Alice Springs

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We have enjoyed a little break from the road at Alice Springs and caught up a bit on some jobs that needed doing. I had needed a new battery in my watch for more than 2 weeks and we also had to get some antihistamine for the spectacular insect bite collection. Brian was particularly suffering which is unusual. We also met up with our old Heading Bush guide friend Michael for a drink and a catch up.

We have an outline route planned to get us back to Melbourne on September 19th and now we have booked somewhere to stay for a week that will enable us to get all our stuff cleaned up and finish packing our shipping container. We also needed some time to think about our next trip to New Zealand and learning from this one we are currently favouring a campervan so more research needed.

We have taken a trip out to the Finke Gorge National park as we had not been there last year. We were hoping to get as far as Palm Valley but the road off was described as "Extreme 4WD" and after 14km with about 3 km to go we decided it was! So we still had a lovely walk around the natural amphitheatre and the temperature was a much more Dorban-friendly 24 degrees. We saw a dingo running towards one of the river pools and also saw a number of birds of prey - mostly black kites. I have included a rubbish photo of the dingo -look carefully he is on the left hand side.

On our way back we stopped to look at Standley Chasm which was very interesting, within the gorge are a number of plants called cycads. There are a few clusters of these in the MacDonnell ranges and although they look like palms they are not. They are very ancient plants (200 million years plus!!!) . The ones in the western Macs actually depend on a tiny thrip insect for pollination and there are separate male and female plants.

Our last night here in the hotel with the hard bed has made me realise how much I love my swag and any further hotel/motel I just might do a Crocodile Dundee and bring my swag indoors and sleep in it!

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