2006/06 Australia trip - Road to Gemtree |
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We wanted to get to the mining area of Gemtree that day, on the other side of Alice Springs, so we controlled ourselves, and didn’t take all those turnoffs to the attractions we’d seen before. We enjoyed the drive though, as the road passes through the McDonnell Mountains, red crags, and thin crests of rocks, some looking like stegosaurus plates on the tops of the ridges.
Our only stop was at Standley Chasm, where Sandie was looking forward to a Devonshire Tea like the one she had back in 1995. They say you should never go back to a place that you really enjoyed, as it’ll never be the same, and this was a classic. It is a private park, and it was expensive for what is just an hour’s stop for most people. The café had changed and no longer did Devon Teas, or much else that was appetizing. There were far more people, mainly because the chasm is on the tour bus circuit, and there were few birds and no lizards to be seen this time. However, the chasm itself is still something to see, a very narrow gap in the mountains, with sheer red walls. By chance we happened to get there at noon when the sun lit up both walls, and from a distance it looked like a furnace. Unfortunately, that part of the canyon is quite small and it was busy with people.
We were in and out of Alice Springs in a couple of hours, quite good for filling up with diesel, doing a week’s shopping, and sending off our e-mails.
We had a couple of hour’s driving to get to Gemtree, which is on the Plenty Highway, a turning to the east, off the Stuart Highway, the road from Adelaide to Darwin. As we left Alice Springs we’d crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, so we were now officially in the Tropics. We still had about 900 miles to go to Darwin. We were noticing that the days and nights were getting steadily warmer, even though the desert wind was still keeping us cool at nights. The days were also getting longer (about 11 hours rather than 10) as we moved north, even though we still had a week to go to the shortest day of the year.
The Plenty Highway had not changed since our last visit in 2002. It is still a single lane of blacktop, stretching east across 
central Australia. You can blast along the single lane at high speed, but you have to be prepared to pull off the blacktop if you meet someone. We tourists just put the nearside wheels onto the red sand shoulder when meeting another car, but I’d noticed that some of the locals took the whole car onto the shoulder, which suggests that sometimes the shoulder is soft and they’d rather not risk spinning out. Sandie also reminded me that road trains do not pull off for anyone other than another road train. As they can be 170 feet long and weigh umpteen tons, who are we to argue?
There is no overall speed limit in the Northern Territory, so it is one of the few places left in the world where the white circle with a black stripe really does mean “unrestricted”. However, few people travel any faster than in the other states, with about 70 mph being the tops. Occasionally you get passed by someone in a rented camper who has it wound up to 90 just for the experience, but they probably soon get tired of the bumps at that speed.
The Plenty Highway crosses the new section of the Ghan Railway. The Ghan originally went from Adelaide to Alice Springs but on our last trip we saw where the new section from Alice Springs to Darwin was being built, about 100 years behind the original plan. We’d expected the new Ghan to take much of the road train traffic, but that doesn’t seem to have happened, and the road trains still roar up and down the Stuart carrying gasoline, cows, concrete, and even army tanks.
We arrived at Gemtree just before dark. The previous owner, Graham, had finally sold the business a few months ago. The new owners, Cameron and Carmel, seem to have left the business much as it was. We found that the next day’s tag-along tour for garnet mining was full, so we arranged to go looking for zircons the next day and garnets for the day after. A “tag-along” means that an employee drives out to the mine and the customers follow along in their own vehicles, laden with mining equipment.
The Gemtree campground is enormous, plenty of bush for everyone. We were out on the edge in our own little grove of trees. For once, it was warm enough to cook outside, with the stove attached to the back door, and to attract hundreds of moths into our little home.