From the centre down under

Hello everyone,

It has been a while. I shall continue where we left off last time, Alice Springs!

It’s taken days of driving, but, Yes! We did it! We reached Alice Springs! Safe and sound. Driving into town gave us quite a kick. Alice Springs has long had a mysterious appeal to me. A big town in the center of Australia, surrounded by dry hot desert, cut off from the rest of Oz. We are in Alice!

After having a small photoshoot with the ‘Welcome in Alice spings’ stone sign, We quickly found a camping on the south side of town. (thank you wikicamps) It had gates that closed after 8 o’clock at night. When I asked why, the owner anwsered: It’s because of backpackers mate. Not the good ones like you. Apparently before he got the gate installed backpackers would roll into the camping after office hours in the evening. They’d then enjoy all the facilities and take off early in the morning. I sort of wonder where people get the cheek from. And who would want to travel like that?
Anyhoo, we had a nice camping and a new city to explore!
Alice has quite a few museums to visit. One that we went to was the old telegraph station. It’s the reason the city is where it is. Somewhere in the mid 1800 The good folk in Darwin, Adelaide and England were looking for a way to connect Adelaide, The city in Southern Australia, with Darwin, the city in Northern Autralia, and then on with good old Great Britain. A fellow named Stuart was able to find a way to cross from Darwin to Adelaide, which had until then, been impossible. The Overland Telegraph Line then became a project. Because a telegraph message loses its strength the longer it travels along a line, it needs to be repeated. And thus repeater stations were built along the road. And that is how Alice Springs came to be. It’s location chosen for being next to a spring. The station was named Alice springs after Charles Todd’s wife. He was an important postmaster in South Australia and also worked in the OTL. Mrs. Todd however never visited the town, for she refused to ride a camel or horse to get there. The spring itself was later found not to actually be a spring, but a deep waterhole that remains after the Todd river has dried up (Charles was a popular guy).

The original Alice Springs 🙂

We learned quite a lot about the early years of Alice. It didnt really start to get busy until Gold was discovered 100km up the ‘road’. Like so many of the outback city’s, Gold was its big beginning. In the Garden of this Old telegraph building (quite substantial, it also had a smithy) there was a pit filled with water that measured how hot the day had been. (through evaporation) When I looked into the water I saw something feathery flapping in it. A bird had fallen into the hole and couldn’t get out. Still having a flattened quail on my conscience I jumped the fence and fished the little guy out. With 20 minutes of hot sunlight and a small nap he had recovered enough and flew off. Save of the day!

We also visited Alices first school. If you have ever wondered how the kids on huge isolated farms go to school, the answer is: they don’t. Well at least not in the usual way. They have the school of air. What started as a radio broadcast is now an internet powered Web cam school. Where teachers teach in front of a Web cam connected to all these students in far flung locations. You wonder what it must be like to grow up on an isolated farm (Some as big as the Netherlands) far from the rest of society.
However happy we were to be in Alice, there is something wrong with the town. It’s the epicentre of one of Australia’s greatest problems. One with no solution. It is here where you see the aboriginal community at its worst. The tension is palpable. When you’re walking to the supermarket, you get screamed and sworn at by a group of Aboriginee for not replying to one calling you out. When you’re in the park, a group of them next to you gets up and leaves all their take away food rubbish behind. The bin was 5 meters away. When walking past the dried up river, there are groups of aboriginal people sitting there and drinking, all day long. When driving back to the camping at night, you need to swerve and avoid the aboriginal woman who had decided to sit on the middle of the road and laugh. It’s a huge problem and there doesn’t seem to be a good solution. The day before we were going to leave Alice, we wanted to stock up on fresh veggies and drove to the supermarket. Going around a round about we suddenly heard a car speeding up and felt something large crashing into the back of our van. What just happened… Well to cut a long story short. An aboriginal woman had decided that we weren’t going fast enough around that round about and had smashed her way into the rear end of Brenda and driven off. A nice Australian guy who was driving behind us followed her and came back to give us the details. Because he didn’t want this to be our impression of Alice. The worst thing was: There was a police woman nearby who had seen it happen, and she just walked away, not interested.

