Outback

The Northern Territory, where I spent the past five days, covers a huge amount of land, much of which is dry, dusty, and sparsely populated – the Outback.

Did you know the outback has trees? 

To get there, you either drive a long, long, long time, or you take the one train that runs north to south through the middle of Australia along the telegraph route, which was the original reason Alice Springs got started as a town. It sits almost directly between Darwin at the Top End of Australia and Adelaide in the south (now is the time where you find Alice Springs on google earth and see that is in the middle of the country). The telegraph line went up through Indonesia and across Asia and the Middle East to Europe, cutting the time needed to send a message to or from London to about three days, compared with mailing a letter on a ship and waiting months for news.

For a small town, Alice has been pretty built up – it has an airport now (ok, so there’s a third way to get here, via flight) and has TWO grocery stores, a Kmart and a Target. Mainly, it serves the Aboriginal communities who traditionally lived on this land (health services, etc.) and welcomes tourists as the jumping off point to get to Uluru, the big sandstone rock in the middle of the country.  

I arrived on Thursday and spent the rest of the day working, but a good amount of time in the evening to wander around, since clocks in the Northern Territory are set 1.5 hours behind Sydney (Australia currently has 4 different time zones because of daylight savings, and different parts of the same state can have different times. It can be challenging to figure out).

Fortunately, Alice had a night market that Thursday. I asked if these were a regular event, and was told they are “only held once every few months.” I wandered around the stalls, which were all standard, and the market wasn’t very crowded, which made for easy walking. There were some people selling traditional paintings, soap, and random knickknacks, none of which looked interesting for me. The only thing I purchased outside my standard habits (which are to only purchase food and postcards, of course!) was a fly net. Multiple people warned me the flies in the desert were annoying, and I decided it was worth five bucks (and looking like an idiot) to be safe from the flies.

Just imagine with that thing covering my face. 

The market also had local Alice bands playing on an outdoor stage, which was the best thing happening. I heard the Northern Territory Song of the Year, which was awesome live. I bet you didn’t know that there is a competition for best music in the Northern Territory, huh? You can hear “Aloft” here:  http://davecrowe.com.au/

After that I went home, packed up my fly net and sunscreen, and went to bed in preparation for my 5:45 am pickup.

In the morning, I joined a tour with 20 other travelers and our fearless tour guide, Charlotte. The group was about half young (20-ish) Taiwanese folks on “working holiday” visas (you can come to Australia on a 1 year visa valid for short-term employment under 3 months. These are extremely popular). The other travelers were a mix of English blokes on their gap year, Dutch people traveling, a Danish couple on holiday, an older couple from Western Australia coming to see the Outback, guys my age from Melbourne and Canada, and a 70 year Australian woman who had wanted to go to Japan but changed her plans given the tsunami warnings and decided to come see Uluru with a bunch of young backpackers.

We drove for 4 hours to reach our first campsite on our 3 day, 2 night adventure. The landscape was flat and pretty desolate all around, there was only one road, and the fuel stops were literally the only thing on the drive. And there were a lot of stops compared to the next day’s drive – I think we stopped 3 or 4 times.

After lunch and unpacking our stuff from the bus, we hopped back on to enter the national park. Traditional owners lease Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park (the leading t is silent, obviously) to the Australian government under 99 year terms. By the time we reached Uluru, it was about 3 pm. I walked around the whole thing, which is somewhere between 6 and 10 km (differing reports make it difficult to judge).

The walk was hot, but it’s nice to say that I was able to do it. Parts of the track are too far from the rock to really feel it imposing upon you, but when you get up close it is definitely big. It’s interesting to walk around – Uluru is a sacred place to the local Aboriginals, and you’re not allowed to take pictures of certain sites due to the special “men’s business” and “women’s business” that happens in those areas. They compared taking pictures of the spots and showing them out of context to misreading or misinterpreting a holy book from the monotheistic religions. I found that a really interesting comparison. First of all, it twisted my brain to reimagine the rock as a book, particularly a prescriptive religious manual. I appreciated the comparison since it is a good way to translate the significance for guests unfamiliar with the local customs, but passages from the Bible, Koran, and Torah are taken out of context and misinterpreted in public all the time. Aboriginals also don’t want you to climb the rock out of respect for its sacred status (and I wouldn’t want to – there is just one metal chain to hold onto the whole way up, and it’s steep!) but for tourism reasons they haven’t actually closed the top to the public. A juxtaposition in action – tourism is altering the way people interact with this object, and it’s a moneymaker to let people climb it, but the locals don’t.  

After the walk we headed to the sunset spot for champagne and the view.

In my opinion Uluru is best viewed from a distance so you can see how immense it is and how it sticks out from the landscape around it.

We headed back to the campsite for dinner, showers (yes, camp had showers and toilets and a pool) and sleeping under a full moon. It was so bright that I didn’t really need my flashlight to find my way to the bathroom twice in the middle of the night.

Out there you sleep in something called a swag, which is essentially a combined bed roll and sleeping bag wrapped in canvas. Ours were pretty basic but apparently you can get fancy ones that have pop up head coverings to make it a mini tent! I don’t know why we don’t have these in North America.

Charlotte woke us up on the second morning at 4:45 am so we could pack up and have breakfast before going to watch the sunrise. The moon was setting at the same time – very cool, but way too wide angle for my camera.

You can see Kata Tjuta on the left and the moon on the right. 

After sunrise we headed back into the park to hike around Kata Tjuta. I found this much more impressive, maybe because it was an actual hike, and maybe because you got to really get up close to the rocks, climb along the path, and watch the colors change based on the sun and the shadows. Plus I did a major part of the hike by myself and it was fantastic to hear nothing except my footsteps and the insects (but not feel them thanks to the fly net). The first two days the sky didn’t have any clouds, and it was so blue – the kind of sky you see when you’re flying in the middle of the day and there is nothing to block your view, except it was from the ground.

The path, and the Outback in general, had a lot more greenery than I expected. Apparently the region is only “semi arid,” which makes me nervous about what arid country is like, because after about a day my skin was extremely dry. I also drank a liter and half of water by 6:30 in the morning on the second day, before we even started the hike. Thanks to my immense amounts of sunscreen, sun protectant lip balm, and sweet hiking shirt, I escaped the sun mostly unscathed.

Temperatures reached 40 C / 102 F, so we headed back to camp after the hike for lunch, a swim, and then back on the bus. We then started the 4 hour drive to our next campsite. This road was even more desolate – we only had one rest stop the whole way, which naturally charged the highest extortion, I mean, prices for things like water and ice cream. I was crankiest on this part of the trip – it was very, very hot since I was sitting on the sunny side of the bus, plus I was in the seat above the wheel, which meant that my legs didn’t fit in the seat (which is a problem I never have because I’m so short), plus I didn’t realize how far apart the rest stops were, so I really had to pee. All of this was exacerbated by the fact that I purposely didn’t bring anything to read or my headphones because I just wanted to enjoy my disconnected time. Overall this was a good decision and discomfort always makes the sweet things sweeter.

The only other stop we made apart from the bathroom break was to collect firewood. Charlotte told us to find pieces as big as her arm and bring them back. In general, we searched in vain until the couple from Perth (Western Australia’s capital city, and one of the most remote capitals in the entire world) showed us how it was done. They are retired farmers, and the wife ended up jumping a barbed wire fence to get to these huge (for the outback) fallen trees. The husband brought back one that was so big that he needed to use his “bush ingenuity” to cut it down to size – he wedged it between a standing tree trunk and used that as leverage. Needless to say, they put the rest of us to shame.

When we disembarked at the second camp, the first thing I did was hit the toilet and then the pool. Part of the group bought beer at extortion prices, and I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity for cold beer in the desert, so I pitched in. See, a happy ending – a pool and cold beer in the middle of the outback, with extremely weird bird noises in the background. All of the birds in Australia seem to make the strangest sounds. I will record them and put them up on the blog, but they have interrupted many a phone call to the States because the person on the other end of the phone cannot figure out what the noise is on my end.

 We watched the sunset on top of the one hill in the area. It looked out over a vast expanse of land with a ton of bush, and there were clouds right where the sun was going down. They all were outlined in gold and looked like they’d been painted into the sky.

For dinner that night we had kangaroo with bread and roasted potatoes cooked in the fire pit. Then we drank some more and stayed up talking while Charlotte went to bed early.

The last day we continued the tradition of waking up extremely early, since the temperature was predicted to hit 42 C / 104 F. We drove over to Kings Canyon, which is a big, relatively green sandstone canyon in the middle of a lot of nothing. It felt like entering the time when dinosaurs roamed. We also learned that central Australia used to be buried under the sea – there were fossils of shells, sea slugs, and ocean ripples. Thinking of such a hot and dry place as the bottom of the ocean was slightly unfathomable.  A lot of people find Kings Canyon the best part of the trip because it is so comparatively green. I enjoyed Kata Tjuta the most: the hike was the best and the rock contrasted the sky so nicely.