Australia

I posted all the pictures from Australia and New Zealand at http://picasaweb.google.com/HeidiH8000/ in case you want to see more.

This trip to Australia wasn't designed to really see ALL of Australia. This was just a side-trip during a vacation in New Zealand. I've wanted to see Uluru (AKA Ayers Rock) forever, so since I was going to be in that part of the world already, I made a little detour to central Australia.

Australia has the most stringent entry requirements of any country I've been to so far. We couldn't bring anything edible into the country, including gum! Apparently it's bad for the local vegetation. We also had to sign forms saying that we didn't feel sick. Good thing I was feeling better that day! Sneezing in the immigration officer's face probably would have been a bad thing. I was glad that I just brought this backpack, because waiting for a suitcase or a checked bag would have taken forever. The customs people pretty much left me alone, but most of the other people on my flight had their luggage sniffed by dogs (looking for bubble gum, no doubt).

The flight from Auckland to Alice Springs included an overnight layover in Sydney. The plane landed at 7:00, so by the time I got to the hostel it was a little after 8:00 p.m. I wanted to see some of Sydney, and my hostel was only about 4 km from the harbor, so I hurried downtown to see the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House before it got too late. Maybe it was just the right time of night, but Sydney was bustling with happy people. The stores were all open, and there were musicians sitting out on the sidewalks playing instruments like electric recorders or digideroos. It was a nice welcome to Australia! I spent a few minutes looking around the harbor before heading back. My flight left at 8:00 the next morning, so I never got to see Sydney in the daylight. Someday I'll go back.

So other than the two hours I spent walking through Sydney, Alice Springs was really the first I saw of Australia. Even though Australia and New Zealand are each other's closest neighbors, the two countries couldn't be more different. New Zealand is green, Australia is red. New Zealand is wet, Australia is dry as a bone. New Zealand is new, one of the newest countries geologically. Australia is ancient. The landscape hasn't really changed at all since an enormous lake dried up in central Australia, about 400 million years ago. The ice ages didn't even change it very much. The dinosaurs saw the same scenery I saw. The Aborigines had a culture virtually unchanged for more than 20,000 years (some claim it's more like 40,000 years) until the Europeans decided to settle on the continent. New Zealand is small, and has what I thought was the perfect ratio of people to land area. Australia is huge and virtually unpopulated. According to the tourist information guide to Alice Springs, Alice is "a small town surrounded by a desert the size of Europe." And it's so true! Alice is just a little bigger than Blackfoot, yet it's the largest city for at least 1,000 miles in any direction. Oh, and Australia is HOT. It was early spring, and temperatures got at least into the nineties every day. I can't imagine what that place is like during the summertime. The sun is more intense there too; the hole in the ozone layer is right overhead.

And there were huge differences between the people of these two countries. (Once again, I'm generalizing, using Alice Springs as an example of all of Australia, but Alice was really all I saw.) In New Zealand, people moved around with a sense of purpose. They were laid-back and happy, but they gave the impression of having things to do and places to go. In Alice, people just sat in the shade watching the sand blow by. And they sat some more. And sat. As the shady area got smaller under their particular tree, they would move to another tree and sit. The impression I got was that there wasn't anything they needed to do today, and there wasn't anything that needed to be done tomorrow, so the only thing to do was sit.

Most of the people I saw in Alice Springs were Aborigines, or Arrernte, as their particular tribe prefers to be called. At first I was just absorbed with how different they were from "us." I know it's not politically correct to acknowledge any differences at all between people, and I'm supposed to pretend that I didn't notice that there were people in town who looked and lived much differently than I do. The truth was that they WERE different: their facial features were different, they walked and sat differently, they dressed differently (I hardly ever saw them wearing shoes) their hygiene habits were different (being desert dwellers, they traditionally only bathed a few times a year, according to one of the books I read), and many of them were living in the dry river bed. And these were the ones who were living in town, instead of living in the bush! I don't have any pictures, since the Aborigines don't like their pictures taken and also it seemed a little rude to be like, "Hey, you look at LOT different than me! Can I take a picture of you to share with my friends back home?" I became fascinated with Aboriginal culture and Dreamtime, and picked up a couple of books on the subject while I was there. There's a movement alive in Alice Springs to just let the Aboriginal people be, to stop thinking of them as "poor" and "homeless" and just let them live the way they want to live. It sounds great in theory, but in practice, it's a hugely complex issue.