Poor Brenda

Leaving the idea of shopping behind, we headed for the Police station. If a collision occurs, both parties are obligated to report to the police. On top of that, the woman’s offence was driving of without stopping. The police woman asked if I just wanted to report the collision or would like them to investigate the offence (looking at cameras etc.) It was quite a tough decision to make. Could I be bothered to ask them to investigate? maybe it had been a misunderstanding. on the other hand, what if she was drunk driving and she hits an actual person next time? what if she hits a kid. I decided to let them investigate. I had the rego details and the Australian who had left me his details as a witness. The Police woman didn’t look very impressed.

Luckily we were able to get a new taillight at the car dump. Finding a sympathetic ear in the owner who wasn’t suprised by our story at all.( ‘It’s all saying one thing when you’ve never been here, but it’s not until you come down here when you see what it’s actually like’ )My Pro aboriginal’ mindset had shifted into a much grayer zone. You walk past posh galleries in the centre of town, all selling very expensive aboriginal art. A wall hanging could easily cost you 55.000. And yet when you walk outside and find a bench to sit on, a drunk aboriginal sits next to you and asks for a couple of dollars to fund his habit. It just feels so warped. With a hightened cautiousness in our driving we left Alice with mixed emotions.

Uluru or Ayers rock & Kings Canyon
One of Australia’s most famous Icons. Uluru (It’s Aboriginal name). A huge red Rock in the middle of nowhere. A visit to the outback isn’t complete without a visit to this mystical rock. For outback terms, It’s quite close to Alice Springs. Only 500 km away.
Another big touristy attraction in the area is Kings Canyon. where there is a very popular and supposedly beautiful Canyon rim walk. I can’t back this up however, for I never got to walk it.
The day before arriving at King’s canyon, we’d decided to camp out in the bush, about 80km from the start of the walk.

Fly nets! An essential when bushcamping in the outback

Everything had been fine during the day, but towards the evening I was starting to feel a pain in my back. It rapidly got worse. I had no idea what was going on and decided to lie down after dinner. The next night would be an excruciatingly painful one. I couldn’t do anything anymore without extreme pain. Rollover, sit up in bed or just breathing, everything hurt. The next morning was the worst. So what do you do? We were in the middle of the outback. I needed medical help. The pain was keeping me paralysed. All we could really do was drive to King’s canyon resort (it took about half an hour to get me up and wedged into the front seat) and hope we could get medical help at the Kings Canyon resort. Whilst driving there I was trying not to move and not to think. Had something bitten me? Maybe a poisonous spider? An image of being airlifted out of this resort flashed through my mind. No don’t think, just get to the resort. Thank you Brenda, for being a reliable van (imagine if she’d broken down). Thankfully the resort had an outback dokters post and the nurse didn’t hesitate to see us. Even though it was 7 in the morning and he’d been up watching the rugby finals the night before. He quickly diagnosed me with a severe muscle cramp. The biggest muscle in my back had cramped, probably due to dehydration. Great… Nothing you can really do about it except take very strong painkillers mixed with codeïne, a muscle relaxer. Whilst waiting for the medicine to kick in, we started talking about his job. He and a collegue are the ‘local’ medical post. The area under their charge is about as big as England. An interesting, extreme and challenging job.

Seeing as there was nothing we could really do about my back but wait, we begrudgingly checked into the Kings Canyon resort camping. At 45 Aud Dollars a night for a dirt patch with hardly any shadow, no power and a shower infested with red backs, it was very expensive for nothing really. The one redeemer was the pool. I spent the next few days bobbering about in the pool. Very slowly being able to move more and more. After two nights we had decided to move on. Trekking up and around Kings canyon wasn’t an option for me. We decided Sander would do the trek, and I would rest in the back of the van on the parking lot.
That’s exactly what we did 🙂

After King’s canyon we zoomed on towards Uluru. The big question here was, to climb or not to climb. This red Rock in the centre of Oz is perfectly climbable, there’s a path leading up, and a (low) railing. You need to start before 9 and bring lots of water. We didn’t climb it however. The reason being; it’s a sacred place for the aboriginal people. there are signs up saying; ‘we don’t climb uluru and ask you not to’. Respecting this, we decided not to climb.

