The Mereenie Loop

My second bit of 4WD driving was the Mereenie Loop. Palm Valley was a slow drive over a short distance to get me to a beautiful camping spot. The Mereenie loop completed a circular route that avoided me being restricted to a there-and-back slog on tarmac to Uluru, but also gave me a taste of driving a reasonably long distance on unsurfaced outback roads. Strictly speaking, the Mereenie Loop is a 93 kilometer stretch of road, but from Hermannsburg, where I was starting, to King's Canyon Resort (F) is just shy of 200 kilometers, with only the last 10 or so kilometers tarmacked.


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When I reached the main road on my return from Palm Valley, a left turn would have started me on my route, but I first had to backtrack a couple of kilometers to Hermannsburg. My destination there was the garage - not to buy diesel, as I'd scarcely used any going to Palm Valley, but to get a permit. The Mereenie Loop passes through aboriginal lands, and the aboriginal community charge a few dollars to use the road. There were three bikers buying permits ahead of me in the garage.

The first part of the route is across flat country, but it wasn't long before what appears to be an isolated ridge hove into view. This is Gosse Bluff and is thought to be the eroded remains of an impact crater created by an asteroid or comet more than 140 million yeras ago. The crater is now a mere 5 kilometers in diameter and 150 meters (about 500 feet) high, but is reckoned to be the central uplift of a crater that was originally about 22 kilometers in diameter:

A few kilometers later I reached the only road junction on my route and a road sign shortly afterwards gave me details of my destination for the day. 150 kilometers doesn't seem that big a distance, but there is nothing along the route - just the road and, almost at the far end, a 'viewpoint' - a small bulldozed area where you can get off the road and stop.

On the whole, the road surface wasn't too bad, but there were long sections with 'corrugations' - regularly spaced parallel ridges running across the road. At slow speeds, the vehicle shakes violently ('vibrates' is far too gentle an expression), but if you have the courage to accelerate, you eventually reach a speed - about 80 kph (50 mph) in the Land Cruiser - where you are skimming across the tops of the ridges and have a smoother ride. With so little contact with the road, it's a bit like driving on ice: sudden braking or steering are best avoided, so driving requires a fair amount of concentration.

I hadn't got far into the first stretch of corrugations when I caught up wth the motor cyclists: first, the guy by himself on a bike, riding slowly up the wrong side of the road, trying to find a smooth strip of surface. About five minutes later, I passed the couple who were stopped and in the process of reattaching their baggage to the bike. I wonder whether they made it through the Mereenie Loop, or gave up and went back.

After the first section across flat open country, the route passes through the Katapata Gap, and then skirts along parallel to ridges:

Like the rest of the Red Centre, I had expected the drive to be through a desert landscape, but here too the vegetation was flourishing, with some spectacular wildflower displays:

and verdant countryside:



Although first impressions were sometimes misleading. The green vegetation in the foreground ...

... was sparser than it looked from a distance:

These brumbies looked as though they were enjoying the plentiful food:

This is what looks like the latest incarnation of possibly one of the best known road signs in Australia ...

... and its companion a little further along:



Towards the end of my journey the clouds started building ...



... and by the time I reached the lookout point and could look back along the last part of my journey the sky was almost completely covered:

It took me about three and a half hours to cover the approximately 200 kilometers. Traffic was thin, but I passed 17 vehicles coming the other way. By my calculations that means there would be about 5 vehicles an hour passing any spot on the route in one or other direction, so it wouldn't have been a long wait if I had broken down.

The campsite that I stayed in was a bit of a come-down from the one in Palm Valley. However, it did have the advantage of launderette facilities ...

... and some rather classy pigeons that were patrolling the campsite pitches in search of pickings. Their name? The crested pigeon, of course.

Palm Valley

Palm Valley was my first destination when I left Alice in the campervan. I drove out westwards from Alice, practising driving through water on the floodways, seeing my first wild budgies, and stopping for apple strudel and Earl Grey tea (and a look at the buildings) in the historic precinct at Hermannsburg. The 4WD drive route to Palm Valley leaves the asphalt a few kilometers to the west of Hermannsburg, and heads south down the bed of the Finke River before turning off west up the valley of a tributary:


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[You can use the Google Map like you normally would – zooming in or out, moving it around, or switching to other views such as ‘Map’. Google maps didn’t have this as a car route, only a walking route, and I was amused by the warning I got: “Use Caution – this route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths”]

I’d approached on the asphalt road to the east of Hermannsburg, from where you can see the line of hills through which the river cuts southwards.

