travel diary — day 255

In australia, travel on 16 December 2009 tagged aboriginals, alice springs, atlas shrugged, australia, beer, bonfire, breakfast, bus, camel station, camp, caves, chinese, coffee, couchsurf, darwin, didgeridoo store, drunk, economics, fire, football, germans, grottos, guide, hangover, hippies, hot, indigenous, katherine, katherine gorge, king's canyon, linux, marijuana, mattress, monolith, movie, noodle, olgas, pot, rock, shower, silhouette, stars, sunrise, sunset, swags, the ghan, theatre, tour bus, tourists, train station, travel, tripod, uluru, uluru climb, walking, water, water bottle bag with no comments

day 251 — today was hot, so i spent a lazy day in alice springs. i had an early cof­fee and talked to the owner of a didgeri­doo store. the owner was a didj player and i got some advice from him. after­wards i got online, catch­ing up on some chess games and had din­ner. that night i watched a movie on the big out­door screen. the yha was a con­ver­ted open theatre and they still showed nightly movies. i packed (anti­cip­at­ing my early start) and got some sleep.

day 252 — i woke up at 4.30am, fin­ished pack­ing, had a little break­fast and checked out of the hostel. i was annoyed that the hostel kit­chen didn’t open as early as i’d hoped … until i real­ised that i hadn’t set my time for the north­ern ter­rit­ory and was an hour ahead. i was annoyed that i could have got an extra hour’s sleep but happy that i still had time to get ready (it could have been worse, i could have been an hour behind!!).

i was picked up by the tour bus and we headed south. i was the only aus­sie on the trip (exclud­ing the driver). we drove south and even­tu­ally reached our first des­tin­a­tion — king’s canyon. the walk around the canyon was dif­fi­cult due to the heat. the first part of the walk was up a fairly steep hill, but the rest was easy enough. we were all sweat­ing and guzz­ling water. i had a good look around, took some pho­tos and headed back to the bus.

in the even­ing we made camp at an open camp­site. we all pitched swags under the stars. the tour concept was fairly simple — the guide organ­ised everything, but we did most of the work. a few people unpacked swags, a few helped cook din­ner, i took con­trol of the fire and had a few help­ers to keep the bon­fire ablaze. even the guide was impressed by the fire. hehe, FIRE!!

i talked to a few dif­fer­ent people in our group. there were two italian girls, three french guys, about five ger­mans, and a mixed group of asi­ans (two chinese malays, one japan­ese guy and a korean girl) … oh, there was also a young brit­ish guy, from bris­tol, who loved talk­ing about foot­ball. after a long hot day we were all tired, so after din­ner most of us crashed. it was nice to sleep under the stars and, being so far away from other build­ings (light sources), the stars were very bright.

day 253 — we had another early start, head­ing straight for the olgas. it was another hot day. most of the group took the long trek through the hills, but i chose the short trek and got back early. i talked with the guide while we waited for every­one else to return. after­wards, we moved to another camp site. this one was near uluru and had a toi­let and shower build­ing. the group took the after­noon off, most people grabbing a shower or going for a swim in the small pool.

in the late arvo, we went to uluru for our first close up look at the mono­lith. the first bit of time was spent look­ing around the cul­tural centre near the rock. i bought a niftly little water bottle holder with an indi­gen­ous print on it. i also looked at the paint­ings, dumb­struck at the enorm­ous prices (some art­works were val­ued over $10,000).

after that, we walked a short course around the front of uluru. we looked at some caves and grot­tos that abori­gin­als used for cere­mon­ies. then we all went back to the bus to go to the sun­set view­ing point. the view­ing point had a good view of the rock and we enjoyed watch­ing the sun­set. we had din­ner there and grumbled about the num­ber of bus­loads of tour­ists which arrived after us. one big bus full of chinese tour­ists came and the all dis­em­barked nois­ily. they yelled and shouted to each other, tak­ing pho­tos and being gen­er­ally annoy­ing. their tour organ­isers set up enorm­ous tables with cham­pagne (includ­ing expens­ive cham­pagne glasses) and other foods. there were so many that they pushed into the area that we’d taken, push­ing and jost­ling for the best ‘view’ and pho­tos. there was plenty of space, but they weren’t happy with the space that they had, so they came and stood in front of us. i had my tri­pod set up and i kept expect­ing someone to knock it over. a woman looked like she was going to move my tri­pod so that she could take the space, but look­ing at us, she thought bet­ter of it.

