Day 281 | Off to the source: a short trip to the actual springs, ie, Alice Springs
My daily biking circuit, around 6 km on weekdays, home/work/town/home, is scarcely training for the next sector of my trip.
Alice to Mt Isa is around 860 km, the first 70, and final 90 km are sealed, the rest an unknown quantity but rock and bulldust are usually mentioned in the conversation whenever the Plenty Highway is raised.
I’m getting my (biking) act together since the parcels with the bike parts arrived, jolting me into action and have started to spend odd moments in my lunch half hour at work poring over my Hema Great Desert Tracks maps, scale 1: 1,250,000, quite sufficient detail for the areas I’m to traverse, actually finding any detail on the ground out there requires some scratching around.
In my inimitable manner, called fuzzy logic, there’s been a route plotted out: a few days in the East MacDonnell National Park for some more gorgeous gorges, then a cross country on some obscure track to the Plenty Highway, turning off at Tobermorey Station for the direct route to Mt Isa through Urandangi, rather than the Donohue Highway to Boulia. Somehow I think I might eventually pass through Boulia on my way south later in the year as I zig zag down Queensland on my way to Melbourne.
13 days, with one day off, not really pushing it, let’s say two weeks, I’m not sure there’s so much to see on those travels once I leave the MacDonnells, but if there is I guess I should allow another couple of days for general distractions.
Seems it’s good cattle country, I note quite a few named bores on the map on the Plenty, water might be not too much of a problem out there.
I’ve now jotted in a tentative date for blasting off: 18 April, that’s this year, 2012.
A few issues need resolution before then: acquainting myself with another 2 sets of parcels of bike bits, from USA and Germany, and, gulp, a couple of visits to a dentist to replace some fillings which have shaken loose on some of those, err, filling jolting roads I’ve travelled, or, more likely, munching on that muesli in the mornings. Yes, there’s been a change in morning diet to pre-chewed and digested mush, ie, porridge to avoid any repetition of said issue.
That gulp is not over any particular fear of dentists, beyond that of the preposterous cost for those not having insurance, $68 open mouth fee, $90 for X rays , I didn’t ask for, or want, those, I mean if they don’t feel confident picking up a drill without irradiating me, they should pay for them.
So.
2 hours in a chair equates to 3 months on the road, something’s not right in that equation.
Anyway, after a long time in Alice, this my second time around, I finally bike on the path up the Todd (now dry) River to the Old Telegraph Station, sited at the place originally named Alice Springs in 1871. Not so far but sufficient to give an inkling of the territory to come.
After the recent rain everything is looking green, even the spinifex has greened up, the waterhole had quite some amount of water that is trapped in a hollow in the underlaying granite. This was a spot where water was able to be found by the aboriginal people, sometimes by digging in the sand, for at least the last 1000 generations.
1000 generations? That is a truly awesome thought. It’s not really possible to get your head around that one.
There’s another more pertinent thought rattling around in my skull.
31 days until takeoff … and there’s even Easter in there.
Hooray!