Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder,

coming to you from a very echoy Simpsons Gap.

This is one of the highlights for me of the Northern Territory,

because it's incredibly accessible accessible and yet it's also

extraordinarily dramatic. I'm looking at sandstone rocks that have been here for 200 million years,

possibly longer. I wasn't around at the time. And some terrible catastrophe has happened.

There's geological wreckage strewn everywhere. And there's trees with gnarled trunks

clambering out of rock. How do they do that? The colours besides the rough, rusty red of the rock are wonderful.

There's kind of pale gold grass, the trees which are sticking their roots deep into the below the surface to find water are deep green

and the whole place is just a joy to encounter now the reason it's so fantastically accessible is that it's

about 25 kilometres 15 miles west of Alice Springs,

which is pretty much at the centre of Australia, halfway between the north coast and the south,

and between the west coast and the east.

Interesting town, very much a frontier location

when it was founded in the 1870s,

now effectively the service centre for the area,

but lots to see, including a fantastic desert park. Most people though simply base themselves in Alice Springs to go exploring.

And while the clear winner of the Australian icon competition is Uluru, the huge rock at the red centre of Australia.

Goodness, if you can take a bit of extra time and explore the West MacDonald ranges,

also known as Churitia in the Aboriginal culture, then you are going to have a

fantastic experience.

You can cycle out, for instance, to Simpson's Gap.

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