Dirk and Joke doing the Half-lap: Day 66: From Simpson’s Gap to School of the Air (06/08/12)

Getting out of date with the blog is so easy! All I have to do is get busy with holiday-making, and the blog falls behind!

So what happened on this Monday? Well, the Northern Territory decided to have a holiday – Picnic Day, I believe. How did that affect us? Weren’t we having a ball, and wasn’t life one big picnic for us anyway? Yes, and yes, of course. But while we were doing the ball and picnic thing, seated under our little caravan awning, little glasses of controlled beverages in our hands and little delicate crackers with dips clutched in our fingers, I had noticed that the front passenger tyre of my little X-Trail had lost most of its tread. In fact, it was down to the legal limit on one side. This tyre and its brother had been swapped to the front in Cairns. One had worn down in 3 weeks since Cairns, while the other was still showing good tread. Of course, every time I checked the front tyres, I had only looked at the driver’s side!

So, we needed to get tyres in the Alice, and pronto. Enter the Picnic Day thing, and we were forced to extend our stay for another day, as all businesses were closed. We decided to take another trip out to the Western Macs to look at the first two gorges: the Simpsons Gap and the Standley Chasm. The first was closest to town. It has a boulder field in it which is home to a large troop of rock wallabies. Most of them were well out of sight (they, too had heard about Picnic Day, and decided it was no picnic for them). We shared the place with many people, a lot of them locals.

Simpson's Gap with its pool

The boulder field where the rock wallabies live

Simpson's Gap reflections

Then we went on to Standley Chasm, which is privately owned. We had been warned not to go there by someone we met a week ago, because you had to pay $10 per person and the other spots were as good, if not better. However, we were glad we went. The owners are Aboriginals (or a Tribal trust or something). The path was a little over a kilometre and ended in a gorge about 5 meters wide with sheer red walls.

Ghost gums and red cliffs. Such a cliche, really, but so nice.

Every turn of the track added new irresistible vistas.

And, of course, more pictures for my random flower collection.

I'm not quite sure what we are demonstrating here, but we are sure happy to do it!

With the sun at its highest point the light was terrific and so much photography was done. When I joked to Joke (get it??) that someone ought to blow a whistle so that everybody would stand at the one end of the chasm to take pictures without people in them, a gentleman standing nearby took it upon himself to chase the 30-odd people in the chasm itself out. His wife had to restrain him, luckily succeeding before an international incident would have ensued.

More ghost gums and red cliffs

The Chasm without humans

The Chasm with humans.

Spellbound tourist ogles clifftop

Then we drove back to Alice Springs and went to look at The School of the Air. Of course, they were on holiday too, so there were no classes, but the visitor’s centre was open and we could have a good look around. Joke enjoyed herself greatly – so much that we hatched a plan to come back on Tuesday morning, depending how I got on with the tyre people.