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Published: October 22nd 2008
....Well, the title was easy. I have had it in mind for a long time now. I even have a subtitle "... and miles to go before I sleep", for those of you who understand the reference. But how to go from here? It was the idea of actually crossing Australia from one side to the other without flying once which attracted me this time. Having seen quite a lot of the country on my previous three visits it was not encountering kangaroos or goannas, watching the sunset at Ayers Rock (now mostly called by its indigenous name "Uluru"), throwing a boomerang, or some such thing which held fascination for me. My present adventures are of a completely different type than the ones I had in Africa and might not come across as particularly thrilling or exotic in comparison to walking with lions, cuddling cheetahs or watching the Himba or Masai dance .
I arrived in Perth on the west coast of Australia on September 28th. It was 7.00 o'clock in the morning but my body was still on South African time: 2.00 a.m. However, it was a beautiful day and I knew I had two whole days
Kangaroo Paw
photographed at the Wildflower Exhibition in Kings Park, Perthto catch up on sleep so I went for a walk in downtown Perth to get a feel for the place. On October 1st I would start on the first part of my overland trip: Perth to Alice Springs in a 4WD truck along the Great Central Road right through the outback. But before that commenced I had time to make plans for my onward journey from Alice and implementing them via the internet - which is still a new and exciting experience for me - browsing through book stores, seeing the wonderful wildflower exhibition in Kings Park, getting a really horrible haircut, and just walking, walking and walking some more.
The drive to Alice was .... long. Anything else? ... According to Google Map the distance is 2488 km and we did have some really long drives, but the Great Central Road - all gravel, of course - is surprisingly well-maintained considering there is really not much there. A couple of roadhouses, a few settlements of indigenous people, and - do I repeat myself here? - a whole lot of nothing. But the wide "Open Spaces" (hint, hint, my dear last year's Leistungskursschueler! especially when you
link it to the "Big City" of Perth) were rather meditative than monotonous, our group had a lot of fun on the way, and it was, of course, terribly exciting to sleep out under the stars knowing that all the creepy-crawlies of the desert would come out as soon as you went to bed. And that includes dingoes, as in "wild dogs", not that those creep or crawl, but they tend to run away with your shoes if you should have forgotten to hide them well. "Beds" were swags, which are like slightly larger sleeping bags with a waterproof bottom, a canvas top and a (thin!!) mattress already inside. Even if the nights are hot, which fortunately wasn't the case as it was still early in spring, you zip them up as snakes and scorpions might want to share your body heat.
Highlights on the way to Alice are, of course, the Olgas (Katatjuta), Uluru, and Kings Canyon. I was glad I had seen all three of these magnificent wonders of nature before as we had very little time to really appreciate them. But that is the way of organized tours and I know that
Desert Sunset
The time when the creepy-crawlies start making their move. and I shouldn't whinge so I only do it a little bit. The climax normally is sunset at Uluru which you watch together with about 37 coachloads of other people, but when we were there a bank of clouds infront of the sun did unfortunately not allow for the otherwise spectacular changes of colour on the rock. However, as you can see from the photo, that did not bother us too much and once people saw how much fun we had they started taking photos of us rather than Uluru. Honest!
Rather than going into a lot more detail here I will tell you a little aboriginal story about how the Olgas, Uluru, and about 100km from there Mt Conner (a table mountain whose top looks like an extra layer of rock has been added) and the salt lake "Lake Amadeus" have come into being. (You can skip this part if you are not into stories.)
"Two brothers set out to go walkabout with their father and a group of other men. As they were still too young to take part in 'men's business', they wandered off and tried to occupy themselves with other things. They collected stones
and grouped them together creating the shape of the Olgas. After some time they walked on until they came to a waterhole. They scraped out the mud and piled it up high, so high that they could scramble up on top of it and slide down the sides trailing their hands left and right thus creating the shape of Uluru. When they got tired of it they wandered off again. The younger brother started to complain that he was tired and felt sick but the older one thought he had to toughen him up and refused to stop. Time passed until the younger boy again said he couldn't continue.The older one then realized that his brother looked quite ill. He made him a bed of mattress and blanket (Mt Conner) and said he should rest while he would try to find food and medicine. But when he came back he found his brother had died. He picked him up and carried him to small
elevation, which is now an island in Lake Amadeus, and buried him. He sat at the grave and cried and cried and his tears dried up in the hot desert sun creating the salt lake around
the island."