The next day, my tour to Uluru started. There are at least a dozen companies in Alice Springs that run tours to Uluru, and most of the ones I saw were just like mine: they all had 25-seat vans (24 tourists and a driver, if the tour was full), and they were three-day trips where you spent two nights camping in the outback in swags. We left at 6 a.m., and our first stop was a camel farm. They offered camel rides for $5, and I did it right away! How many times do you get to ride a camel? I was surprised that there were only about three people in my group that rode the camel--it was awesome! Then we drove to King's Canyon, about a five-hour drive from Alice. If I haven't already said so, let me just say that Australia is EMPTY! In five hours, we passed the camel farm and two "stations," which are family-run cattle ranches the size of small countries, which have a gas station and a teeny-tiny convenience store for travelers. Some of the stations even have campsites. If you're lucky, there's electricity and hot water, but those are real conveniences. It was like driving through Nevada, only worse. At least in Nevada there's a town every hundred miles or so, with actual houses and maybe some grass. Australia is just a million miles of nothing except desert.

King's Canyon, though, was gorgeous. The red rock formations are enormous. It's hard to get a sense of scale in these pictures, but the walls of the canyon are almost 1000 feet tall. Those little spikes at the top of this picture are people. We hiked around the top of the canyon, which meant that the first part was pretty steep. I was proud of myself for flying on up the trail with out needing much rest! Gotta love being at (almost) sea level. I imagine things will be different in Peru when we're hiking through the Andes at 14,000 feet.

King's Canyon was a gorgeous hike, but I'm not used to hiking with 24 other people. It was a bi annoying. We would start out all grouped together, and then as soon as we got comfortably separated our tour guide would rein us in again. Don't get me wrong, everyone in my tour group was wonderful and I liked them all, but it was hard to take pictures or see anything without someone else getting in the way. For the last mile or so, we got to just go at our own pace, and that was my favorite part. I did enjoy the tidbits the tour guide gave us, though. At one point he pointed at some holes in the rock and told us they were jellyfish fossils! In the middle of Australia! They were from 600 million years ago, when Australia had an immense inland sea. Amazing.

Before going to our campsite, our tour guide told us that we were going to get firewood. Being American, of course, I thought he meant we were going to BUY firewood. But no, he meant we were going to stop on the side of the road and pull branches off dead trees. It was really fun! We went to a remote bush campsite that night, and camped out in swags. The campsite had a table and trailer to store the swags (since they take tour groups there every week) but nothing else. The "bathroom" was a shovel and a bush. We didn't have tents, since it never rains there. Instead we slept in swags. Maybe everybody except me has heard of swags before, but this was my first experience with them. If you picture a mattress wrapped in a big sleeping bag, that's the general idea. We put sleeping bags inside the swag, for an added level of warmth, and then zipped both the sleeping bag and swag around ourselves. It was surprisingly comfortable, but a bit cold. The desert can get so hot during the day and so cold at night! The stars...oh my gosh! I wish I could have gotten a picture of the stars. I've never seen so many before (but I've never been anywhere so remote, so I guess it stands to reason). The Southern Cross burned in the sky. I could even see the different spiral arms of the Milky Way. It was amazing! Even if the tour had been a dud, it would have been worth it just to see the night sky in Central Australia.

