Anyway, I was now ready to experience the
Australian Outback, and boy, was I looking forward to it!
When I walked into the terminal at Darwin International Airport, I was smiling. That was partially because the airport police looked rather ridiculous in their shorts and long stockings, but mainly because I then realized I had traveled to the other side of the world, and I was most definitely still alive. My VISA card made the ATM at the airport hum merrily, and I was soon able to start going through the information available at the tourist information desk. It is easy to see that Australia is a country which is working hard on becoming the most popular tourist destination in the world, judging from the incredible amounts of tourist information they come up with.
Just after six in the morning I was settled in the local YHA hostel. I paid AU$27 for a one year membership in YHA International, and by doing so got the airport bus (AU$9) and the first night at the hostel (AU$13) for free. It is a very good deal, although I didn't quite catch all the details in it, it was only later I gradually adapted to the Australian version of English. Choc-a-block means "totally packed full", by the way.
After six hours I had decided that Australia was pretty much like the USA. Although there's no "downtown" in Darwin, it has got the square buildings, straight streets and avenues, and they speak a strange mutation of English. Oh, and they seem to like drinking Dr. Pepper. The loonies.
I started my day with spending an obscene amount of money on a Greyhound bus pass. For AU$756 I got a pass with a photo of myself looking rather heavily drugged on Extasy, which entitlet me to unlimited travel, one-way only from Darwin to... Darwin, actually. I could travel down through the desert and then along the East Coast up to Cairns, and then back to Darwin again from there. I was planning on leaving from Brisbane, though, but figured the pass probably was a good deal, since it included special tours to Kakadu and Ayer's Rock/Uluru, which otherwise would have been pretty expensive trips to me.
I enjoyed the last sunset of 1996 from the Esplanade. It was a nice one, and the, to me, brand new kinds of trees I was surrounded by, added to the fascination inside me. Afterwards I went down to the Wharf and saw how a Northern Territories New Year's Eve is properly celebrated. The locals had started early in the morning with a beer at the pubs, and early in the afternoon they were almost sleeping already. Later in the evening the festivites came to a new climax, with the men wearing Mickey Mouse hats and glitter-wear and shot beer at each other with water guns.
I ended up at Stoke's Hill Wharf, where the New Year was celebrated with much rejoice and two-steppin' country dancin', my first kangaroo-, crocodile- and emu-burgers, drunk Australians and a genuine Melbournian tram / ice cream outlet. At midnight, the fire boat of Darwin headed towards the middle of the bay, while the firemen got their matches ready. Soon the air was full of great fireworks and everybody ooh-ed and aah-ed, before the Auld Lang Syne singing started and it was beautiful and everybody smiled at each other. Not much like the freezing, wet, cloudy quick outdoor sessions at midnight New Years Eve I was used to from home... I definitely liked it.
Afterwards there was an impressive number of policemen in the streets, breathtesting panic-strucken drivers and driving the drunk Aboriginals home, or somewhere else, possibly. At the YHA there was something that might be mistaken for a pool party, but I was really tired after my first day downunder and went to bed.
Late in the morning the next day I phoned home and said happy old new year to my family. The time zone system we use is a strange concept. It had started raining, so instead of staying by the pool, I went for a nice, long walk. I walked northwards along the coast, past the university (not a VERY nice campus), via Myilly Point (nice view) to Mindil Beach. I thought it was a beautiful beach, until I saw all the signs warning about the killer box jellyfish in the sea between October and May, and the man with a cane who seemed to be the official crocodile "scarecrow" of the beach... I stayed on dry land.
