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Published: December 30th 2007
Improved entry. Here goes:
The first awareness we had of being in the beginnings of the outback was the heat (naturally). It is difficult to explain how much it affects your mind, your comfort and energy levels. We first noticed this when we'd driven up to Port Augusta after leaving Adelaide. We planned to stop off at the huge jetty in Port Pirie (you'll see in the pictures) to meet some dolphins and get some nice photos and then we'd get on the road into the official outback for our first night in the desert. Just stepping out of our nice air-con van made us realise how HOT it was already, not the kind of heat you get when you step off a plane into a nice pleasant holiday, it's like a smack in the face. I think the photo's we took here show our sudden change in mood, we didn't really verbally acknowledge this (yes, it was too hot to even want to talk) we just did a lot of frowning and huffing/puffing to each other (like what builders do when they are about to announce an exorbitant quote to fix your garden wall - except we'd taken that
on as a new form of communication). We'd already selected a good playlist of tunes ready for our first dessert driving (all hail the IPOD!) this involved Queens of the Stone Age & Desert Sessions, Down and Jamiroquai (Emergency on Planet Earth) so as we drove on into the red dust with music blaring it got me to thinking about my current feelings of the desert and I got to wondering how these would change by actually experiencing it.
So some of you may be thinking "What the hell is she going on about now?" but I really had a lot of jumbled expectations about the desert, from staying up late to watch Mad Max when I was little and then loving many other post-apocalyptic films that usually are set in desert lands (cos the silly humans have knacked up the water supply - not so funny now is it?) which invariably involve lots of tense and violent moments and some kind of crux in the storyline where a lead character could be burnt alive if he takes the risk to dash outside in the midday heat, but if he doesn't the entire world could be doomed. Then there is
Prohibited Land
The first part of driving in the outback is on a road which falls inside the Woomera Prohibited Area. The reason it's prohibited is because they did a lot of nuclear testing there.the sci-fi aspect of the desert, which comes from learning about all the strange creatures that manage to survive and evolve around the heat (I heart you David Attenborough!) to the point where there seems to be actual aliens living in a whole different world which is on the same planet as you (you just had a moment inside my brain as a 7 year old trying to understand the world from a comfy house where the heating needs to be on all the time and it's a 'wildlife moment' if you find a worm in the back garden). Then there's the music that you start to imagine would suit your long anticipated drive in a desert (see above references) and how immensely cool you'd look as your vehicle is making dust tracks. The sound waves dispersing out into openness at full volume, a place where you can pick the theme tune to the moment and not have it spoilt by anyone else or any other sound. You'd be in charge of a whole sense in the environment, lizards would probably stop in their tracks to look up and see what all the noise was about (can a lizard have
Having a Blast in Woomera
The full menu of artillery they shot off out into the desert on display right in the middle of town. Includes the first rocket to go up, which was found 1200kms north and 27 years after it had been launched (well outside the prohibited experimentation area). a musical taste?). But don't these images always ring with the pathetic fallicy of the beginning of some teen horror movie?
"Those kids thought they were out to have a good time, but the desert wanted the silence back" eek! eek! eek! I also had a swirling image punctuating these thoughts - it was of this bloke who'd pulled his car over to shoot the breeze with us one morning back in Peterborough on the Great Ocean Road. He had a kahuna of a stetson, accompanied by some classic reflective wayfarers, and after giving us his rather disgusting racist thoughts on many an ethinic group he simply said, "You going to the desert?" to which we both nodded, then "You got a gun?". It was this that was going round and round "You got a gun?", "You got a gun?".
So as I mulled over all of my collective expectations and flavours of terror and glanced over to see Thom grooving along to Mansuns "Wide Open Space", I decided that all of this resulted to us approaching a potentially big slice of danger in our adventure. Things we took for granted like water Found it!
We found him at the opposite end of the van, 2 days and 350kms after Thom's SA bite incident. Or it could be a new one. Either way he died shortly after this was taken. supplies and petrol gauges were actually really serious now, dark things happen in the desert ("You got a gun?). Maybe the heat had already gotten to my cold geordie cockles, or maybe my over-active imagination was running away with itself in a cocktail of bizarre memories. Either way the weirdness of the desert was what prevailed to the theme of our trip there and having come out of it all safe as houses I can declare that it is the weirdness that makes it simply marvelous! Here's what we saw:
Our first night was at a rest stop, I'd set the menu at a rather fitting "cowboy-like" Kangaroo Chilli, which as we finished another van pulled up and spent ages parking exactly underneath a corrugated iron hut we'd seen at all of the rest-stops (and had thought they were odd). As I was making a brave trip to my first outback dunnie, the passengers were getting out of their van and shouted over "You should park in the shade!". I went over and chatted post-dunnie joy and struck up conversation with them. A very strange travelling dynamic: a couple and the blokes sister had been living in the back A Salt Lake
Well a dried up one of a tiny van and had just completed their route through the desert in the different direction to us. So using one of Daddy's many sayings I decided to not look this gift horse in the mouth (why would you look at any horses mouth is beyond me, they have minging teeth!) and put a pause to the conversation, got Thom to park up under the iron sheet ready for the sun-rise and we marched over to quiz them on tips for staying alive in the desert. They were from Germany and the girlfriend didn't speak English and remained inside the van hiding in the shadows for the rest of the night (think Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now) as if it was a thing of shame if you were not bi-lingual (UK's language curriculum is extraordinarily naff!). The brother and sister were very nice and gave us a great low-down of where to get the cheapest fuel in the dessert and where tries to rip you off and so on. All of them were in the hospitality trade working all over the place then travelling on their savings.
