We left the Ayers Rock area today around 1:00 and drove about 200 miles along the "Lassiter Highway" to King's Canyon for the night. The road was fine, two lanes and paved the whole way. Traffic was very light, seeing about 1 car every 15 minutes or so. Surprisingly, there wasn't a lot of truck traffic. Since this is the only road from anywhere to Ayers Rock, we had expected to see a lot of trucks...but not.
The terrain was very similar to the Ayers Rock area. Lots of scrub brush, sandy soils, small hills, and very red sand. King's Canyon itself is at the end of the George Gill Range of mountains and is about 300 feet deep with a small stream running in the bottom. Not quite as big as the Grand Canyon, I'm afraid.
We had no internet access at King's Canyon Resort, so we weren't able to post yesterday's trip online and we aren't able to upload any pictures today (Monday) from Alice Springs. Tomorrow evening we're flying to Cairns, so we'll get caught up on pictures there...promise!
Great trip!!
Last night we did the "Sounds of Silence" dinner at dusk overlooking Ayers Rock. The dinner was excellent and so was the entertainment. This gent was playing a didgeridoo with a pretty good beat:
Here is a shot of the sunset over Kata Tjuta in the background:
And here are some of the "beautiful people" at dinner:
Part of the program at the dinner was a lecture by an astronomer pointing out many of the constellations in the southern sky...very different, btw, than the northern sky.
Pat's Paragraph.......... The Sounds of Silence dinner was exceptional. We were entertained with dance by Aborigines, songs, stories about the Dream time and a lovely meal. We really enjoyed the astronomer who had a huge telescope set up for us and you coud see the demarcation of the light and dark side of the moon. Did you know that what we call the 'Man in the Moon', down under refer to it as 'the Rabbit'. Think of the man in the moon upside down. I couldn't picture it but maybe you'll do better. The Southern Cross was below the horizon at dinner time and I was not getting up at 3:30 a.m. to see it. We were up at that time that very morning to make the dawn camel ride but I didn't go out in my jammies to see the Southern Cross mostly because I didn't know it was there. The sky was sooo clear you could see every star and the moon lit up everything. The Milky Way was brilliant and he pointed out so many constellations I'd have to sit here and think of them. We did see Orion, the 7 Sisters and Venus was huge and so bright. A really magical evening.
This'll give you some idea of what the terrain is like between Ayers Rock and King's Canyon. The mounds are termite mounds. According to what we learned, the "biomass" of termites in Australia exceeds the "biomass" of kangaroos and cattle on the continent:
And along the way, we met up with this fellow grazing alongside the road:
