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.
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