Alice Springs to King's Canyon
Trip Start
Jan 16, 2006
1
15
102
Trip End
Ongoing
King's Canyon,
Australia
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Where the hell do you start with the 2 days here.
We left Alice Springs damn early in the morning after no sleep and within minutes were in the desert. To start with, the trip out of Alice is pretty nice as you go past the edge of the Western MacDonnell Ranges (we went the Larapinta Highway, not the regular old sealed road, ours is a big dirt track road like most of the bloody roads in Oz, I thought this was a developed country. Anyway...) and then not too much was going on for a while.
The journey to Kings Canyon took about 10 hours in total and in that time we saw I think 3 simply stunning things, quite a few "hey, that's really cool"s and lots of not much else. The stunning things were oh my god stunning though
King's Canyon - looking up the gorge
. The best being at the side of the road a big flat field with just thin low shrubs, with a huge rippled cliff thype thing at the back (i have photos to make up for the crap description, it's early!) with wild horses running and playing in front of them. We stopped here for a few sandwiches and found how much we were gonna be bothered by flies and were happy we'd bought the fly nets in Alice!But it was the most incredible sight.
Then we carried on for a couple of hours, stopping only momentarily a few times to take a few snaps of whatever took our fancy. Usually the road in front where we got really straight bits surrounded by bugger all.
Then we found a scenic lookout signposted. "There's nothing here though, can't be that scenic". Turns out we were wrong. As we rounded a corner on the hill we saw a bit of the view. It was a big mound overlooking the valley which led 25kms toward the national park where Kings Canyon is. We struggled to speak for a while! Unfortunately the photos don't do i tjustice but it was amazing. As it turned out we had a long time to take in the views cos we had a flat tyre here. Bloody hot, Toyota Land Cruiser needing jacking up with a jack that has no turny bit so we had to attach a small spanner, and trying to replace it and fill up a spare tyre that wasnt exactly well endowed with air pressure
King's Canyon - start again
. Oh yeah, we only had a foot pump. Anyway it was all fun and was now my 1st tyre change (i'm so manly. Grrrr beer curry football etc...)And then we managed to get our asses to Kings Canyon just after sun down, pitched us some tents, ate n stuff n off to bed.
Next day we actually went to the canyon. It is, as you guessed, a Canyon, and quite a big one at that. We decided to do the long trek which involves a steep incline for about 20 minutes to get to the Canyon rim, and the a walk round the top. You can go right to edge of the canyon rim and look right down, which is absolutely beatiful but a bit nervewrecking. Benj, don't think you'd be too hot at it. Bit high. My heart was in my mouth a bit when i had my legs over the edge of it.
The trek took about 3 hours to do cos we did it the slow way by stopping at every point possible to take photos and see everything we could.
Bloody amazing.
Comments
Wow
must be brill if it's stumped you that much for words!!