I’m pleased to announce that the new house now has solar hot water and solar panels. We enjoyed solar at our previous house and these days it’s even more important to be able to reduce power costs. Despite living in a country with an abundance of quality coal, natural gas, and uranium, household power prices…
It’s been about two months since we moved into our new home and started to appreciate the… what can I say?… inadequacies of the house. Down-sizing became real in ways we hadn’t anticipated. Still, we’ve done quite a bit in those eight weeks. I mentioned some before – new bathroom cupboards, new lounge because the…
Australia is a unique place. It’s the only place on Earth that is at the same time a country, a continent, and an island. And that last property has helped to make it a haven for monotremes, marsupials, and other weird critters. Europeans ‘discovered’ the Great South Land several times over the centuries, usually by…
On our last tour day at Yulara we were treated to a helicopter ride so we could see Uluru from the air. It stands out, a huge rock in a red desert, as though some God had plucked it out from somewhere else and placed it on the plain. Kata Tjuta looks like a pile…
Sunrise at Uluru at this time of year is around 6:30am. The Rock famously changes colour as the light grows in the eastern sky. It’s all part of the experience – but you have to get up well before sparrow fart to see the spectacle. We crawled out of bed at about 4:30 to be…
It was time to move on to Uluru. We checked out of the Crowne Plaza bright and early to board the buses for the long drive to the Rock. And it was raining! That’s a rare occurrence in this part of the world and although showers were inconvenient I wasn’t the only one hoping we…
We’d had a busy morning on our first day – Simpsons Gap, Standley Chasm, and the Desert Park. The afternoon was very different, with our visits in the town itself. Our first stop was at The Royal Flying Doctor Service. It has a small museum where visitors can read about the various pioneers of the…
The first day of our actual tour was very busy. Our group of fifty was divided into the reds and the yellows and each group set off in a bus big enough for everyone to have a window seat. Our driver, Roger, a knowledgeable Kiwi who’d been around the Red Centre for many years, was…
Alice Springs is often seen as simply a jumping-off point for tourists heading for Uluru and Kata Tjuta but there’s actually rather more to it than that. It was the site of the Telegraph station that connected Australia to the rest of the world via Darwin. The Ghan railway line has run from Adelaide to…
Quite a few months ago, before we decided to sell our house and move to a smaller property, Peter and I booked a short holiday to Alice Springs and Uluru. It had been many years – in the last century – since we’d been there and that had been with FILM cameras. Positively archaic. The…