In the late afternoon of the sixth day we arrived in Alice. As I had booked a seat on one of the famous Australian trains, the "Ghan", for my onward journey to Adelaide, I had only two full days in which I wanted to see and do as much as possible besides laundry once again (does it never end?). One thing I had planned on doing was an Aboriginal Cultural Tour. I had gone on one 16 years ago, actually with the same company I finally decided on, and it had been really enlightening and very authentic: small group of people, aboriginal storytelling and music, bodypainting in preparation for a traditional dance, the indigenous people themselves explaining about the food (bushtucker) they collect, watching how a whole kangaroo is cooked and then tasting it, and much more. My main intention this time was to be able to take photos with my digital camera - all my old photos, of course, being slides - as I like presenting some visual material when I try and tell people something about aboriginal culture be it at school or with friends.
I asked if it was possible
on this tour as on the trip to Alice we had been asked not to take pictures of any of the indigenous people when we passed through their communities as they don't normally like it. Not that they fear that you are stealing their soul as it is believed in some other cultures, but when a person dies all ties
to him/her are cut which means not mentioning his/her name again and includes destroying all images of him/her. A dead person is said to still be able to "hear" this life and wanting to be back thus cannot rest in peace.
Anyway, they said photography was no problem with the indigenous people participating, as long as you asked and didn't stick your camera right into their faces, which I have a problem with anyway, so I went. And what a flop this turned out to be.
Besides me there were only three other people on the minibus that picked us up. Great, very small group, I thought! The "site" - not where the local indigenous people actually live, they are taken there from Alice whenever the tour takes place - is about 10 minutes out of town. When we
arrived, there were already a few people there ... okaayyy ... but then a big coach drove up and about 30-40 more people spilled out of it, so by now our number had increased to about 50. Our guide, a white Australian, then proceeded to give an interesting ca. 30-minute lecture on Aboriginal life today to possibly correct some of the existing misconceptions which might exist. Afterwards we had billy tea (prepared in big cans on an open fire) and damper, in this case "spotted dick", which is damper bread (made of flour, water and baking powder and cooked in the hot ashes of the fire) with raisins in it. Another 15 minutes gone. We then moved about 80 meters on to a different area (why???), just a little closer to the four aboriginal women sitting around on the ground painting. There we were told about "Tjukurpa", what white people call "The Dreamtime".
For the indigenous people "Tjukurpa" explains the relationship between people, plants, animals and land. It records the creation of all living creatures and the landscape. It teaches them the proper way to relate to each other and the environment, and it is law. So it encompasses
Yummy!
Yes, I did eat it whole! a whole lot more than what white people normally associate with "The Dreamtime" which they think of as something like the story of creation in the bible. One of the major differences, though, is how "Tjukurpa" actually links past and present and describes an ongoing process.
In the meantime another coach had arrived with another big mob of tourists who were doing the same things we had just done so every aspect of the tour wasvery regimented and could only last so long.
But now to what I would have liked to experience as the highlight of the tour: "interaction with the locals" as advertised on the company's leaflet. Ha! We were permitted to walk around among the artists, buy their paintings, you could have your photo taken with the artist if you bought something, (quoting our guide) "by all means talk to the people, but they are very shy" ... well, I know they are shy but if you didn't buy anything they wouldn't talk to you at all, or let you take a photo when you asked them ... and presto! time was up and we had to meet again to throw a boomerang at a kangaroo
cut out of wood, what fun!, and when all 50 or so people had had a go we still had the bushtucker presentation, but alas, we were running out of time, so just the more spectacular items were dished up: a pre-cooked kangaroo tail for everyone to taste and three witchetty grubs, fat white juicy worms which live in the roots of the witchetty bush - not that we know what that looks like. At least these were extracted from the cut-off roots right before our eyes (Wow! Yuck! Aahh!
Oohh!) and everyone had to have his photo taken while pretending to bite into it. At least I ate mine! Yes, I did! Not that I liked it, though. It crunches when you bite into it, then it's very creamy inside in a not-very-nice way, tasting of I-know-not-what but not really horrible, and knowing how very nutritious it is .... there you go. The skin is very tough, however, so I spit that out. Anyway, a culinary experience to tell one's grandchildren about (if one had any).
On the whole, the affair was rather a waste of time, although I should say 'my time' as others may have found
View from my car ...
... to the front ... it exciting and informative not having had my previous experience.
Still, Alice Springs was great. I saw a fantastic exhibition of Aboriginal art with the title "Desert Mob" at the Cultural Precinct, heard the Australian Girl Choir sing - just by chance as the hostess of my B&B took me along -, went to ... no, no, no, too many details, boring, boring ...
