By all accounts our road trip was a great success!
We started in Alice Springs, a small town, bang in the centre of Australia and surrounded for hundreds of kilometres on all sides by vast expanses of desert. We arrived on the last flight into Alice at around 4:30pm and made our way to the car hire company. They were shutting up for the night as we arrived but we managed to pick up our campervan and begin our drive into the outback.
The only real way to appreciate how vast and desolate Australia really is, is to drive across it. We were taking a rather well trodden tourist route between Alice Springs and Ayers Rock, but even on this popular stretch of road, you will only pass another vehicle every ten or fifteen minutes. Most of the other road users are road trains. Road trains do exactly what they say on the tin, they are essentially two, three sometimes four lorries bolted together into an absolutely vast vehicle that thunders through the desert at an unstoppable pace. You certainly don’t want to be caught underneath one, that’s for sure.
The other immediate danger you face when driving in the outback are suicidal kangaroos. Whole families of them will literarily sit either to the side or actually on the road and wait for you to come past. You will slow down to a walking pace when you spot the first one, but even so they will try their luck by jumping out just in front of you, forcing you to slam on the breaks to avoid an accident. Road trains don’t bother stopping, but if you hit one of them in a campervan, neither the kangaroo nor your van are going to come out of it well. Fortunately we didn’t hit any.
On that first day we drove around 150km outside of Alice Springs to our first campsite, Stuart’s Well Roadhouse. Home to Dinky The Singing Dingo. Dinky performs every morning around 8:30am, so we got an early night, ready for the early start. Whilst dinner was cooking I took my camera and tripod out to capture the desert night sky. Being hundreds of miles from any form of light pollution, the night sky in the desert is simply phenomenal. I managed to capture this shot using a 30 second exposure.
The following day, after watching Dinky, we were back on the road, to drive the next 300km to Kings Canyon, our next stop.
Ever since leaving Kings Canyon we had noticed that the oil warning light had been flickering on and off, so when we pulled up at a service station we checked our oil, only discover it was old, gunky and useless. A quick repair and some new oil and we were good to go. We were lucky, the outback, hundreds of miles from civilization would not be a nice place to have a breakdown.
We attempted to make Uluru by sunset, however the distance was just too great to cover in time (another 400km) so at dusk we pulled up by the side of the road and made our first outback barbecue. Here is Joe lighting the fire, whilst Lucy is in the background stepping out the van.
We finally arrived in Uluru that night and parked up in the nearby resort, essentially a mini city with all the amenities of civilization. They even have an airport there now, which has been a big boom for the tourist industry. We set our alarms for 4:30am ready for sunrise, only to discover upon waking up that the sun didn’t actually rise out here in the desert until 6:30am. It was worth the wait though, this was our first site of Uluru and it was every bit as impressive as we had been lead to believe.
Kata Tjuta was our next stop on the list. Within site of Uluru, it is far less well known, yet in my opinion a lot more impressive as a rock formation. You can be the judge of that though…
Back to Uluru for sunset and we had time for a brisk 10km stroll around the rock. I really liked these charred trees I found on the far side.
Finally, the light show we had been waiting for, and sunset over Uluru, quite amazing!
On our way back towards Alice Springs, we spent our final night in the outback, cooking on an open fire under the stars…
… and it was time to fly to Adelaide, and the Great Ocean Road.
We spent one glorious night in the comfort of a youth hostel, much needed after 4 nights in a small campervan, and it was time to pick up a new van and drive it to Melbourne.
Our first stop was this place, Lofty Hill, home to this monument and a Koala Sanctuary. We didn’t stop in at the sanctuary, we were more interested in finding wild Koalas on the Great Ocean Road, but the view from the top was nice.
Our next notable stop was after we past the Southern Australia, Victoria boarder and headed into The Grampians mountain range, where we spent the night, climbed a mountain and took lots of pictures!
The following day it was onwards to Portland, the largest town we had seen since Adelaide. We went on a short coastal walk starting in the middle of a petrified forest and ending up looking over a 200 strong seal colony.
The very next day we hit the start of the Great Ocean Road, and what better for a first stop than the Bay of Islands.
These were followed shortly by a rock formation called London Bridge, for obvious reasons…
… and finally by the most famous of them all, the Twelve Apostles.
The following day we were heading inland, and straight through a fantastic area of rainforest…
We ended up that night, completely by accident in Otway National Park, in a small area called Bimbi. We were actually heading into Apollo Bay, for a campsite to park up in, but it was getting late and we spotted a sign for Bimbi Park Campsite on the road. We headed down the one lane track, and about halfway along the 7km route, discovered in the guidebook that it was described as having only limited facilities. We decided to head on anyway, and when we arrived we realized how lucky we had been. The campsite was amazing, with brand new shower blocks and a cozy fire headed hut with a brand new fitted kitchen. We had struck gold! What made the place more incredible was the wildlife. Along the Great Ocean Road, through the rainforests and gum tree plantations, we had spotted just two wild Koalas. This didn’t surprise us, as there are only around 120,000 left in the world. When we woke up the next morning and stepped outside our campervan we saw 7 or 8 within a few paces of where we had slept the night. They were everywhere! I borrowed Lisa’s telephoto lens and took these shots!
Unfortunately we didn’t have time to hang around, we had more rainforest to discover. Followed by another stretch of scenic driving to reach Lorne by nighttime. It was probably the best day of the trip though. Here are some more rainforest shots, including a magnificent waterfall we discovered and some photos from the treetop walk we took after lunch.
Driving into Lorne, we stopped just one more time to watch the sunset on the beach. The following day we made the short 100km hop up to Melbourne, where I am right now. I shall update with pictures from Melbourne shortly!
