Weekl 17 No Town Like Alice

Alice Springs is not a town that really grabbed us, however we were both really impressed the the set up the School of the Air, so impressed that we are considering doing some relief out station tutoring - we will see how that pans out. Anyway back to the important stuff, we took a trip out to Hermansberg Mission, this was the place that Albert Namatjira was born and developed his magnificent skills as a water colour painter, seeing the landscape you can see how someone with the talent could do such magnificent paintings. on the same day that we visited the mission we took a trip to Palm Valley. As we turned onto the road there was a sign describing the road - you know the type, 4WD vehicles only, 22kls and expected travel time of 3 hours return. So after deflating the tyres a little we headed off, as you know Gaila is not too keen on 4WD'ing however I think the scenery distracted her sufficiently so as not to complain about the road/track too much. The track followed the Finke River, crossing it numerous time and driving along the river course it self (it was dry). The hills surrounding the road was brilliant, it looked like huge bricks had been laid. To get to Palm Valley you travelled through the Cycad Grove, a area of magnificent ancient Cycad plants. Scientists have estimated the age of these Cycads between 200 and 300 hundred years old, some of them were here before ol' Jimmy Cook discovered our fair land.The Palm Valley was still some way off and the was getting a little rougher but all credit to Gaila, she coped well with the bouncing around, but it was really worth it when we arrived, it was truly stunning.

I took a walk around the rim of the valley, truly incredible, again photos do not do the spectacular scenery justice, it just goes to show how small we are in this world of ours. The way that the landscape and vegetation adapts to the conditions is amazing, next to each other on the rim walk were two groups of trees, one group were native fig trees, they are usually found up in the tropics and the other group were white Cyprus pine, they are usually in the south of the country, they were there when the landscape was very different and over the eons of time they have adapted to the climate of the area.
The following day Gaila decided to stay at the van while I visited both Standley Chasm and Simpsons Gap. This prooved to be an expensive day, $8 for Standley Chasm and a new camera for simpsons Gap, yep that's right I stuffed my camera, the only made steps on both walks and I trip over the, drop the camera, rear screen busted, no so bad as I could have used the veiw finder, however, the two chips on the lense tended to put two soft focus spots on the picture.



STANDLEY CHASM

SIMPSONS GAP

PALM VALLEY



CYCAD GROVE