Every distance on this site is either our own routing from the hotel pin or a number published by the destination. Here is the difference.
The starting point
We used the map pin that our registry holds for the hotel: latitude −23.7193651, longitude 133.877757, on Barrett Drive between the Todd River and the golf course. That pin is where Google Maps places the complex. All our own distances start there.
The method
- We looked up each destination by name in OpenStreetMap's public geocoder and checked that the result was the right place.
- We asked a public OpenStreetMap routing engine for the driving route from the pin to that point.
- We recorded the distance, rounded to a tenth of a kilometre.
- We did not add traffic, roadworks, stops or detours. The result is a floor, not a schedule.
Why we rarely print drive times
The routing engine also returns a time, but its times out here are unreliable. It gave 21 minutes for the 7.7 km to the Desert Park and 13 minutes for the 12.3 km to the airport, which says more about its assumptions on town streets than about your drive. Where a destination publishes its own time, we use that: Standley Chasm says 40 minutes from Alice Springs; Parks Australia says about 5.5 hours to Uluṟu.
When our number and the official one differ
| Destination | Our routing | Published figure | We print |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uluṟu | 432.2 km to Yulara village | 465 km from Alice Springs (Parks Australia) | 465 km |
| Kings Canyon Resort | 327.6 km | 323 km via Redbank and the Mereenie Loop (Tourism NT) | 323 km |
| Standley Chasm | 50.5 km | 40-minute drive (the Chasm) | Both |
| Town centre | Todd Mall 2.5 km by road | 1.8 km on foot (convention centre) | Both, labelled |
The Uluṟu gap is the obvious one. Our routing ended at Yulara, the resort village, not at the rock, and it started at the hotel rather than the town centre. Parks Australia's 465 km is the figure a visitor sees on official material, so it is the one we print. The Kings Canyon difference is smaller and comes down to where each source puts the end point.
Places we did not route
N'Dhala Gorge, Arltunga and Ruby Gap are reached on unsealed tracks. Routing engines handle those badly, so we left them without a number rather than print a distance that sends someone the wrong way.
The rings on the home page poster and the lists on the West MacDonnell and East MacDonnell pages all come from this run. Back to field notes.