The next morning we had our first glimpse of Uluru. I was so excited! I'd been wanting to see it for so long! But instead of going there, we drove past Uluru and went to Kata Tjuta (also known as The Olgas), in the same national park as Uluru. I know the pictures look like something you can see in southern Utah, but it's really completely different. Completely HUGE, I mean. They're these round geologic formations that kind of look like marbles. They were formed around the same time as Uluru, but while Uluru is solid sandstone, Kata Tjuta looks more like red concrete with big chunks of rock in it. A long, long time ago, there were enormous mountains in Australia, larger than anything on earth now. The land where Uluru and Kata Tjuta lie was in the mountain runoff. Kata Tjuta has larger chunks of rock because it's closer to the mountain ranges, so the streamflow deposited rocks there. Uluru, being farther downstream, got the silt. The streambeds hardened over time, turned into rock, and were buried. Then there was some continental drift activity that pushed these fossilized seabeds upwards so they because the geologic formations we see today. And then everything geologic in Australia just stopped. No more water, no more runoff, no more volcanos, no more continental drift. Nothing ever changed again. It's hard to imagine.

After lunch, we FINALLY got to go to Uluru. We just had a short hike that day, but our tour guide promised us we could walk around the whole thing the next day. He talked more about Aboriginal culture and the idea of sacred sites, but really, nobody except the Aborigines knows much about what goes on at the sacred sites. Aborigines keep those rites secret. There are areas around Uluru where there are signs asking people to refrain from taking pictures, since certain spots are sacred. And the Aborigines (also called the Traditional Owners) also ask that people don't climb Uluru, since it's sacred to them, but plenty of people do it anyway. (There's a trail going to the top.) We went on the short hike to a water hole and then drove further away to a viewing area to watch the sunset. It was beautiful to see how Uluru changed colors as the sky changed colors.

My tour group was great. There were four of us who were native English speakers (another girl from here in Washington, one from England, and one from Ireland), four French girls, and then the rest were Taiwanese (three separate groups who happened to end up on this tour together). At first we kind of stuck with whoever spoke our language, but after the first day we branched out and made friends with other people. I wished once again that I was fluent in other languages, like Taiwanese, for one! Some of my closest friends on the trip were Taiwanese (this is Linus and Jane standing next to me), and it would have been great if we could have just talked together without having to do so much of the sign language thing. I had to rely on their English skills (which were excellent) and kind of felt like I wasn't doing my part. Another goal for the future, I guess.

The third day, we got up early (before the crack of dawn) to take a sunrise hike around Uluru. This time we got to walk all the way around and we got to go at our own pace, which I really liked. I spent some time alone with the mountain, watching everything wake up in the sunlight. I'm so glad I finally got to see it in person. I loved the colors and the wildlife and the sounds. Just before leaving, we went to the Aboriginal Cultural Center at the foot of Uluru. (I wished we could have done that FIRST!) I can't get my mind around a culture that didn't change for 20,000 years, any more than I can grasp the concept of a land where there's no erosion. Truly an untouched place, until 200 years ago.

Then we got back in the van and went back to Alice. We stopped along the way to see Mount Conner and some old seabeds, but mainly we just drove. We drove a few miles on the old highway from Alice Springs to Uluru, which was a rutted dirt track. I'm grateful for new highways! It also made me wonder how people discovered Alice Springs in the first place, and why they built a town. If it's truly the only habitable area in all of non-coastal Australia, how did they ever stumble across it? And who decided it would be a great place for a town? Of course, I wonder the same thing about Phoenix, and I've never figured that out either. My tour group met for dinner that night before going our separate ways the next day. We took lots of pictures and exchanged email addresses, but of course we won't really keep in touch.

I had purchased a ticket on The Ghan, the train that goes from Alice to Adelaide (actually from Darwin to Adelaide with a stop in Alice) but when I got back to the hostel, I realized I had inadvertently given myself another day in Alice. In other words, I was stuck in hot, dry, rather ugly Alice for an extra day. I considered going to the train station to see if I could get on an earlier train but eventually decided to just stick it out in Alice. When I come back to Australia, I'll probably spend some more time in Adelaide, but it's unlikely that I'll ever feel like going to Alice Springs again. So I decided to see everything there was to see before leaving.

I hiked along the dry river bed to the old telegraph station. There was a nice little park with some interpretive plaques. