It’s a bit easier to write about our Outback experience now that the constant, maddening (infuriating!) buzz of the flies in our faces is more of a fading memory than the recurring nightmare that it was in the moment. It’s really hard to describe how challenging it was dealing with the flies, the heat, sleep depravation, the flies… I kept thinking it was a lot like the game of golf: you endure many, many frustrating moments where you swear you’ll never play the game again, but you have *just* enough long, straight drives and sweet putts to make it all worthwhile (with the help of some selective memory). Despite our frustrations with the flies, sleeping on the ground exposed to the elements and creepy crawlies, and a few insanely early wake-up calls, we really did have a once-in-a-lifetime experience in the Red Center (although we both agree that we probably wouldn’t go back for more).
We’ve added photos from our last three days in the the Red Center: Kings Canyon, Oak Valley and the MacDonnells (a range of mountains west of Alice Springs). Rather than give you a day-by-day account of the entire week, we thought we’d spare you the travel log and just share a few highlights:
Getting Way Outback
The company we travelled with (Way Outback) prides themselves on giving clients the true Outback experience, and they aren’t kidding. We travelled in a crazy, souped up 4WD bus (with a big trailer behind it), and it’s a darn good thing we had it. With all the rain and flooding they’d had the week before we got to Alice Springs, there were many places where we had to ford rivers, maneuver through deep sand (with limited success at times), and go off road to find wood and/or a campsite. We cooked all of our meals over campfires that we built each night, and we slept out under the stars in “swags”, which are basically thin mattresses covered in army-issue canvas. Flush toilets were few and far between — as our guide said at the beginning of the trip, “there will be few facilities, but many opportunities.” Showers were equally rare, and when they happened, they were either cold or heated by hot water “donkeys”: water tanks that were heated by fires under them that we also had to build ourselves. We definitely had a renewed appreciation for fire.
;)
The men give our 4WD a little help after it got stuck for the second time
The Group
Our Aussie guide Paul was a true jack-of-all-trades: skilled 4WD driver, DJ, knowledgeable tour guide and geologist, fire starter, gourmet cook (or as close as you can get with only a fire and two dutch ovens), and general problem solver. He was also really funny and seemed to genuinely enjoy showing us around. He’d gotten pulled in to lead our tour at the last minute (our scheduled guide was apparently still stranded by the floods in the Outback after going out there to “play” in the mud and sand with his 4WD truck a couple of days before our trip), but you wouldn’t have known it from how Paul led the trip. He kept us informed, well fed, and on schedule.
We were also fortunate to travel with an interesting mix of people, and mature people at that (no more backpacker idiots!). There was an older couple from Brooklyn who we had some great conversations with about favorite books, a really nice newlywed couple from Vienna, a young German girl and her parents, who we decided were the happiest Germans we’d ever seen (they spoke almost no English but joked with each other constantly), and John, a 20-something guy from Papua New Guinea. His story is pretty amazing: he’s from a 500-person mountain village that you can only get to on foot or by airplane from PNG’s capital city. He spent the last two years studying in Australia, and he’s doing a bit of traveling before heading back to PNG to live in his village and possibly study medicine. His English was really good, and he had a wickedly dry sense of humor that kept us laughing all week.
;)
A few from our group hanging around camp
Mother Nature
There were so many natural wonders to take in out there, it’s hard to know where to begin. The rock formations, of course, were spectacular. The geological story of how Uluru and many of the rocky gorges and canyons were formed is pretty amazing — the whole center of Australia used to be an inland sea, and so many of the cliffs we saw were actually sedimentary layers that had built up over millions of years. The combination of gorges and heavy rains also made for fuller-than-normal water holes that were perfect for taking a dip to cool off. The heat wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but we stilled sweated our asses off hiking around the place. It was also amazingly green — one of the locals called the rains the week before a “100 Year Flood” — and we felt very lucky to see the Red Center in a way few people ever do.
;)
The Southern Cross and Milky Way
At night, we were treated with mostly clear skies, an insanely bright nearly-full moon, and some spectacular star-gazing later in the week once the moonrise was late enough. With almost no light pollution, we saw more stars out there than either of us could remember — the Southern Cross, Orion (familiar but upside down), and the Milky Way were all clearly visible. We were even able to see the dark nebula below the Southern Cross that completely blocks the light of the stars behind it. So cool!
We had more than a few nighttime visitors, too: a nearby pack of wild dingos howled constantly the first night as we slept out in our swags, and we saw plenty of weird spiders and even a python (small and non-venomous, fortunately) in and around our campsites. Laura and I slept easier (literally) when we finally caved in and requested tents for our last two nights. (As Laura said, “When life gives you lemons, ask for a goddamned tent.”) I mean, there’s roughing it, and then there’s *roughing* it. Paul gave us a hard time for being the “soft Americans”, but he ended up sleeping in the spare tent the last night, so we didn’t feel too bad!
Hiking
The best way to see the gorges and canyons in the Red Center is to get out there and hike them, so hike we did. Some of the routes were pretty challenging, with steep climbs and heaps of rocks to scramble over, but mostly we were just overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the rocks and gorges. It was impossible not to take picture after picture of the deep blue skies behind red rocks and green trees and shrubs. The photos we posted aren’t enhanced in any way — the colors really were that vibrant.
Aboriginal Culture
Learning more about the aboriginal people and their culture was perhaps the most unique and rewarding part of the trip. We felt like we saw two extremes of aboriginal life during our week in the Red Center: a particularly disheartening view in Alice Springs, and another much more encouraging one in Oak Valley. In Alice Springs, we saw lots of aboriginal people wandering the streets and hanging out in front of the shops, looking pretty forlorn and poverty-stricken. We asked Paul about it later, and he told us that alcoholism, unemployment, and welfare are sadly the norm for much of the aboriginal population in town.
Fortunately, the story in Alice Springs is not true everywhere in the Outback. On our third night in the bush, we headed down a 100k dirt road to visit an aboriginal community living in Oak Valley. There we met Craig, a man whose ancestors have lived and survived on this land for thousands of years. His “language group” (as they call their tribes) only recently won back the full legal rights to their ancestral land, after going through an extensive process of trying to “prove” to the Australian government that the land was theirs, despite having no written documentation to support their claim (their culture and history was, until recently, completely story- and picture-based). Even after this victory, though, Craig told us that his people believe they are only the keepers of the land, not the owners of it.
We spent three hours exploring some of their sacred sites with Craig, and he shared his people’s stories and history with us through pictures he drew in the sand. He was pretty candid about the challenges facing aboriginal people today — some (like alcoholism) he acknowledged they had brought on themselves. But for Craig, the goal is to preserve the stories and ways of the past while learning to adapt to a new modern era. He still teaches his sons the stories his grandfathers told him and shows them the ways their ancestors lived off this very harsh and unforgiving land, but he also encourages his sons to “attend” school in Alice Springs remotely via web-based e-learning. We really enjoyed the time we spent with Craig, and we were especially glad to get a glimpse of aboriginal culture that seems to be thriving despite its incompatibility with the modern world.
;)
Craig tells us the story of his language group and their land using pictures in the sand
Despite its challenges, we will always have a certain fondness for the Red Center. It’s a unique place in Australia and the world, and we would definitely recommend it to others… just be prepared for the flies, and get yourself into a full-on roughing it mentality!