The best thing about the long walk was that I finally solved a mystery I had been wondering about for a long time; How the aboriginals could come up with the amazing concept of the boomerang. I bet you're curious how I solved this mystery... Well, the answer is: Boomerangs grow on trees in Australia! As I was walking through a small forest just above the beach, I was thrilled to find myself tripping over a boomerang on the ground. I bent to pick it up, and saw another one next to it. And another one. Lots of them! I still don't know what tree it was, but it has red flowers and large, boomerang-shaped green leaves, which apparently turns brown and hard when they fall off the tree and are left on the ground for a while. It doesn't take a genious to pick one of these up, find little interest in it and throw it away, only to discover the strange aerodynamical behaviour of the object...So, mystery solved, case closed.
Soon after, I found myself in the botanical gardens, which in this particular park mainly consisted of palms in all shapes and colours. It was here I discovered the Australians favourite activity; The Barbeque. Here, there and everywhere in the park there were electrical grills, at the push of a button, anyone can get their steak well done totally for free. This would not be a happy sight for a cow, but I was delighted. And there are drinking fountains that actually are in working order, too!
In my way back to the hostel I stopped at a church to dry up a bit. Someone else seemed to have the same and at the same time somewhat different idea. At the church organ an Aboriginal was sitting, playing intensely. Either his musical skills were at the level of a five year-old, OR what he played was very, very uhm... old, original Aboriginal music. When he saw me, he took a sip from his bottle before he continued "playing". Or something.
Mental note: I think maybe something has gone wrong in the process of integrating the Aboriginals into the Australian community.
January 2 I spent at the museums. For a dollar you can take the bus from the city to Fannie Bay, where the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territories is located. They both have free entrance, and are worth visiting. You can see lots of Aboriginal art with explanations about the symbols being used. Among the main sights at the museum are the crocodile "Sweetheart", a six meter monster from the 70s, a very thorough exhibition showing the effects of tropical cyclone Tracy which hit Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974, Asian boats and stuffed, previously poisonous animals.
The rain just kept increasing in strength, but I started walking in the direction I thought the Fannie Bay Gaol would be. At this time I didn't know that Gaol is just another way of spelling "Jail", so the people I asked for directions didn't really understand what I wanted to see. In the end someone understood what my "Gayoll" meant, and a man gave me a ride there. There was not a lot to see there, so I walked back to the hostel and had a long, warm shower. It is strange how quickly human beings adapt to the luxuries of the Western world after having been deprived of them for months.
The rest of the evening I spent reading and watching TV and talking to the other backpackers. I saw my first sitcoms since leaving Norway, and barely noticed the warnings about some cyclone that kept scrolling over the screen during all the programs. On the morning of January 3 the plan was to leave for Kakadu, and the departure went as planned. The weather was really bad, and after an hour of driving, the road seemed to be gone and have been replaced by a rather large lake. The bus driver took off his boots and waded into the lake, and decided that he would not be able to drive to Kakadu just on experience, so we returned to Darwin.
The cyclone Rachel had hit Darwin almost straight on, and all roads out of Darwin were flooded, an airplane had crashed near Darwin, almost all shops were closed, people were told to stay home and inside, and I was hungry. I managed to find a small supermarket which had not barred all openings and bought some food. The rain and winds stayed strong, and Darwin recorded an "all-time high", 331mm of rain in 24 hours, that day.
But the next day the conditions were better and I was able to get on a bus to Katherine. To my big pleasure, Greyhound in Australia is VERY different from the American Greyhound. They're all very clean, eating hot food inside is not allowed, the air-conditioning DOES work (a good thing when you're about to cross a desert by bus), and most of the passengers are fairly normal, sane people. On the long drives there are two drivers on-board, one driving and one sleeping in the back or making pleasant talk with the passengers. AND they show movies, mainly Australian ones. It's good to have something else to look at than the landscape, as it is a bit monotonous. My first movie was Lightning Jack with Paul Hogan, and even THAT was more interesting than the barren, barely vegetated beginnings of a desert outside the windows.