The train ride on the Ghan down to Adelaide covers about 1500km and lasts 23.5 hours which means the train trundles along at a not very exciting speed, stops occasionally in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason, slows down every now and again so that passengers can take photos of "the sights": a dry riverbed, a monument to the men who built the railway line - which is so small and unremarkable that I missed it ... and there are insightful comments on the places passing by. I was in "Red Seater" Coach which is even below "Red Sleeper" and a long way down from "Gold Class". Names are, I suppose, self-explanatory. But my seat neighbour Beryl, a 73-year-old lady from Adelaide, and I had fun, shared our food, slept fitfully, read,
stared out of the window, got (good!) coffee from the bistro, chatted some more, and parted ways in Adelaide at about one in the afternoon the following day.
The stretch from Adelaide to Dubbo in New South Wales, where I would drop off my smart little rental car and my friend Babette and her partner Allen were going to pick me up, was part of my trip I was really looking forward to. I had a newly acquired small icebox to prevent a meltdown of my supplies and my trusty mp3-player and six days to cover the distance. Of the six days I had planned to spend one whole day in the Flinders Ranges, which meant a slight detour north of just 443 km, and one whole day in Broken Hill. All in all I covered 1839km, all easy driving on sealed two-lane roads as my rental contract did not allow me to do otherwise.
This is where the subtitle of this blog comes in "... and miles to go before I sleep" as the roads just went on and on and on. What do you do besides listening to music and talking to yourself? You count things?
4.5 cars per 10 km; that is cars coming towards you, as on a stretch of 269 km (the distance between two roadhouses of which one was closed) I did not have to overtake a single vehicle; well, you just do not overtake any cars as everyone travels at the same speed which is the maximum of 110km/h and everyone sticks to it. (There was a huge billboard somewhere which read: STOP CREEPING, and then in small letters: ... over the speed limit.)
Counting: 10 instances of roadkill on 10 kilometers, all dead kangaroos in various stages of decomposition; plus 9 goats - alive; 58 kilometers(!) of absolutely straight road, then a very wide bend and another 27 km staying straight even through a whole town - consisting of 10 buildings. At the beginning I always thought when the road was leading up to a crest, "Let there be a different view on the other side!", but once I got into checking the kilometers I was always hoping the road would continue straight so I could clock a new record. The first time I counted it was 19 km which I thought was amazing. But 58?! Oh, and there
was this sign for a school bus stop. It was 60 km away from the nearest town! Don't even think about riding your bike to school.
One of the towns marked on my map was Wilcannia. I had planned on stopping there to get gas and maybe a coffee to break up a 556 km drive fom Broken Hill to Cobar. There actually was a gas station just when you entered the town which I was rather glad about as the last two places on my map either did not have any
at all or it was another one of those that had closed down. But when I checked I found it was really expensive, actually 22 cents more than I normally paid. I only bought a limited amount thinking there would have to be another place in town and being competition it might just be a little less expensive. So I drove on ... and had left behind the city limits by already two kilometers. I decided to turn around as Wilcannia was also praised in the tourist brochures as having some really nice heritage buildings. But everything was boarded up, closed down, derelict ... what a
place!
However, even Wilcannia has clean public toilets! With toilet paper! Australia really deserves 1st prize in the competition "Excellent public facilities countrywide". For some time now I have been playing with the idea of writing an illustrated guide with the title "Toilets of the World". As I am, to my greatest regret, someone who needs the loo (the 'Ladies', 'Restroom', 'Powder Room', 'Public Conveniences', or whatever you might want to call to be polite) very, very often, I am always on the lookout for these facilities or just "places". Oh, the adventures I have had on my travels! Definitely enough material for a book and the competitions (The Most Original, The Weirdest, The Nicest, The Most Disgusting - yeah, definitely a few of those - etc.) would be part of it. But I am getting distracted here.
Suffice it to say, I loved every minute of my drive. I am now staying with my friends and their tenant Mr Huntsman (yes, they have a big spider in their bathroom, it is a huntsman and has a diameter of at least 12cm!)in Mudgee but I have been so busy that only just now have I found the
Mr Huntsman
... eine Spinne als Untermieter? time to tell you all my news. Tomorrow we will drive to Sydney so my "crossing a continent" will come to an end. I'll stay there till October 31st when I will leave for Vietnam to start another chapter of my "One Year Off".
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