Alice is a modern & busy town, easy to forget that we are in the middle of a desert whilst in the middle of town, but any short drive quickly reminds us of where we are. I probably should have taken some pics of ‘The Alice’, but as with other places we have previously visited the motivation to capture images of things photographed in the past is dampened by the thought of duplication. Now sitting here writing this I wish I had taken some. Alice Springs has natural features that many towns would love to have, & they make good use of them. Not all will agree, but as towns go we find it a visually attractive place. We did some minor re-stocking of foodstuffs, still having plenty of the basics brought from home. A zip on the one of the Tvan’s doors had ‘let go’ , the zipper itself separating & the slider no longer pulling the to halves of the zip together. A problem caused by a worn slider, the wear no doubt a result of use in ‘red dirt’ country, where the desert dust apparently wears the metal of the slider, but less so the nylon teeth of the zip. Mr Google found us a couple of places we hoped might help. A GPS navigator made life easy in town, how did we ever manage without one?! Second bloke we visited was happy to drop what he was doing to fit a new slider. The job took around 15 minutes plus an hour’s talking. Cost was $140 for cash, or $152 on a card. Next time we wont talk! He did however give us a special needle, a supply of strong thread, a handful of new sliders, & a can of silicone spray, having shown us how to do the fix ourselves if required again in the future.
I had also discovered that whilst still working, that there was a minor air leak from the hose on my 20 year old tyre inflater. It needed shortening & a refitting wth a new crimped fitting. I left it at a hydraulic repair shop & picked it up half an hour later – cost a very reasonable $18. We were expecting to be driving in some soft sand using low pressures, so having an inflater which we could rely on was paramount.
Leaving town this time around our intention was to see the parts of the West MacDonnell Ranges we had missed out on last time we were up here, the Fine River Gorge as each time we have previously been in the area there has been heavy rain, causing the Todd & the Finke rivers to run. Although interesting because they are normally dry, it had meant that access to places we wanted to visit had been cut off, as the access route is to drive along the dry creek bed. This time our presence failed to bring rain ….. Phew! 🙂
Leaving town our first sight of the West MacDonnell ranges reminded us of why they are so popular. They are dramatically huge, imposing & beautiful, making it impossible to drive along with them in view without exclaiming ‘Wow!
(Again no photos I’m afraid).
It was getting late in the afternoon by the time we left Alice, & so we found the nearest free camp we could on the western side of town, around 70kms out. 5kms off the bitumen, on the banks of the dry Hugh River. Unremarkable, but nice because we had it to ourselves, quite an achievement in an area thick with campers, most who are rushing to ‘do’ Uluru, Alice & the East & West Macs & then driving back home to be there in time for the new school term.
It was our coldest night so far. We found ourselves standing & turning ourselves like human kebabs in front of our camp fire before retreating to the warmth of the Tvan’s snug bed. In the morning we found that the taps & the external water hoses on the Patrol were frozen solid! It turned out the temperature had dropped overnight to minus 5 degrees, but strangely (to us) there was no frost to be seen due to the lack of humidity in the desert air, only the icicles hanging from our taps. Once thawed, it was a relief to find no splits/leaks. Packing up to move on was slowed by pain…….. believe me everything & anything you touch ’sucks’ any residual heat one’s extremities might once have had, it hurts. Gloves seem like a good idea, but there are some things which just can’t be done with gloves on, & once metal has been touched with bare hands it’s all over red rover!
However, unlike home in Ballarat, renowned for it’s cold, the sun in these parts warms things up quite nicely as the day progresses. Here in what is mid winter daytime temperatures are reminiscent of the best summer temps we enjoyed as kids back in England. Cold nights, but t shirts, sunblock & hats during the day.
From our Hugh River camp, we left in search of the poorly named ‘Boggy Hole’ about 100kms away. This is the destination at the end of a 3 hour ‘4wd only’ trek in the Finke River Gorge National Park. Boggy Hole wasn’t boggy, but is special inasmuch it is one of only 6 relatively permanent water holes in the entire 600km length of the Finke River & even has fish species unique to this single stretch of permanent water. Access involves a lot of driving in & out of the dry creek bed, a mix of narrow tracks, rocky in places & very sandy in others, including some quite long stretches of very soft sand renowned for bogging unprepared 4wd’s. National Parks info attempts to dissuade drivers from towing anything along this track by (in our view) exaggerating the difficulty. We already knew of others who successfully towed dedicated off road trailers/campers to Boggy Hole & so decided to ignore NP ‘advice’, albeit with little voices in the back of our heads telling us we may be acting foolishly.
This would be our first experience of deep soft sand! Our tenuous confidence was knocked slightly after instead of heading toward the Boggy hole track from Hermannsberg as most do, we took another track called the Boggy Hole Access Track & got lost for 20 minutes or so. Turned out there was any number of tracks created by residents of local communities & outstations which were not as marked on our maps. After going around in a few circles we got ‘back on track’ & stopped at the first sight of a sandy creek bed crossing to let more air out of our tyres.
Fronts & Tvan tyres down to 18psi & rear tyres down to 22psi. This served us well & we made it to Boggy Hole without incident, enjoying what turned out to be a very pretty drive immensely, whilst gaining a lot of confidence in sand driving which I expect will serve us well in the future. Whilst driving around ‘lost’ we stopped & picked up some wadding from a discarded sleeping bag, & once camped de-burred it, cut it into strips & lagged our water pipes. Despite further freezing nights – no more frozen pipes! 🙂
The creek sand is nothing like the firm sand of beaches, it drags the car down, but with the low tyre pressures & the torque of the 4.2 litre 6 cylinder motor we did it fairly easily. Mainly in 2nd & third gear, low ratio. For us, Boggy Hole was just a place to camp, it was the drive through the gorge to get there which was the highlight, different to what we had expected. We did come across two parties who had become bogged, one a so called off road camper which was really rather too big to qualify for such a title, & another, a 3.0 litre Patrol being driven in 2wd, the front hub locks having apparently failed. The owner didn’t seem keen to strip the hubs to inspect them, so was relying on lots of revs & momentum. Both got pulled out of the sand with snatch straps by other drivers). It was a relatively busy track, I think we saw 6 other vehicles during the two days we spent there.
Hermmansberg is an aboriginal community, once a Mission. Today the mission no longer runs the place, but the original mission buildings remain as an ‘historical precinct’ tourist attraction at one end of town, surrounded by intimidating fences welded from upturned star pickets. The $24 entry fee for us both to go in for a look around & to buy a coffee & their apparently renowned apple strudel at (presumably) prices that the tourist coaches might find acceptable left us cold. We took a few photos from outside the steel fortifications, & instead bought ourselves some hot chips from the town’s ’takeaway’ at the fuel servo. It felt disrespectful to take photos of the township, as the protective mesh everywhere conveys a perspective which we believe is not one the same as lived experience of those who reside there. Talking with a few people reinforced our beliefs. We can’t pretend to have anything more than a poor ’surface’ understanding of life in one of these communities, especially one like this which sees a steady flow of tourists gawking at what is possibly their first & only experience of such a place. Living there must often feel like living in a goldfish bowl, one where the goldfish reap little, if any, benefit from the experience. Most, but not all, avoided all eye contact & went about their lives as though we were not there. A couple of times a smile or a wave made us feel better.
