I find it hard to describe the appeal of visiting the Outback. It is a whole lot of nothing at first glance. The first day our highlight was a view of the Flinders Ranges, which looked like small rocky hills with little vegetation. (That felt worth of the 8 hour drive, let me tell you!) But after a while the Outback seemed to captivate us. We enjoyed noticing all the differences, all the stars were different, and so bright, all the plants were different and we learned so much about the thousands of ways Aboriginals used them to survive, and there are wonderful birds there. The most basic things seemed to different, all the natural water is salty, we saw lots of lakes and rivers but none had water in them. We passed the biggest lake in Australia and it had lots of salt, but no water, in fact it only has had wter in it 5 times since European settlement.
We went to William Creek, the smallest town in South Australia, population 11. It is off a dirt track, so far from aything it is amazing to imagine the lifestyle. And it is the city that the people living on the Sheep Stations (ranches) go to! The stations here are so huge, 6,000 square kilometers was average! It is so hut, so dusty, so dry, and they have the most annoying and aggresive flies that are determined to fly in your mouth, eyes, ears, and nose. William Creek was our first experience sleeping in a swag (a waterproof canvas sleeping bag cover with a thin mattress inside) under the stars.
At times I thought that if this tourism is so popular, we should start something in Nebraska. A couple of our stops were pretty hilarious.
- Talc Alf – now here is a bloke we visited that has lived in no mans land for 30 years. He has created a story for each letter of the aplphabet, when that was done he got bored again so he did stories for many, many words, then he ran out of words, and now he scupts the stories into soapstone. Quite the character.
- Then we saw a station that took all their busted machinery and welded them together into huge sculptures.
- And last, but not least, we stopped at Pussy Willow, where there is a dead tree in nowhere with dead feral cats hanging from the limbs like Christmas ornaments. Our guide said, “Oh, the locals do that for a joke because the cats are pests.” We said “What locals?! How do you define local?”
Proof that boredom gets to ya, but I think that there is a future for the worlds’s largest scarecrow and two headd snakes that you see in the flatlands of Nebraska. But seriously, all in all we met a lot of great people from Sweden, Netherlands, UK and Australia. Hopefully we will see them again someday.
The next stop along the journey was to an Opal mining town called Coober Pedy. The temperatures there are extreme. 120 degrees in the summer and 32 degrees in the winter. So most people there live underground in old mines or they dig out a house in the rock an dmine for opal in the process. We figured we would try our luck and strick it rich by doing a little noodling (searching for opals) ourselves. We came away with a few unspectacular specimens that we were told were virtually worthless, but we kept them anyway.
Next stop was Ayers Rock, also called Uluru (the Aboriginal name). We saw it at sunset and sunrise and during the day, and if you are lucky enough you can see the 5 minutes of video footage that Chad shot of…a rock. It is spectacular, especially after seeing 4 days of flat desert. We climbed it, with mixed feelings, since it is spiritual to the Aboriginals. It was very steep and a little scary, but had wonderful views up top. In the evenings we had a campfire and one guy in our group did tricks with flaming nunchuks and spit fire (he also played the didjeridoo), our guide gave the nunchuks a go too and kept us all laughing in the process. It was fun.
After the trip we spent the night in Alice Springs, right smack dab in the middle of the country. And the next morning flew to Cairns on the east coast. On the plance Chad was reading the Northern Territory Times and the headlines were “Woman Plunges to her Death” (which is a woman who fell at Kings Canyon, where we had been the day before) and “Jellyfish Sting Sparks Heart Attach in Girl”(which is in Cairns, where we are headed). We find it amazing how many things can kill you in Australia from what we have been reading.
A box jellyfish stung the girl, which is one of the world’s most deadly creatures with tentacles up to 9 feet long. Our book says “Someone stung will come running to the beach screaming and collapse, be prepared to resuscitate the victim”. Then there are salt water crocodiles that can be 24 feet long that like to dine on humans. It seems that half of the swimming places in our book say you can’t swim there for one reason or another (box jellyfish, man eating sharks, fresh water crocs, salt water crocs, lethal undertows, etc.) But don’t worry Mom, we are safe.
Cheers!
Heidi and Chad