At the start of the route, there was a modest sign indicating that it was a 4WD route, so I hopped out and turned the hubs of the front wheels to lock them, and used the second gearstick to engage 4WD.

The next sign was a bit fiercer, and didn’t altogether concur with the route descriptions that I’d seen, but I decided to carry on anyway, but be prepared to turn around if the route did get too challenging, or stop on the way if I was overtaken by nightfall.

In the event, the internet descriptions were right and, although the route was slow-going, it didn’t require any exceptional 4WD driving abilities. The 3 hour requirement was for a return trip with time to relax at the other end. However, the recent rain meant that there was more water in the river than normal, and I fairly quickly arrived at the first river crossing. Unless I was absolutely certain that there were no surprises, I walked the river crossings before driving the vehicle across: if anyone was watching, I preferred to be laughed at for over-cautiousness than have to wait for someone to come and tow me out.

The National Park campsite was in among the trees by the river (the photo was taken while I was on my evening walk).

It was a great spot, with a toilet and (hot-)shower block with solar-powered lighting, and a limited number of spacious shaded pitches,

and the river running just behind the sites.

About a kilometre before the campsite the southern wall of the valley was shaped into a natural amphitheatre (this panorama is almost a 180 degree view):

A short, but steep path led up to an outcrop in the centre of the amphitheatre, which provided a splendid viewpoint to admire the changing colours of the rocks in the evening light.

As I was rapidly learning, the ‘Green Centre’ was in full bloom and there were plenty of flowers to admire on the way up.

Back in the campsite the sun set over the valley …

… in time to see the moon and Venus dropping towards the horizon.

Without any light pollution, it was possible to see the darker part of the moon, unlit by direct sunlight, being lit by light reflected from the earth. Later there was a splendid display of stars and the milky way, but I put off taking photos for a later night, and missed my only chance.

In the morning I was up early to drive the last couple of kilometers to Palm Valley. There was more water to cross, and the track was slower going as it traversed rocky bulges. Eventually I reached a patch of water where I decided that discretion was the better part of valour.

The water was shallow, but there were places where the rocky bottom had vertical drops of 20 cm (8 inches) or so. If I’d had someone with me to walk in front of the campervan, we could have crossed easily, but the water was relatively wide, with no landmarks, and I would have had to walk and drive it in sections, and it wasn’t worth the bother. So I did a nifty three point turn in the water’s edge, parked off the track, and walked the rest of the way. It turned out that it was only 300-400 meters to the start of the path, anyway.

Palm Valley, and the narrower part of the valley leading to it – Cycad Gorge – are critically important to the survival of two tree species. It doesn’t take much to guess that they are a cycad (a primitive gymnosperm – gymnosperms include the modern-day conifers) called the MacDonnell Ranges Cycad:

and a palm (palms are among the earliest angiosperms, or flowering plants) called the Red-cabbage Palm (and no, they don't resemble red cabbages to me, either):

Both of the species are endemic to (ie occur only in) a small area of the Red Centre. Both are relict populations from a time when the climate was warm and humid: the cycad from the time of the breakup of Gondwanaland, the southern supercontinent, more than 100 million years ago, and the palms from a more recent period with a warm humid climate. And both have survived in Palm Valley because of its microclimate: the steep valley sides protect the trees from desiccation in the dry desert winds, and the valley is watered by seepage from the surrounding porous sandstone. Astoundingly, with the slow rate of movement of water through the rock, the ground water that the roots of the palms now tap fell as rain about 30,000 years ago.

The valley is a quiet secluded spot:

The path that I took followed the bottom of the valley, and then climbed the side, and returned at the higher level, with a view down into the valley:

There were plenty of flowers in bloom:

I’d arrived at 7.30 am, and got back to the start of the walk, just as three separate vehicles were arriving at 9. 00 am. I was glad to have had the valley to myself to enjoy the solitude and the early morning light.

One of my last memories, as I headed out towards the tarmac, was a beautiful almost-translucent flower growing by the track:

Outback driving

Like almost all visitors to the Red Centre, one of the reasons to visit was to see Uluru (Ayers Rock), which is surely one of the wonders of the world. At the same time, by virtue of the number of visitors, it's a difficult place to get a sense of the vast emptiness of the Red Centre. If you want to take photos of Uluru at sunset or dawn, you will find yourself sharing the viewing areas with tens, if not hundreds, of other camera-toting tourists. Moreover, there is only one route on sealed roads to make the nigh-on 500 kilometer journey (each way) from Alice, and a trip to King’s Canyon is a there-and-back side trip of about 300 kilometers on top of that. The country the roads pass through is of course empty by most standards, with roadhouses (fuel station, convenience store, café and accommodation) at average intervals of perhaps a hundred kilometers, but the roads are well-beaten tourist routes and pass through relatively monotonous terrain.

