Kings Canyon is located about halfway between Alice Springs and Uluru, by road its about 470 km from Alice. The canyon has been cut 100 m deep into the layered sandstone and shale over a period of 400 million years, creating one the most spectacular landscapes in central Australia. We climbed 500 steps to the western canyon rim, then walked through the dome-like sandstone formations of the “Lost City”, crossing over to the other side of the canyon at a waterhole known as the Garden of Eden, before returning along the eastern rim of the canyon and back down to the bottom of the gorge.

We descended to the Kings Creek level and drove back to Kings Creek Station for the night, before heading towards Uluru (Ayers Rock) the next day.

When we returned to Switzerland, I told Felix we needed to watch The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, a great 1994 Australian movie in which two drag queens and a transgender woman travel through outback Australia and visit some of the places we had just seen. So we both watched it and realized that the climactic scene where drag queens Tick, Felicia, and Bernadette climb to the a cliff and gaze across the landscape was filmed at Kings Canyon and we recognized the path they climbed to the top of Kings Canyon. We even walked through the narrow chasm in the photo below from the movie. Its now known as “Priscilla’s Crack.”

In the penultimate scene of the film, the trio stand triumphant on top of Kings Canyon’s south wall; they’ve survived not only the hike, but the existential threat of bringing Sydney’s drag culture to the outback. The grandeur of the 400-million-year-old landscape in the sweeping panorama only magnifies the accomplishment. “It never ends, does it? All that space,” Terence Stamp’s character, Bernadette, remarks.