There’s enough to see walking around the rock. There’s quite a lot of vegetation and a few springs. It’s suprisingly cool in the shade too. It’s actually quite a tranquil place to stroll around. I can understand why aboriginal people would come there for ceremonies. Some parts of the rock told folk stories, or dreamtime stories as they call them. Generally about really big people and animals.

Sand Drawings

All in all, it’s an impressing site to visit (and quite expensive). We particularly liked being able to drive all around the rock :).

after spending the rest of the day getting back towards the Stuart highway( the one that runs north to South straight through the middle of Oz.). We camped at the only petrol station for 400 km, which was, conveniently also a camping and store. An aboriginal guy outside the store tried to give us money to buy him alcohol.It’s forbidden for aboriginal people to buy alcohol in this area (!). In other parts of Australia there are liquor stores where they actually scan your passport and will only sell you one bottle of wine per day.

Time Hop: the border between The Northern Territory and South Australia, there's a time difference, I'm time traveling 🙂

Coober Pedy
One of our favourite places in the outback is a funny little town called Coober Pedy. Famous for one thing: Opals. I’d never heard of the gem before, but they are quite beautiful. The whole town and it’s history revolve around Opal mining. When we were driving towards the town, we were starting to see small hills of earth everywhere. There were also signs next to the road saying ‘forbidden to enter’ and ‘watch out for holes’.

Between all these human made mole heaps, a small town suddenly appeared. Funny that I call them moles heaps, because quite a lot of the homes in Coober pedy were built underground. Being quite a lot cooler than the scorching temperature during the day. There is even an underground church. We found a small camping run by an ex Opal miner who has a very contagious enthusiasm when it comes down to coober pedy and opals. He told us exactly how and what to look for whilst noodling. Noodling turning out to be, sitting in the sand, dipping rocks in water and seeing if any glimmer. This might sound a bit borish, but we had quite a lot of fun. We visited an Opal museum, which taught us a lot about the first Opal miners and how they mined. The museum had a noodling pit( for tourist) which is filled with buckets of potch (worthless opal) from the big Opal mines.

Noodle Noodle

We spent a good 1.5 hours washing stones and collecting shinies. Ever so proud of our findings we reported back to camp. We had been lucky and had found 2 ‘money stones’ as our camp owner told us. I thought that even the potch stones were pretty and decided to keep all our findings :).

Our little pot of Opals

Coober pedy also has another, very cute, attraction. A kangaroo rescue sanctuary. I’ll let the pictures do the talking on this one:

Adelaide
Leaving Coober Pedy and heading south, and south and even more south. Things started to get greener again. Sloping hills, farms, hay bales. Finally, the sea! Just one more day of driving and we reached Adelaide. Famous for being the first city in Australia founded by free people, a.k.a not convicts (like Sydney). We were happy to have left the sweltering heat and flies of the outback behind. We found a nice camping on the outskirts of the city right next to a national park. Taking an evening walk throughout the park I spotted something in a tree, a koala! Our first koala in the wild! Not just one, but two! A mother and child.

The mother just sort of chilling in the tree and the child moving about eating leaves. It’s amazing how they can curl up or lie down on a branch and not fall out of a tree. We spotted several more that evening.

The city itself has quite an English feel about it. It’s a nice city to walk about. The city centre is a square, surrounded by parks. We didnt actually do a lot except walk about and go to the cinema. It was nice being in a big city again, with all its comforts and facilities. (drinkable water, air conditioning in shops, no Flies).
After Adelaide, we decided to head straight back to Sydney. We would skip Melbourne and Victoria for now.But head down at a later date!

That’s all for now! Sanders post should be up next 🙂

Lisa and Sander