they all left quickly, but we stayed and enjoyed the last splash of light, wait­ing until dark before we left. our group returned to camp to settle in for a night around the bon­fire (my speciality).

day 254 — for the third straight morn­ing, i got up early and we headed to the view­ing point for an uluru sun­rise. most people went to the ‘sun­rise’ point, but we returned to the sun­set point which we’d been to the day before. it was a good idea. although it was the same place, we got to see the sun rise behind the rock, cre­at­ing a cool sil­hou­ette. we enjoyed break­fast there and headed into the uluru grounds for a walk around the rock.

most morn­ings, the walk­ing path ascend­ing the rock is open. it’s free to climb ulur if the trail is open. the pre­vi­ous day and in the morn­ing, the guide had harped on about how insens­it­ive it was to climb the rock. his­tor­ic­ally, indi­gen­ous aus­trali­ans never actu­ally climbed uluru. they revered it and only stayed at its base. he said it would be dis­respect­ful and also men­tioned that people do get killed occa­sion­ally when they fall on the steep path. when we arrived, we had the choice to climb uluru or just walk around it … how­ever, as luck would have it, there was no climb­ing the rock on the day we were there. if the wind is too strong or the morn­ing tem­per­at­ure is too high, the climb is sus­pen­ded to pre­vent acci­dents. the climb will even­tu­ally be closed per­man­ently, but it seems that the gov­ern­ment (who con­trol the climb, des­pite the fact that abori­gin­als con­trol uluru) is reluct­ant to stop climbs, for fear of los­ing tour­ist dollars.

so, our only option was to walk around the rock. the brit­ish guy and i set the pace, walk­ing the cir­cum­fer­ence of uluru, tak­ing pho­tos and talk­ing about football.

that sig­nalled the end of the rock tour, and we headed back towards alice springs. on the way, we stopped for a break at a camel sta­tion. some of the group did short camel rides. i took pho­tos. return­ing to alice springs, the driver dropped me at the train sta­tion (along with one of the french tour­ists) so that we would be on time for our trip to darwin.

the alice springs to dar­win train is called “the ghan”. it’s an arabic word (i think) and is a hom­mage to the camel trains that used to ply the tracks between alice and dar­win, fol­low­ing the route which was also used for tele­graph lines. when aus­tralia was an explorer’s wet dream, most adven­tur­ers quickly real­ised that horses weren’t suited to the heat and desert. so camels were impor­ted for their abil­ity to sur­vive the out­back. camels quickly became pop­u­lar and enorm­ous num­bers were intro­duced. many became wild and over the course of about 150 years, wild camel num­bers grew to reach a mil­lion. so, inter­est­ingly, even though camels are not nat­ive to aus­tralia, we have one of the largest camel pop­u­la­tions in the world.

on the train i had a ‘first’ … i was still dirty and stinky from the two day uluru tour. how­ever, our car­riage had two showers and for the first time ever, i had a shower on a train. then i headed to the din­ing car­riage for my usual beer fueled train trek. it’s become a bit of a tra­di­tion for me to get into the piss on long train trips. me, the french guy from my tour and two funny ger­mans got stuck into the beer and put away quite a lot of it. we drank into the late even­ing, get­ting rather pissy and talk­ing about everything from ger­man foot­ball, linux (one of the ger­mans was a pro­gram­mer) and african eco­nom­ics (wtf??).

day 255 — nurs­ing a small hangover, i had break­fast with the ger­mans in the din­ing car­riage. at mid­day the train stopped in the small town of kath­er­ine. there were tours to kath­er­ine gorge and other places, but i chose to walk around the town­ship. then i caught the bus to a homestead which was the meet­ing point for those return­ing to the train. i talked to a bel­gian guy who is a teacher near brus­sels. we had a great con­ver­sa­tion about edu­ca­tion and it has put bel­gium on my list of pos­sible teach­ing des­tin­a­tions (partly because the work is good there and partly because houses are sur­pris­ingly cheap to buy).

back on the train, it was only a few more hours to dar­win. i got a city bus to my couch­surf­ing host’s house. the people i stayed with were, without a doubt, hip­pies. my host’s name was ‘noodle’ due to his height and gangly appear­ance. they were fun people. they had an open house, a lot of marijuana, and i slept on a mat­tress in the front room. at first i was doubt­ful about my decision to stay there, but it turned out really well. i had a shower, star­ted read­ing ‘atlas shrugged’, talked with my hosts, smoked some pot and got some sleep.

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