We then enjoyed a day soaking up parochial desert life in the town of Woomera, famed for it's launching of rockets and missiles. As well as this being a odd purpose for any town's existence I was fascinated by the way they all lived. We went to a community centre building which was the only place to go and eat at in town, but it turns into the local pub at night time and is a tourist information office, the town's bank, a gift shop for visitors and has the museum about the town. There was one lady running the whole place single handedly (cue those uberwench sirens) dashing into the kitchen to heat up a pie for a NASA scientist bloke who came in, then legging it over to answer a phone in the bank then running out the back to sort out a generator or something. The very fact that I'm describing other visitors to this place shows how quiet it was, even though it clearly seemed like the place to be in town. That night we stayed in a motel that was converted from being a detention centre for illegal immigrants a while ago, we had a beer this tiny air con room the owner had built as a Not a good sign
The main sights of interest were road-kill or tyres/car parts like this. From far away the blown rubber tyres shine in the sun haze and we were always fooled into thinking we were about to meet a huge snake.....still none yet social room and he told us about how he had seen 54 degrees in the shade before (heat is the main topic of conversation with everyone - a bit like the rain in the UK) and then warned us about water levels and petrol which didn't do much to my heightened paranoia. We cooked in a kitchen which was exactly like a scene from a David Lynch movie with many many flies buzzing around and the heat of the oven adding to the heat throughout. When we were finally sitting down to eat keeping one eye on the rusty kitchen door for any trouble I noticed there were dusty baby's footprints up one of the walls and lost my appetite immediately. Why would a baby walk up the side of a wall or be held to kick it's feet up a wall, it all got a bit too art house horror for us both so we ran back to the van and locked it up freaked out.
Next sight to report was staying in Coober Pedy which we both enjoyed, but before I go on about that I'll tell you about our little daily routines we managed to hone to Scenery
In Coober Pedy. They've done a bunch of films there like Mad Max and Pitch Black. try and deal with the desert as best we could. We always were woken up by the heat at about 7am (it's already blistering by then) and as one of us would be finding any cool water and trying to get the air con working the other tries to get dressed and slathers on sun cream on top of sweat then we reverse and hit the road for a daily mission to find ice coffee's (something we both got addicted to heavily for the duration of the Oz trip). The photo's of Coober Pedy show what a strange place it is. The reason it's there is for opal mining and along with digging into the ground for opals, miners decided to remain under the ground to keep cool - so many houses and hotels are built underground for this reason. On the surface it seems like you've entered a giant beetles nest or something as the fossicking machinery leaves neat geometric piles of sand behind it and aside from that you can only see the odd door leading you to an underground house. The centre of town has the odd shop and local amenities on the surface which are all covered in desert dust and difficult to see for the heat haze. We stayed in the underground backpackers and had a great chilled sleep then enjoyed the community swimming pool with all the towns children the next day. After a cooling dip and an All-you-can-eat underground feast we filled up our water supply with the fuel-like coin-operated water pump and hit the road again for a few days intensive driving in nothingness.
We crossed the Northern Territory border and headed straight to the main attraction - Uluru/The Rock/Ayers Rock/etc. Having met a nice Swiss couple in a rest-stop that has a vicious EMU as it's main tourist sight, we were given their Uluru passes - you have to buy 3 day's entry to go and see it and they'd done it in a day. So with our new Swiss identities we managed to check out Uluru and The Olgas for free in 2 days. There are many many pictures here with descriptions of what we thought of it all included so enjoy!
We did a bit of a detour to go and check out King's Canyon which was another great Natural phenomenon to see (again - see the pics). Crashed Spacecraft
From Pitch Black. It's on the side of the road in town with other scenery. The parochial community is regularly swept up by one Hollywood venture after another and then they get given a bunch of leftovers at the end of the shooting. To add to all the walking we'd done at Uluru and The Olgas we decided to go extreme and hike around the edge of the whole canyon which included scaling up some steep trails to get to the top. Trillions of calories must have been burned.
We got to Alice Springs by the 23rd November where we had to get the van serviced for an all clear to continue on driving. While we were waiting for the service on Mitzy to be done Thom had a battle with this huge dog for a seat in the waiting room, while the wife of the mechanic chattered to me about her life, marriages, and her daughter who was 25 and had 5 kids (I nearly passed out!) and what she'd be getting them all for Christmas and how she was dreading having to cook a roast. We didn't do much tourist stuff in Alice Springs, just weren't really interested in it but we did venture out for a nice dinner which we were both looking forward to for ages. With the promise of eating 'hefty desert fare' we ordered some Camel and Emu and were given some measly overpriced steaks in return. Both tasted ok, nothing alien a but like gamey horse and really dense duck respectively.
After crossing the Tropic of Capricorn and seeing the Devils Marbles (see pictures for more stories) we headed on out to Queensland to splash in some much needed sea and surf. As well as trying to get used to being around people and more civilisation again.
On a couple of proof reads of this beast we've both just concluded that it would take many hours and much clicking of keyboards to describe the sights and strange characters we met in the desert. We've tackled this entry twice now and are both officially pooped - some of the stories we've included in the photos, some of them we can tell you about over drinks and meals and some of them can remain just for us.
Enjoy the photos and let us all be glad that we didn't meet any dramatic endings in The Great Red Centre.
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