This was really one of our nicest tours in Australia. Your tour guide can make a huge difference, and if you go you might not be lucky enough to get Leroy, who only does this part time (we actually got him on his last day before heading back to his other gig, radio host and proprietor of the Greenhills Hotel and Condah Pub in Condah, Victoria). However, it is a good company, so probably their other guides are good too, and the scenery was amazing. With this post more than any of the others, I hope that you will check out the other photos on our Shutterfly site, because a lot of them came out really beautifully and I can only choose five for the blog postings. They are mixed in with the Ayers Rock Resort photos under "The Red Centre".
Leroy picked us up at the resort at 2:00 PM. Mt. Conner is about 88 km southeast of Uluru, and is not part of the national park. Instead, it is on private property, part of the Curtin Spring cattle station. Perhaps because of this, there is less of an effort to change habits of referring to it by the English name and going back to the aboriginal name. However, we did ask and you can also call it Attila. Leroy said the natives called it the land of the ice men, and as it was once part of Antarctica, they seem to know what they were talking about.
Since you are on private property, we had to stop off at the station to pick up the keys, and there is a gated entrance that you need to go through. At the station there is a roadhouse, restrooms, and camping, and they have some cages with various native birds. I said "hello" to one white cockatoo several times, having been told he would greet me, and he just kept looking at me and said nothing. Then, as I started to walk away he began saying, "Hello! Hello!" I guess he takes a little while to warm up to you.
Just to be clear, the cattle station itself is very large, but most of it is just land for the cattle to roam over, along with assorted wildlife, and occasional corals and watering holes. You can buy land for a dollar an acre if you will buy a million acres at a time, but in country this dry, I suppose you need a larger spread to support enough food. Where we stopped is right near the road, and I imagine may be the only buildings on the entire spread, though you could probably roam around for days without being sure. Anyway, if you are into camping, that could be one way of seeing the area without staying at the resort, and it looks like they have rooms too.
Anyway, we picked up the key and got in through the gate. All this time Leroy was talking via radio with the other driver, Brady. He mentioned something about spending an hour at the lake, so I had in mind that we would be going to a lake, only I was surprised that there might be a lake in such a dry area.
As we got closer, I noticed a low, flat area that I thought was it, only it seemed awfully white, and bright. The temperature surely wouldn't have allowed for freezing, so what was going on? As we got there, it was just a sheet of salt.
There was water there once upon a time, but below the surface there were salt deposits and a layer of porous black mineral. When rains come now, that combination causes the water to leach more salt up to the surface. I imagine it's a lot like the Bonneville Salt Flats, but I have never been there.
Leroy told us that it's official name was Lake Swanson, but there are also references to the Amadeus Salt Lake Chain, so that may indicate that there are more of these lakes around. It was pretty impressive, and makes a great backdrop for pictures. Maybe it's gross, but I did feel compelled to break off some salt crystals and taste them. It was salt all right.
We headed out for some kangaroo spotting, and saw two. Granted, we had already seen kangaroos at the Rainforest Habitat, and we were going to see more in every zoo and park on the trip, but there is still something cool about seeing them in the wild. One of the pictures up there has one of the kangaroos, but it is pretty tiny. I still had not discovered the zoom feature yet.
I had mentioned earlier how the crocodile spotting was a bit reminiscent of the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland, only real. This was a bit like the Indiana Jones ride, only real. There are parts where the road is quite smooth (and notice how red it is), but as we started heading up to the lookout it kept getting rockier, and rougher. We kind of like it that way, and were laughing a lot. The really rocky pictures are from up at the lookout. It's good that there are all of those rocks around, because Mt. Conner is just slightly shorter than Uluru, and Mr. Severin's wish is that by the time he dies it will be taller. They are working on a cairn at the top, so every time they go up, they grab some rocks on the way to add to the top. I bet with Hugh Grant they could finish in a day.
There was still a lot of plant life everywhere. The most populous was probably the mulga, but we also saw a 400 year old desert oak (which is a type of acacia, nothing like an oak as we know it, except that it is tall and strong).
Our next stop was an old homestead from the original settler. The current family, the Severins, have been there since the fifties, but there were two families before that. The first guy started out in a hole in the ground that is still there, and I suppose we could have poked around, but I just know it was full of snakes-probably extremely poisonous ones.
We drove to the top of the hill where the house once stood, then wandered at our leisure down to the old windmill, corral, and water tank. The other vehicle joined us, so we got to talk to the other passengers a bit. They were a couple from the Isle of Wight, and a family of three (two parents and a young daughter) from Melbourne. Our guides set up tables where there were drinks and snacks while we watched the sun set. Brady also did some demonstration with a whip, and if I had known we were going to get a chance to try it I would have paid more attention. I did not do well.
There was wine, of course, but also some juice. The food was bread that you could dip in olive oil and then these crushed seeds. I think they were wattle seeds, and the name for them as a dish was something like woogamooga, but I am just going to call it bush tucker.
After sun set we drove back to the station for dinner. They started us off with pumpkin honey soup, which was excellent. We were served pumpkin soup in many places afterwards, but this was the first time we had it, and I thought it was the best we had (that was the honey element). Then we had steak, and finished off with a choice between bread pudding or I think lemon something. Almost everyone had the bread pudding so I can't really picture the other one.
We finished off by looking at the stars for a bit, then headed back to the resort. You can't really stop and look at things at night, but the animals are a lot more active. I think I saw five kangaroos and a dingo, but everything was just whizzing by. I could see where camping out there at night would be great, though I'm not sure how safe it would be.
Throughout the trip my sisters and I would discuss where we would go again, and a lot of the best experiences would be ones you wouldn't repeat, because they were great and they were done. It would not make sense for us to take this specific tour again. However, there is a lot more that we could do in the area, with more hiking and camping.
I definitely recommend seeing it at least once. There is a wild beauty with lots of variety, and so far I would have to say it is like nowhere else on earth.
http://harristravel.shutterfly.com/161
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Connor
http://www.ayersrockresort.com.au/mount-connor-safari/
http://www.curtinsprings.com/
Greenhills Hotel and Condah Pub
5205 Kenly Highway
Condah, Victoria (between the Grampians and the Great Ocean Road
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment