Driving Through the Red Centre

Trip Start May 22, 2005
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Trip End Jan 22, 2006


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Monday, December 12, 2005

The real fun began once we started to drive through the Red Centre.  Kings Canyon is 450 kilometres from Alice and the trip took 4-1/2 hours on sealed roads (i.e. highway).  There is a slightly shorter unsealed road (i.e. off-roading) option, but we skipped that option to save our sedan rental car and our butts from the punishment.  The roads in the Red Centre are dead straight and they stretch on for miles and miles with nothing but limitless flat red sand on either side to mark the way.  We rocketed our way to Kings Canyon.  We only slowed when we ran into a spectacular rain and lightning storm.  The terrain is so flat that we saw the on-coming storm long before we reached it.
 
Kings Canyon is a picturesque canyon whose 100 metre rock walls drop to rock pools and gum trees.  400 million years ago the Canyon used to be a sand dune.  We arrived in the mid afternoon and set off to do the 7 kilometre, 3 hour rim walk.
 
The mildly challenging hike brought us through a maze of rounded sandstone formations called the Lost City and to a fern-fringed pocket water hole aptly called the Garden of Eden.  The truly challenging thing about the hike was the voluminous amounts of mosquitoes that relentlessly buzzed around your face.  The mosquito infestation that comes in the summer is apparently the bane of living in the Red Centre.  We finished the rim walk in the fading sunlight and were rewarded with a beautiful sunset over Kings Canyon at the end.  We rested for the night at the Kings Canyon Resort before we continued onto Uluru (Ayers Rock) and Kata Tjuta (the Olgas).
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