Days 34-35: Road Signs

Who was it that told me there would be nothing to see, crossing the Australian Outback?

I had mentally prepared myself to look at a flat, never ending desert with barely a blade of grass for three days. At least that made a pleasant surprise to discover that the scenery changed very quickly compared to most parts of my journey, even if it was in subtle ways. It's difficult to say exactly what it was- perhaps the type of trees and shrubs, or the balance of sand, grass and rock, the coming and going of mountain ranges and distant ridges... Something was always different when I looked out the window.

Add to this the sun, which, as it rises and sets, paints the sky the same earthy red of the sand (that iconic colour that screams out AUSTRALIA like nothing else). Now you can be sure that I haven't felt bored once on my journey across the outback, which seems to me, devoid as it mostly is of livestock or human habitation, even wilder than anywhere I went in Mongolia.

There is no way I could convey the beauty of this wilderness with my little human-made camera, designed for taking pictures of human sized things. And I admit there are not many human sized things around. I resort, then, to describing my experience of the outback through pictures of road signs. Really, there's not much else.

I keep seeing signs saying 'floodway' followed by these depth gauges. I don't understand. How can it possibly ever flood when there are no clouds in the sky? Even the things marked 'rivers' on my map, with bridges over them, are nothing more than depressions full of sand.

When I made it to Alice Springs Desert Park, I learned that these desert rivers often have water buried beneath the sand, even when they look this dry. But they don't flow into the sea- they only get as far as salt pans or clay pans. My world is being turned upside down. Didn't I say something about the sun going round the same way in the sky every day? It doesn't, it's started going anti-clockwise!

After meeting the local animals and plants at the park, which was a kind of zoo, I headed out into the bush to see if I could spot some of them in the wild. Thankfully I met the friendlier sort (kangaroos, wallabies, lizards) and not any snakes. 

The view over Alice Springs (a little village when you've just come from Kuala Lumpur). Everybody else seemed to prefer driving their four wheel drives to walking so I had the mountain to myself. No road signs up here.

Ah, I'd better turn left then. 

Just 1519 km to go. Uluru is several hundred km from the main road, so I didn't get to see it. 

Every now and then the coach would stop at one of these little roadside pubs. This one is at the border between Norrhern Territory and Southern Australia.

The driver was also the postman.

You knew this one was coming, didn't you.