Dry Stuff

Walking around in the heat was strange. It was quite windy, and with the high temperatures it was like constantly having a blowdrier turned into your face. I sweated real bad all the time, but my sweat was devoured by the dry air immediately, so it was almost as if I didn't sweat at all.

The most amazing thing about Alice Springs is that it's there. There are a few slightly special places to see, though. One of them is the Royal Flying Doctor museum, where they have guided tours, showing how they can give almost immediate medical assistence to 16.000 people in an area four times the size of Norway, through the use of 3 small airplanes. Another thing to do is to climb Anzac Hill and watch the nice view in all directions from there. I went there for the sunset, and met a girl from the Orkneys who had spent two years on seeing the same places I want to cover in six weeks... *Sigh*

Rather optimistically, I packed my "swimmers", as they say, and walked the scenic-in-a-desert-kind-of-way 3km out to the old telegraph station, where the actual springs in Alice Springs are located. The only problem was that it had been an exceptionally warm and dry summer so far, so the springs had totally dried up for the first time in 20 years. There wasn't even a fata morgana to take a bath in, so I stayed dry, and went and saw the telegraph museum instead. It's most of all like a small pioneer farm, with lots of evidence for Alice Springs once having been a busy railway construction site. This is the northernmost station on the Ghan route, the train that takes you halfway across the Australian desert. The "Ghan" name derives from the animals used to transport equipment back when the railway was constructed; Afghani camels. Nowadays the train is right on schedule most of the time, but it's not THAT long ago since if you asked people when the train arrives, they'd say "Wednesday", without specifying exactly which Wednesday it would arrive, simply because they could never know!

All this Ghan talk made me feel hungry and a bit adventurous, so I walked back to Alice and had a US$10 dinner; Camel butt steak. It was delicious. If you get the chance, I recommend trying the brandy camel steak with mushroom sauce and salad. It's even more tender than Elvis ever was.

From Alice I followed the Greyhound tour to Ayer's Rock / Uluru. The driver was Jamie, a big fellow with a professional but nice sense of humour; "Other companies offer champagne to the sunset at the Rock. We at Greyhound, running low-budget, can't do that, but you are free to mingle, if you know what I mean..." Quite a few did when we got so far. But our first stop was at Noel Fullerton's champion camel farm. Noel looked pretty much like Santa, except he rides camels instead of reindeer. He stunned me by telling us that there are much more than 10.000 wild camels in Australia today. At the farm they sold camel burgers, very decent-sized, at least 3-4 Big Mac's worth of camel. It wasn't as good as the butt steak in Alice had made me hope for, but it was edible. "Tucker" seems to be the Outbackian word for food.

Although I now was pretty much straight in the middle of the desert, the ground was still semi-arid, with lots of green casuarinas and acacias around. But it certainly was hot outside. Luckily the air- conditioning was working fine, and so was the video, which offered a view into the world of the pig Babe. Baa-raa-mew!

Our destination for the day was the Outback Pioneer Lodge. They have competition, so you have to pay them rather a lot (AU$18 at the time) to stay in a large room with about 20 others. The good side of the deal is that the lodge is a part of the hotel establishment there, so included in the price is access to a nice, refreshing swimming pool. Between the lodge and the Rock is the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Cultural Centre, where you can buy Aboriginal souvenirs at a very nice price. The centre has an exhibition which tells a lot about Aborigin history, and about what Ayer's Rock/Uluru means to the people who have lived here since forever. Apparently it is sacred ground to them, but not so much so that they don't offer guided walks upon it, with Aboriginal guides. So I decided, just like when I found beef on the menu in a Hindu restaurant in Nepal, that the next day I would take my chances and have a taste of holiness.

Jamie took us for a ride around the Rock. It deserves to be called a rock, because it actually consists of the same minerals throughout the whole of its mass, of which about 2/3 are underground. This is in other words not a mountain or part of the bedrock at all, it's just a big chunk of stone. The colours are strikingly beautiful, with the strong contrasts between the sometimes VERY red stone, the deep-blue sky and the green trees and bushes. Some places there are waterholes, which to the Aboriginals meant that they could always find something to eat here, as animals comes here all the time to take a sip and chat about whatever there is to chat about in the middle of a desert. Much like the local heroes at the Outback pubs, really. There are also lots of Aboriginal paintings, which aren't pieces of art, but maps, telling them which way to go to find water, food, villages and social security offices. There's also a large, amazing pattern looking very much like a skull, which is formed by nature on its own.

At sunset we went to a parking lot just north of Ayer's Rock. We weren't exactly alone. There were at least a hundred vehicles with many times that many people around them, all fighting to get the best place to take a photo of the sunset. Jamie was right, it was quite possible to "mingle" oneself into a few drinks and some BBQ. Unfortunately, the spectacular final orangeish glow just did not happen this night, but it WAS a beautiful sunset. Nevertheless, the Americans and the Germans loudly complained about this. The Italians too, until two Swedish blondes distracted them.

Dinner was a simple BBQ, accompanied by some guitar-playing fellow. There were quite a few pathetic Greenpeace members, making a BIG point out of telling everyone that they were here to NOT climb Ayer's Rock, because they respected their religion so much. They were also trying to dance the dances of their youth to the guitar music. Luckily nobody were seriously injured.

We aimed at getting up really early, to beat the rush to climb the Rock in the morning. The first alarm clocks started beeping at about 5am, and about every 5 minutes a new one started. The joys of shared rooms. We drove to the base of the Rock at 7am, and already there were about 3 million tourists there, spanning from energetic, young, dead-tired backpackers to fat Japanese men in their fifties. The climbing is pretty steep, and many have poor shoes for climbing/walking, so there are actually ropes hanging down the sides, so that people can pull themselves up. I had my mountain boots on, so I walked straight up. It's a climb of 300 meters for a distance of about 1.5km. It took me 35 minutes up and 24 minutes down. The view up there is nice, and it actually feels kind of sacred, or at least like a very, very, very special place on earth. I most definitely did not feel the least bit bad about being there, actually I felt quite the contrary, really good up there.

Back down, Jamie was waiting with ice-cold water, and I felt fine. We went to take a closer look at the Olgas, Kata Tjuta. It has to be the cutest mountain in the world, looking like it's taken straight out of a cartoon for small kids. Great colour combinations. I stretched my limit of 3 photos per day quite a bit there.

To get into the Ayer's Rock area you have to buy a AU$15 ticket, which is valid for a week. Before we left the lodge, I managed to sell my used but valid ticket to an old lady who looked at me as if I was selling drugs to her. I was inspired by Annika, one of the Swedish blondes, who managed to get AU$10 for her ticket from a guy with thick glasses, who looked really intelligent. If I was her, I would have tried for AU$20. Anyway, we left the area with lots of nice memories. The next stop was the Kings Canyon Resort. For $30, I got a bed in a 4-bed room, a lockable locker, a towel, access to yet another pool and a pen which I stole from the reception myself. No, there's no competition among the hostels there either.

The air in the desert was very clear, so I spent a large part of the evening sitting outside, watching the stars. They are very different from what I am used to from Norway. The southern hemisphere offers a very generous view to the Milky Way, it's almost like a mist somewhere up there. (Defining "up" as the direction you look when you're lying on the face of the earth.) A perfect soundtrack was contributed by some crickets and the wind which was tickling a lone desert oak standing nearby. Shortly after I had been joined by some of my new friends from the Greyhound tour, we were incredibly lucky to be witnessing a meteorite impact! A very bright light followed by a long, red tail disappeared behind the hills a few kilometers away. I was so amazed by this that I stayed out there, watching the sky, for most of the night. Now, THERE's 30 Australian dollars out of the window for a bed in a room. Still, I was very satisfied by my visit to this place.

The bus left for King's Canyon at 5:45am. On our way there we passed some strange sand formations looking much like houses. Not surprisingly the Australians have given it an appropriate name; The Lost City. It's high quality beach sand, with wave patterns many places. The strange thing is that King's Canyon is below sea level, as this is where the Australian Basin is at its deepest. King's Canyon is nice, but not VERY nice. The best part is a pond in the inner part of the canyon, with some cool, refreshing water in an otherwise barren land. Again, it's got a name; The Garden of Eden. No naked people while I was there, though. Nice view towards the canyon anyway.

