Alice to Uluru

I always thought Ayer’s Rock was synonymous with Alice Springs. Kind of like, have coffee and a piece of pie at the restaurant in Alice, then walk across the road and queue up for an experience at the Rock! Turns out the Rock is a five hour drive from Alice. Along the way there are two truck stops. They both have functional facilities for truck drivers. You know, bathrooms, showers, food and of course, beer. The parking lots are big enough to land a plane on! They also have things for tourists, like a pen of camels and emus (neither of which have any current commercial function other than to have their pictures taken by tourists), postcards, tank with a big snake and some rats-in-waiting, museum quality paraphernalia nailed to the walls and of course, beer.

The countryside, since they have had some rain in recent months, is dotted with short, green vegetation and native grass tufts but largely dominated by sand. Red sand. Like PEI red sand. And lots of it. I understand the Irish come here for their hair treatments. In the five hours we saw no wildlife other than a couple of lizards when we ventured for a stroll away from the bus. There are some feedlots along the way, being about the only commercial ventures witnessed enroute. Grazing would be out of the question. To ingest enough grass the cattle would have to graze at about 60 km/hour.

The ride was stunning in the vastness of homogeneous terrain. Now I know how our Dutch relatives felt when they visited Canada and took the Greyhound from Montreal to Victoria. The size of our prairies amazed them, coming from a concept where property boundaries for farms occur every 30 meters!

The Erldunda Truck Stop

Proof of beer available. The emus are not real. They are stunt emus.

Red sand on the road to Uluru. Note a random mesa on the horizon. No name, just nature's way of saying if you build a straight highway it won't be through here. The highway is actually referred to by locals as the gunbarrel highway.