The solution to this problem is the Mereenie Loop – a route that links the point at which the tarmac runs out on the roads that run westwards from Alice, to the point at which the tarmac starts again at Kings Canyon, through landscape that is dominated by the sharply etched relief of rocky hill ranges. In doing so, it creates a more or less circular route that allows you to take in King’s Canyon and Uluru without too much back-tracking, and takes you through some of the finest landscape in the Red Centre. When it’s in good condition, the Mereenie Loop would be passable in a two-wheel drive vehicle (although you might find that you lost a few car parts that rattled loose in the process), but in any case, the campervan companies aren’t keen on you destroying their vehicles, so if you take a 2WD van onto unsealed road you are in breach of contract, consequently uninsured, and liable for the full cost of any damage you do to the vehicle, yourself, or third parties. (I find this difficult to believe, but it appears that third party motor insurance is not a legal requirement in Australia.) This was the reason that I hired a 4WD campervan – a modified Land Cruiser – for the part of my trip in the Red Centre. And once I had a 4WD it allowed me to make a side trip to a beautiful spot known as Palm Valley.

Now heading off alone, even in a 4WD, into the Australian outback does not sound a very sensible proposition, but I am not a great risk-taker and a further safety cushion is provided by a finely developed sense of how embarrassing it would be to have to call out the cavalry because of foolhardy behaviour. My first level of protection was avoiding getting into trouble in the first place: I would never have rented a 4WD without a reasonable amount of experience of driving both 2WDs and 4WDs off road (and although I went off-tarmac in the Red Centre, I didn’t go off-‘road’), and driving relatively long distances on unsealed roads. I also did some fairly exhaustive research before I went, including getting the Hema maps, which show what services are available where:

and finding information on the internet about both the 4WD driving conditions and on the details of camp sites and other facilities. And then I checked the condition of the roads and the weather forecast with the Information Centre in Alice before I set out. Lastly, I planned my route so that I had enough fuel to cover increased fuel consumption or being unable to get fuel at fuel stations marked on the map, and so that, if I ever ran into road conditions that I was not confident of driving through, I could simply retrace my steps – if necessary all the way back to Alice. (The Land Cruiser had two fuel tanks, although apart from the last day back to Alice, I never used more than half of the first tank before refilling. The green light that appears to be warning that you are heading off the road into the shrubbery indicates that 4WD is engaged.)

Level two of protection was being able to cope if I did get stuck without calling out the cavalry: I only used routes that had enough traffic on them that if I broke down or got bogged I would only have to wait a couple of hours at most for another vehicle to come along who could help me either directly, or by taking a message to call out a breakdown truck or whatever. At the same time, I had enough food and water that I could have waited days for someone to come along.

And level three was calling out the cavalry: this is an emergency beacon that when activated will bring you emergency aid wherever you are in Australia within two hours:

The girl at the campervan hire looked me sternly in the eye, and said that I should only use it for a life-threatening emergency – and not just if I had a flat tyre. To be honest, the only situation I could imagine where I would use it would be if I got bitten by a snake – and the realistic chance of that happening was tiny.

Ancient (European) history

Most of my tour of Australia was planned to take in the natural sites: the forests, plains, wetlands and mountains, as well as the continent’s fauna, but I was also interested in some of the human story – not only the aborigines, but also the lives of the early European settlers. The extraordinary isolation of the Red Centre – 1500 km from Darwin in the north, Adelaide in the south, and the Indian Ocean in the west, and 2500 km from Brisbane in the east – presented extra challenges, and I took time out to visit two of the first European sites in the area.

The first of these is the very raison d’être of Alice Springs – the telegraph station about 4 km to the north of the current town centre. During the middle part of the 19th century, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney Brisbane and Tasmania were progressively linked by a telegraph network. The Adelaide to Darwin overland telegraph line, together with an undersea cable that came ashore at Darwin, was the link which finally connected Australia to the rest of the world, and Sydney to London via India. The 3200 km distance from Adelaide to Darwin necessitated twelve repeater stations along the route, where a telegraphist listened to the incoming signal in morse code, and then transmitted it to the next station along the line by tapping it out again. The line was built in just two years and completed in 1872. Alice Springs was one of the repeater stations.

