(Mount Connor, as it looks from the lookout by the naked eye.)
My bus-buddy Eve, along with Janet, Jill and a couple of others, left the bus this morning to fly home. We had a late(ish) departure time of 9 AM, and they all arrived at the front of the resort to wave us off.
“I think they want to make sure we’re ready leaving,” said Tracey as we pulled away.
Today is pretty much a driving day back to Alice Springs. We stopped at a lookout for Mt Connor, which also had a view of a salt lake.
(Mt Connor, close-up.)
“It’s over the sand dune across the road,” said Tracey. “ I warn you… there’s been a bit of rain so it might be muddy. Your shoes will never be the same.”
Damn. My trusty travel boots. I said a last goodbye to the way they used to look, and then I launched my way upwards.
Look, Dingo tracks.
The view of the salt lake was stunning.
Remember when I harvested some salt from the Pink Lake on the way back from Kangaroo Island? It’s lovely how the more I travel, the more intertwined some memories become.
Anne is an artist and she’s set herself the task of painting a picture a day of this trip. I was lucky enough to see what she’s done so far, and they’re wonderful. She’s doing watercolours of the landscapes and flowers in a book, which is obviously going to be the most beautiful keepsake. (Almost as good as a blog! Haha!)
Here she is doing a preliminary sketch, getting the major features in place. I airdropped my photos, including this one, hoping they’d help with colours later on.
Back at the bus for morning tea,I noticed the (misspelled) graffiti on the shelter. Zoom in on the roof.
It’s referring to the cattle station we had lunch at yesterday.
There are two sides to every situation…
Oh! I took some photos of the public toilets for you. It occurred to me that some of you might not have experienced a “long drop” toilet before. As you can see, it looks like a normal toilet, but it’s missing a flush button.
You can’t believe how tightly I was holding my phone while taking this shot!
The toilet is over a deep hole in the ground. It would be a terrible mistake to drop anything except human waste in there. Tracey said that there was a coach driver who left his keys in his pocket and they fell in. He had to do the dive to retrieve them with people holding onto his ankles.
We’re travelling along the Lassiter Highway, named after Harold Bell Lassiter, who in 1889 claimed to discover a massive reef of gold out in the desert. He marked the area with a marker, which in this case was a big post. He was worried that “ the blacks” would remove the marker because it was near a sacred site. He was insistent that the reef of gold was there, but there were many inconsistencies in his story.
In 1930, during the depression, he raised the possibility of finding the reef again. He raised several thousand pounds to make an expedition. They even had an aeroplane, a prelude to the Tigermoth, as well as a couple of heavy trucks.
On the second takeoff, the plane crashed. The trucks bogged. Lassiter soon showed that he was a very poor bushman, so the people on the expedition lost a lot of confidence in him.
The crew broke away from Lassiter and went back to Melbourne, while Lassiter and a few camels wandered on.
He reportedly died.
He wrote the coordinates of the reef in lemon juice on a piece of paper, which is basically invisible ink, but the coordinates meant nothing.
To this day, no one has ever found the fabulous reef of gold.
We stopped for lunch at the centre point of Australia!
Erldunda!
They have emus here.
They also have very understanding customers, so it seems.
We passed by an airfield right beside the highway. These are dotted all over the countryside, both for mail delivery and for the Flying Doctors. This gives the doctors greater flexibility, as they can fly to the closest site to an emergency, the pastoralists will meet them at the airstrip and drive them to where they need to go.
The speed limit along this highway is 130 km/hour. It used to be unlimited, but then a movie was released in the early 1980s called The Cannonball Run, starring Burt Reynolds. The plot involved people racing from one side of America to the other, avoiding the police.
A few years later, the Northern Territory government decided to boost tourism by hosting its own Cannonball Run, right up the middle of the territory. Anyone in the world who owned a fast car was able to enter.
What could possibly go wrong?
On the second day, a Japanese guy in a Ferrari lost control of his car and drove headlong towards a check point. The marshals and the two people in the Ferrari were killed.
(The photo is of a memorial, written in both Japanese and English, taken from the bus as we went speeding by. Apologies for the excitingly blurred look.)
After this, there was an outcry about the unlimited speed limit. The government lowered it in line with the rest of the country to 100, but road fatalities increased. They worked out that it was driver fatigue that was causing this, so they upped the speed limit to 130. This decreased the amount of time drivers were on the road, and the faster speed keeps the drivers more alert.
By the middle of the afternoon we were pulling up outside the Alice Springs Hilton.
And so the first half of the trip is over. If you’re looking for a holiday, I can recommend this company. Colin and Tracey were fantastic and the bus was extremely comfortable. We saw a lot in a short space of time.
And if you want to have some down time, just do what Janet did. She’s staying back at Yulara for a couple of days of R & R.
Tonight, I’m here at the Hilton, listening to piano music as I dine.
Tomorrow afternoon I hop back on The Ghan to go up to Darwin.
The adventure continues!
Dad Joke of the Day:
I went along to the local Kleptomaniacs Anonymous meeting but all the seats were taken.
We were lucky to be told by other travellers about the salt lake over the hill. Such a surprise when you reach the top of that incline. On your drive later in the year, make a pitstop at Lake Hart before Coober Pedy. It is majestic.
Thanks! As long as it’s on a sealed road, I will.