 kilometre diameter outer ring has eroded away. The centre of the crater is occupied by scrubby bushes, small gum trees, and a small lot where you can park before taking a hike up to the top of the crater.
It doesn’t look like much when you’re at the bottom and in the middle of the crater, just another spot with some rocky hills around, but the steep hike to the top revealed the impressive ring, and gives you a sense of what made the place special. And from the top we had a good view of the dark clouds that were moving in.
We sat up there on the rocks, mesmerized by the churning dark sky coming closer, the flashes of lightning, while winds swirled around. Being at the highest point around did seem a questionable idea with lightning filled clouds moving in, but we sat and watched nonetheless, like we were seeing a storm for the first time.
At the top we were joined by another hiker, an older woman and the only other person we’d seen.
The rains at Gosse Bluff.
Polish woman who had two new knees. Why did she get two knee replacements?
‘Even the king has to walk to the toilet,’ she told us.
Travelling by herself while her partner stayed home in Melbourne, and loving it. ‘No questions, no arguments, no discussions.’
She was a geophysicist, and recommended Ormiston Gorge, some of the oldest rocks on the planet, different from everywhere else in the region.
We saw her little black Suzuki Vitara van parked in the lot, license plate said ZYZIO. What’s ZYZIO mean?
Trish and Dave had seen her.
People next to us knew her, camped next to her.
As I noted in my journal, our new Polish friend and her mini van with the license plate that said what amounts to ‘sloppy’ in Polish, was quite well known in the area. We met any number of people who had met her, or remembered seeing her, doing her thing and loving it.
The storm looked the part, but we watched as it did most of its dumping off in the distance. And yet, the short shower and sprinkles we received seemed to give us a charge, and we moved on to our next campsite - a place called 2 Mile, on the banks of the Finke River.
Glen Helen campsite along the banks of a river is nice. Pretty sandy, you could get bogged, but you won’t if you’re careful. Black flies are pretty terrible.
20 October 2019, Finke River Camp
Black flies are most intrusive this morning. I had to eat my breakfast of mackerel on toast with a fly net on.
Today we’ve planned an ambitious day. Go to Ormiston Gorge and hike the 5k loop (3-4 hours, if you believe the paperwork). Do this in the morning. Then in the arvo we would head to Redbank Gorge for a swim. This requires a 1k walk. Then I hope to have a drink on the patio at the Glen Helen Station.
Feeling ok this morning, don’t have to go poop yet, which is good because there are no toilets here.
The Tjoritja - West MacDonnell Ranges are an oft overlooked place. Many visitors, including ourselves the first time we came to the Northern Territory and Alice Springs, focus on Uluru. But similar to Kata Tjuta, the lumpy red hills located just up the road from Uluru that are equally as wonderful as the main attraction, the Tjoritja - West MacDonnells deserve as much attention as anything in the area.
Tjoritja - prounouned ‘Choor-it-ja’ - are the first mountains we’d come across since the Ikara - Flinders Ranges, and these ones are special. Aside from being extremely old - ‘some of the oldest rocks on the planet’, as we were told the day before - there’s water in these mountains.
There are any number of streams and rivers in the area like the Finke, that sit dry for long spells of time until rain fills them. Then they run until the sun and heat turns them into rocky trenches again, sitting quietly until the rains return. Over time, we’re talking thousands of years, the cycles of flooding have allowed some of the creeks to carve massive gorges through the red sandstone mountains. In some areas the water has collected in waterholes, large pools that remain filled even through long periods of drought because they are sheltered from the wind and often the sun, by the high, red walls of cliffs and mountains.
Signage around each of the waterholes warn against hypothermia, which is a bit of a shock. The notion of water that cold existing in the red oven of central Australia is hard to wrap your head around. And experiencing something that cold after the incessant heat we’d been living through will send a bolt through your body.
So you’re left with these surprising spots of quiet, cool waters, often surrounded by high red cliffs, rock layers gnarled and twisted in angles, as if the rocks themselves are straining toward the water like flowers to the afternoon sun.
10.42pm at night.
I’m in bed after accomplishing it all. Had to drag Henry along on both hikes, him groaning ‘It’s too hot!’ about 1/3 way through the Ormiston hike, which turned out to be 8.25 k, not 5. To be fair, it was hot, and we were a bit exposed, but we kept pulling him along.
After dragging his feet until about halfway, he got over the hump and started walking strong. The first part of the hike was ok, but once into the gorge it was amazing. The high reddish brown rock walls of the gorge looked like they were made from crumbling Lego cubes. Closer to the bottom, they changed to rainbow coloured hues of purple and blue. They are the oldest rocks in the world, our Polish geophysicist friend from Tnorala-Gosse Bluff had told us the day before.
After a quick swim in the waterhole, we hit up the tiny snack shop near the parking lot for scones. What a little gem in the middle of nowhere! Best coffee since the Melbourne Indians in Coober Pedy. Good scones, good toasty, good smoothie. All from a tiny kiosk in an empty, middle-of-nowhere National Park.
Then we drug the boys 1.5 hot kilometres down Redbank Gorge to a spectacular waterhole, which you could have followed down the narrow gorge forever.
And then, on the way to Alice Springs, we hit Ellery Creek Big Hole. Amazing waterhole.
It was quiet in the car as we drove to Alice Springs. Our trip was officially 20 days old. That’s 20 days sleeping in a tent, and 20 days of putting it up and taking it down again. It’d been nothing but hot. The average temperature seemed like 32C (90F), give or take. We’d driven over 3,300 km (2,000 miles). I could feel it, and could sense it in the rest of the family that we were all weary.
You can see that in my journals as well. Two days prior, I struggled through that short run, and was feeling lethargic for long afterward. I’d taken the drastic measures of examining my poop for signs of sickness, excuses for worry. I was on the verge of leaving Palm Valley, setting the cruise control and steering the car in the direction of Alice Springs.
Ultimately it was water that restored us, gave us the energy that we needed to not take the easy road. It was the rain blowing in our faces while sitting on the rim of the Tnorala crater. The rejuvenating cool of the three waterholes we’d visited. This seems like a silly, small thing, a couple more days of camping, but now I can’t imagine having missed those hikes and those swims. Like Joe used to say, water means life, and in this case it definitely rang true. Water did indeed give us some life.
Even so, we still had 60 days left on the road. Water or no, a reset was needed, and Alice Springs would be the place for it.