In Katherine I found a hostel which seemed nice enough, and was placed in an 8-bed room. This was not very fortunate, as two of the others in the room were rather vociferous, genuine fucking Australians, fucking drinking fucking Victorian fucking Bitter fucking beer, while they were having a fucking conversation about their fucking lives, being fucking unemployed. Through listening to them, I picked up that they had met in prison not long ago, one of them having been put there for beating up and severely wounding a policeman. We were four others in the room and two were Japanese. The not-so-intelligent Australians used their non-existent logic to decide that the Japanese were the direct cause of their unemployment, so they started picking on the Japanese guys. Luckily they ran out of beer before things got out of hand, so they left for a pub or something.
But it was only the beginning of a tough night. The Amoeba Australians came back soon after, probably after having been thrown out of every place in Katherine that serves alcoholic liquor. The rest of us had turned out the lights and gone to sleep by then, but we were soon wide awake again, as they turned on the lights and turned up the volume on the TV. *Sigh* They talked proudly about their illiteracy, about how they had slept with women from all parts of Australia, and about how stupid foreigners are. I got a bit grumpy and went outside. I couldn't find anyone in the reception, so I went back and asked them nicely to be quiet so that we could sleep. That was of course a stupid thing to do, because they then told me that I'D better be quiet, or I would soon be closer to dead than I had ever (fucking) been before. I continued to argue for the human need for sleep a bit more, and in the end they got tired and fell asleep. I didn't really sleep well, feeling just about as safe as I felt when I slept practically on the sidewalk in a New York City Hostel about 18 months earlier.
But I survived and live to tell the tale. The next morning I got up really, really early, together with the other human beings in the room, and we VERY noisily did our shaving and packing, to the less satisfied grunts from the Australian trash in the corner, unable to move due to a major hangover. Oh, and yes, I made sure to leave the TV on before leaving the hostel. #8D)
The bus didn't leave until late in the afternoon, so I had time to explore Katherine a bit further. There seemed to be Aboriginals lurking in all alleys and garbage containers in the area. Especially nearby the social security office. It is a sad sight. It surely must be possible to give them something meaningful to do? I still had not seen any of them smile. Maybe they are not able to?
The most amazing architecture in Katherine can be found almost anywhere; The homes of the termites. They have built many large and beautiful structures, so well-built that I was able to stand on top of one, and it didn't even come close to breaking.
There is at least one thing in the area that is able to break down a termite castle, namely the thing that every now and then creates a loud *Whooooosssshhhh* and produces Quite a bit of wind; The Road Train. A road train is a huge long haul truck, a powerful car with three attached truck wagons, up to 53 meters long and 3.5 meters wide. You only find them in the Northern Territories, where they transport all kinds of things between Darwin and Alice Springs at a velocity of about 100km/h. It's possible because the roads are mainly straight-ahead most of this distance. All other vehicles on these roads are equipped with a metal net in the front, so that their windshields are not crushed by the large rocks whipped up in the air by the road trains.
Due to flooding after ms Rachel Cyclone, the big attraction of the area, the Katherine Gorge, a natural pool and some waterfalls, was closed/underwater, so I picked the second best option; A couple of hours by the large, public pool. Here I noticed yet another similarity between Australians and Americans; Quite a lot of them have rather thick thighs and big stomaches. I'm sure there is something to be learned from this, but I am not quite sure exactly what.
The next night was spent onboard Greyhound, where I had a MUCH better night than the previous one with BeaBruce and ButtBruce. I spent half the night sleeping and half the night talking to one of the drivers. He told me that they often did this long drive (Darwin - Alice Springs is a 19 hour bus ride) with as little as 10 passengers. In addition to transporting people, Greyhound and McCafferty's (the other major bus company in Australia), provide the small towns in the Australian Outback with mail and other necessities.
At 5:30 in the morning I awoke to the most stunning sunrise, and discovered that due to the straight roads I was able to read while going by bus (I normally get sick even by trying to read road signs while being in a moving vehicle). Good thing to know, as the drives in this country/continent tend to be of the long kind.
Anyway, I was now ready to experience the
Australian Outback, and boy, was I looking forward to it!