Alice Springs – King’s Canyon – Palm Valley
As you drive down the guts of the territory, there isn’t a whole lot to do. All up from Katherine to Alice Springs takes just over 12 hours, but in the van I knew it would take a bit more, so I allowed a full three days to make the trek. It only involved a little doubling-back to Tennant Creek, and then I was on brand new road. Yay!
I smashed through some audiobooks and podcasts, just wanting to get to Alice as soon as possible. As a nice little break on the second day, I visited Karlu Karlu where there were a few walks to stretch your legs and explore among the boulders. I remember reading about Karlu Karlu when I used to work at the travel company and, don’t laugh at me, but… I always thought that it was just like… one boulder. So I was quite surprised to see a whole expanse of boulders spilling over the horizon! Here are some of my favourites. Those are nice boulders.
That night was potentially one of the scariest nights of my trip so far. I was camped on the roadside around 200km from Alice Springs – I’d cooked up dinner and said hello to a couple who were also camping at the same spot, just around the corner and kind of hidden amongst the bushes. They’d come up to me and said that if I needed anything to just sing out! Thanks, Merv! I’ve noticed that people always say this to me, like they see a young girl on her own and get second-hand anxiety, but I always appreciate it nonetheless. Anyway, that night I woke up at around 2:30am to a quiet tapping on my window and a man saying, “Hello, is anyone there?” I decided that if I didn’t say anything, he’d eventually leave me alone. I could tell that it wasn’t Merv, and that whoever was tapping on my window must have walked to the campsite because I hadn’t heard another car pull up.
They kept tapping and knocking and walking around the van, but I wasn’t too nervous. I’d decided that since they didn’t sound too hurried, they couldn’t be in major trouble. And also that since they hadn’t smashed my window yet, they weren’t looking to break in and steal anything. I made the call that they must have just been looking for a lift (at 2:30am!) in the wrong place. I stayed silent and again hoped they’d leave me alone. In the back of my mind, I remembered Merv and thought that in the worst case scenario, I could jump in the front seat and bang on the horn to wake him up for some help. Or I could always just drive away! The man knocked and knocked saying, “Hello, is anyone there?” for another half an hour before he started to try the door handles. I heard him try to open the front doors and I jumped out of bed, finally fed up. I banged on the door to the van and said, “Fuck off! Get the fuck away from my car!” in my scariest voice (hehe). The man started to apologise and said he just wanted to know if anyone was in there because he was out of fuel and needed a ride… but when I told him that I wasn’t going to give him any help at that time and that he’d still be out of fuel at 7am, he left me alone. Even though he stopped knocking on the van, every now and then I could hear his footsteps going to the highway whenever a car passed, presumably looking for a ride. Sorry that I didn’t help you, man, but at 2:30 in the morning, I can hardly help myself.
A lot of people ask me if I ever feel unsafe and my honest answer is that I generally don’t! Most people are so friendly and go out of their way to introduce themselves, so this was a really rare instance in which I felt uncomfortable.
Anywayyyyy I made it though the night and into Alice Springs the next day where I finally caught up with my friend, Sam. She moved here back in Feb and I’ve been hanging out to get here and explore her new town. Almost instantly, she took me on a “show off your neighbourhood” day complete with sunset hikes, watering holes, cheese platters at the Clay Pans, and many cuddles with dogs. I even had my first flat tyre of the trip!
The first of many sunsets featuring Wesley.
From Alice Springs, Sam and I set off on a short camping adventure in her 4WD. Since she’d just gotten off a string of night shifts, she had a few days off, and we capitalised on the time together (and I used her for the car since mine doesn’t have a hope in hell of getting to some of the amazing 4WD only places around here). We set off for King’s Canyon and drove a long few hours on the unsealed road, eating a sushi lunch inside a crater, until we reached the camp site. It wasn’t an ideal place to stay because it was so busy and touristic, but we agreed that it was a necessary evil to ensure that the park stayed natural and protected. We chilled out in the afternoon paying some cribbage and watching the sunset with a beer. When it was dark, we wandered through the field of lanterns which lit up the base of the canyon.
The next day we were up early to beat the heat, and started the rim walk around the canyon. It was a little nerve-wracking to see that they have two defibrillators and four emergency heli-pads on the walk, but we set off anyway. It was really stunning – so many sheer cliffs and streaks of rock eroded by wind. I don’t remember seeing safety railing anywhere either which made all the heli-pads seem even more eerie… We wandered around the northern edge of the rim and down into a valley with a beautiful little pool of still water, before hiking back up to the southern part of the canyon. It was a really busy walk with lots of tour groups and families, but it didn’t really feel crowded because it was so expansive. The rocks were so striking and unlike anything I’ve seen before – like a crazy Mars-scape. So cool! It was here that we also read some Dreamtime stories about how the old ripples in the rock from the dead river that ran through the canyon were said to be left from the belly of a snake that once passed through.
After the rim walk we had a little coffee to fuel us through the next part of the long drive into Palm Valley. Sam was doing 100% of the driving, so I was on music duty the whole time, pumping some LCD Soundsystem and introducing her to one of my favourite news podcasts when a wild camel ran out on the road. At first I honestly thought it was a monster – my brain couldn’t compute what it was seeing.
The Jeep got some real 4WD time in the afternoon, navigating through sand and over mini boulders to get into the campsite. Here we set up a swag nearby the river and settled in with some beers and more games. We had a cook up of nachos and sat around the fire with some other campers, roasting marshmallows and talking about the OH&S nightmare that is the rim walk. This campsite was much more homely than the one from the previous night, and even though we could hear some dingoes howling in the distance, we couldn’t resist sleeping with the canvas open and looking up at the stars. (Not that the canvas would help us much anyway.)
The next day Sam and I took the roof of the Jeep and drove a further 4km into the heart of Palm Valley. It’s a really wild place – picture a literal desert oasis – where these one-of-a-kind palm trees grow within a 60km radius and absolutely no further. And if you were to condense the space to have the palms all side-by-side, it would only be 1 square-km! AND they grow nowhere else in the world! It’s unknown exactly how they got to the valley to begin with, but they thrive there because of the table water from the river nourishing them. My mind was blown here – can you tell? – I’ve become a crazy palm lady. We walked around the valley and must have said the phrase, “What the hell! How wild!” at least a dozen times each. When we got back to camp, the host of the site (the guy who fixes the BBQs and makes sure everyone has a permit) came up to us with a gift – a pair of sunnies each! He said that as we drove into the valley with no roof on the Jeep, we reminded him of Thelma and Louise, so he found some sunnies that people had left behind and picked out the pairs that best suit us. What a legend.
That evening we went for a mini hike to the top of one of the mountains for sunset. The way the sun hits the rocks here is truly incredible, a complete explosion of orange and red that just glows. We sat at the top for a little while having some snacks and then walked back to camp for a hot chocolate to end the evening.
The following day – our last day in the valley – we took a short walk to the mountains that we had a view of the previous night. It was cool being back to look back for a new perspective, and to read the local stories. Everywhere in the valley were these amazing wild flowers too which apparently only appear right after some rain. Most of the flowers were typical desert flora with papery petals and spikey stems – some of my favourites were the different varieties of mulla mulla. Afterwards, we drove back into Alice via the service station for some hot chippies which we ate in an old yellow steamroller.
Rocky views just outside Palm Valley.
