Log One Hundred and Thirty Three – The Centre of the Centre.

11 June 2026

As predicted we are now in the Northern Territory and enjoying the weather of Central Australia, cool nights and sunny days.

On our way to Uluru (Ayers Rock) we stayed at a free camp at Curtain Springs station. It’s a cattle station of about 1 million acres. We enjoyed dinner with several bike riders who had travelled through some of the more remote and isolated country to get to the Finke River Desert race. An interesting night of conversation sharing stories of remote travel and places to be explored. The conversation was of course enhanced through the imbibing of various refreshments. It’s these experiences that make remote travel so worthwhile. The next morning they packed up their swags and were back on the road seeking out challenging tracks to get them to Alice Springs via the Finke Gorge.

We have previously climbed Uluru (no longer possible), walked around the rock, flown over it and now have ridden our bikes around this massive lump of geology. Similar to natural wonders the world over, photos never do the magnitude of the monolith any justice. It’s huge which is even more awe inspiring since it rises like an island out of a vast empty plain. You have to wonder how did it get there!

What is normally best described as a desert has enjoyed several wet seasons which means the desert is green and there is water in some of the creeks and rivers. The Finke River which starts and finishes in deserts is between 300 and 400 million years old and this year it has water! It’s one of the oldest rivers in the world but you might think it’s more like than a creek than a river. The Todd River is even flowing.

We are now in the town of Alice Springs which is named after a woman, namely Alice who never lived in the area, and a spring that was actually a water hole and not a spring. So the town is named after someone who was never there and a water feature that doesn’t exist; curious.

We have done our bit to assist with reducing the number of feral camels in this country. We enjoyed camel burgers for dinner one night. They were very good. There are also lots of feral horses and donkeys up here but I don’t expect to see them on any menu.

There was a worry about fuel availability in these remote parts but that has not been an issue. However there appeared lines of 4WD vehicles at the diesel bowsers when the town’s population blew out from 30,000 to 45,000 for one weekend. That was the weekend of the Finke Desert Race. This is a competition of about 160 vehicles and over 550 motorbikes racing over two days. Each day was about 200kms of rough dirt track.

We have visited a gorge with some 3,000 unique palm trees growing in the middle of the MacDonnell Ranges. It seems incongruous to find palm trees in the middle of Australia and in the middle of a desert but they are there. Their nearest relatives are about 1000 kms away, on the coast.

The Alice Springs telegraph station is a fascinating piece of history. After 1872 with cables stretching across the world and under the oceans, a telegram to London took only 5 hours. Before the telegram a letter took three months to get to its addressee and three months for the reply. The telegram was the internet of its day but at 20 cents a word in 1872 it was not available to the common folk and you certainly didn’t sit up all night chatting with friends in far off places.