Monday: Alice Springs to Glen Helen

It’s an easy start at Alice Springs airport, large and airy, with a huge Tim Stonier landscape blazing and burning at the baggage claim.

Alice, more like a NSW suburban town than a city, is easily negotiated. Armed with a freezer bag, ice, bottled water, Cokes and Subway sandwiches, we sail forth into the Western MacDonnell Ranges. My memory of my earlier visit thirty years ago was of brick-red mountains against a cobalt blue sky, dusty grey spinifex plains and white gum-tree trunks. In August it’s all much greener, with splashes of yellow wildflowers. Southwards an escarpment worthy of Sidney Nolan shadows the road like a fortress.