Australia Dreaming
The Oz-yssey ContinuesGreat Barrier Reef Photo Slide Show
Uluru Slide Show
Australian Photo Gallery - A collection of other photos from the tripThe next morning, we headed into the Centre, driving across the Queensland Outback to Tennant Creek and down through Alice Springs to experience Uluru, Katja Tjuta and King’s Canyon.Along the way, we saw bounds of kangaroos, emulations of emus; spinifex woven like silken gold across red sand dunes and purple mountain ridges dotted sparsely with scrawny gums like old men with thinning hair; sunsets of spun red-gold streaking across an endless sky; rose breasted galahs and white cockatoos screeching their flights to the scorched branches of a dead eucalypt.
< Previous The Centre Slide Show Next > Uluru and the surrounding rocks were beautiful, breathtakingly so ... but also disappointing somehow ... both of us expected to have a "spiritual experience" in the presence of "the Rock", but we both felt very little. It was impressive and spectacular in its physical form but it wasn't ... well, perhaps we expected too much. For my part, I was ready to leave in a day ... and it took me some time to work out why I didn't really want to be there. There wasn't any water.
From there we headed south through Coober Pedy where 75% of the world's opals are mined ... one traveler we met along the way said Coober Pedy is a hole ... and, well it's much more than that: it’s a whole lot of holes in a the most desolate treeless landscape I’ve ever seen. Still,there is something quite fascinating about a town where many of the homes, motel rooms and shops are underground.
We saw and tasted a bit of a bit of the local wine country ... coming down from the Centre through Port Augusta, we took a tourist drive through the Clare Valley, stopping for lunch at a most charming little historic village of Mintaro ... quaint cottages and manses with an English character line the narrow lanes dotted with flowers and pretty trees ... a few days later we would drive through McLaren's rolling hills, brushed in autumn gold grape vines. We also visited Warrawong, the wildlife sanctuary where a night stroll brought us in close encounter with koalas, bilbys with their rabbit ears, pottoes, bandicoots, and myriad other marsupials too numerous and unusual for me to recall.
The Oz-yssey continues: Adelaide, Kangaroo Island and Beyond
Australia - The Beginning, Great Barrier Reef :: Adelaide & Kangaroo Island
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