The station consists of half a dozen stone buildings laid out neatly:

The heart of the station was the telegraph office,

where the morse code messages were re-transmitted

after arriving down a single copper wire from Adelaide:

Besides the telegraph office and accommodation, the station needed everything for a self-sufficient community, including a smithy for the blacksmith-stockman and a camel yard for the baggage trains that supplied the station. (You can just make out the telegraph line to Darwin.)

Alice Springs are not a spring at all, but a nearby waterhole in the otherwise usually dry bed of the Todd River. Alice was the wife of the former postmaster of South Australia, Charles Todd.

The other early European site that I visited was at Hermannsburg, 130 kilometers west of Alice Springs and close to the start of the road to Palm Valley and of the road known as the Mereenie loop. I discovered it more or less by accident when I was looking for the supermarket – which I never did find. The site was founded as an aboriginal mission by the Lutheran church in 1877, and consists of a precinct of 18 surviving buldings. The mission is an important heritage site in the chequered history of interaction between the aboriginal and European populations: unlike most other missions at that time, the early missionaries recorded, and taught in, the local aboriginal language, and the mission was a refuge for aboriginal people during the violent frontier conflict that was a feature of early pastoral settlement in central Australia.

The church is the centre piece of the spacious settlement, and was completed in 1880:

Like the telegraph station, the mission impressed me with how well the European settlers lived in such isolated circumstances. The buildings were all constructed with deep verandahs to protect the interior from the searing heat …

… and the furniture, domestic appliances and decorations were what one would expect in a European household from the same era: neat, functional, but not uncomfortable. It struck me that, in an era before mains water, electricity and gas, living in such isolation would have been no more instrinsically difficult than living in Europe, but that transporting goods and appliances from outside was the real challenge. I wondered what stories the piano would have had to tell …

The Green Centre

The ‘Red Centre’ is the colloquial name for the desert area surrounding Uluru (Ayers Rock), and including – the best part of 500 kilometers away – the town of Alice Springs: ‘Centre’ because, well, it’s in the centre of Australia, and ‘red’ because of the oxidized iron in the soil and rocks that gives the area its distinctive and immediately recognizable glow. Who hasn’t seen those sunrise and sunset photos of Uluru?

The first part of my flight down from Darwin to Alice Springs was therefore pretty much as expected. We took off from humid, tropical Darwin into mountainous clouds that soon obscured the ground, and when our ride smoothed out a bit and the view beneath us cleared, the ground below was the brown of bare earth and dried vegetation, with tell-tale green revealing the damper soils of river valleys.

But what happened then was not at all expected, for instead of getting dryer and redder, the landscape spread out below got greener …

… and by the time that we landed at Alice airport, the natural vegetation looked as though someone had been out regularly with a hose for the last few months.

The ‘someone’ was Mother Nature, and compared with an average annual rainfall of 283 mm (less than a foot) of rain, she had already lavished 583 mm of rain on the weather station at Alice Springs airport by the end of September. Years as wet as 2010 happen about once in a decade, and the desert vegetation responds with a vengeance, with seeds germinating, and plants flowering and producing the next generation of seeds, in short order. Those red blobs in the previous photo are the flowers of the desert poppy, which hasn’t been seen in Alice for ten years.

At the Hotel, I borrowed a hire bicycle to have a look around town, and was warned that I would have to cycle through water to get across the Todd River. The Todd River is a peculiar affair: for most of the time it’s reduced to a few derisory billabongs, one of which gives its name to the town, and the dry sandy riverbed is used by the locals as a pedestrian shortcut. Rare heavy rain turns it back into a river, however, and local custom has it that you aren’t a proper native of Alice until you have seen the Todd River flowing three times. In the event, I missed my first step towards nativehood by a few hours …

… and was just a smidge jealous of another MLer who had seen it flowing earlier this year. I think the ‘road closed’ photo near the bottom of Alastair’s Alice post is the same river crossing as my photo above.

Missing the Todd River in action was partially compensated the next day, when I set off from Alice in my second campervan and discovered that, not only were there floodways, but some of them actually had water in them, unlike the ones in Kakadu:

A bit later, I stopped at one to take a photo, and caught a familiar sound – a mixture of chirruping and choking bird song. Those of you with sharp eyesight will just be able to make out, perched on a twiggy diagonal branch going left from the tree in the centre, a small group of budgerigars:

The only difference from their caged counterparts was that they were all green with yellow faces. For the rest of the day, I saw regular groups of two or three budgies – little green darts – flying overhead as I drove along through the Green Centre.