Since I was going the "wrong" direction, I now had to leave the people I had been taking the Greyhound tour with, as they continued northwards. I changed buses in Erldunda, and by midnight I found myself in the utterly strange mine-digger community of Coober Pedy. An ancient, French blonde, Yvonne Something, picked me up and took me to the rather excellent Radeka hostel. I have no idea what Radeka really means, but to me it means a-hole-in-the-ground-where-you-can-rent-a-bed- ten-meters-below-the-surface-so-that-the-temperature-is-nice- even-when-the-temperature-is-INCREDIBLY-hot-outside. Yes, Coober Pedy is in the hottest part of Australia, with temperatures in the high fifties Celcius every now and then. You COULD use lots of electricity on air-conditioning your house to a durable temperature, but the people who live here, of which almost everybody are miners, have realized that it is easier to let nature take care of it. A lot of people live literally underground. Want a bigger house? Just borrow some mine machinery for the weekend and dig out as many rooms as you like. Interesting concept. A full underground home takes 2-3 weeks of digging and will set the owner back about AU$10-20.000, which is DIRT cheap. (Ha-ha.) On the downside; Water is about 10 times more expensive here than in the closest big city, Adelaide.

In the middle of the day I filled a couple of bottles with water and went for a walk. Coober Pedy is a strange place. The only place that was open was the supermarket, where I bought some expensive groceries for breakfast. There are holes in the ground pretty much everywhere, and inside the hotel there is a small opal museum where you can learn more than you ever wanted to know about opals. Australia has 95% of the world market for opals, and Coober Pedy digs out 85% of the Australian opals. The community does not look very rich, but there has to be some money hidden there somewhere.

Not finding very much on my own, I decided to take an AU$20 tour of the city, with one of the young miners as a guide. I definitely got my money's worth. As I've already mentioned, a lot of the activity in Coober Pedy goes on underground. One of the most impressive underground buildings is a complete Serbian Greek Orthodox Church with beautiful stone carvings and everything. The guide also showed us the cemetery which was very... eccentric. One miner who had drunk himself to death on whisky has his whole grave decoration built up by empty whisky bottles. And it is actually quite nice!

An old German has built himself a palace of junk. If you go inside you'll probably get lost pretty fast, and he will find you, thanks to an early warning system consisting of threads with bells on them everywhere, and start boring you to death with his talk immediately. Apart from that he is generally crazy but harmless.

There is one square meter of grass in front of the school, which is cared very well for, just so that the kids shall know what grass looks and feels like. The rest of Coober Pedy is sand, rocks and sand. Nevertheless there is a full golf course there, complete with a "Keep off the grass!" sign.

Coober Pedy has a seemingly endless supply of weirdoes from all over the world, but the king of them all has got to be Crocodile Harry. He was nothing more than your average crazy person for years, but after Mad Max III was filmed in his home caves and Tina Turner gave him her bra, he totally left the rest of the lunatics behind. Since then about 4.000 "virgins" from all over the world (but, strangely, mainly Swedish girls) have passed his secret, personal test and been allowed to put their name and a greeting on the walls of his home. There is a Gadaffi sculpture sitting quietly on top of the caves, which seems like a nice tribute to the Libyan dictator, until you realize that the sculpture's function is to be a lightning conductor.

Finally the guide showed us some strange scenery instead of strange people. There are a couple of small mountains, Salt and Pepper, one dark and one very white, both consisting of exactly the same mineral. There is also one mountain which looks very much like a sleeping cat. The guide made fun of the Aboriginals who calls it "The sleeping cat" in their language. Since there are no cats in Australia, that must mean that they did not have a name for it, or maybe they did not even know of its existence, before the Europeans came. The miners aren't too fond of the Aboriginals, who do everything they can to claim as much of Australia as theirs, so that they can charge people money for visiting the areas. What the miners ARE fond of, though, is to go kangaroo-shooting. By car you can easily hit a hundred of them in an hour, our guide claimed. There are more kangaroos now than ever before, as the kangaroos love the cultivated land of modern days.

The grand finale of the tour of Coober Pedy was a visit at the largest manmade construction ever; The Dog Fence. It used to be 9.500km long, roughly the distance Copenhagen-Bangkok, but now "only" 5.500km remain of it. It was built to keep the dingos away from errrr... something. It is about 2-2.5 meters tall, and while it may have seemed like a good idea at the time, it did not take long after building it before it was discovered that the dingo had learned to jump just a little bit higher than that. Tough luck.

Feeling I had seen most of the sights of Coober Pedy, I got a seat on the night bus to Adelaide. That day, January 11th 1997, was my father's 50th birthday, so I called home, catching my parents just as they were having breakfast. By some miracle, my sea-mail package sent from Thailand in early November had turned up just a couple of days earlier, so my present, a Gurkha knife could be opened while I listened. That was very nice. The best part, though, was that there was not even a hint of homesickness to be felt anywhere, which was a relief to me, since I had felt quite different about it a few weeks ago in Indonesia. I got on the bus to Adelaide knowing now t hat I would endure my travels for sure...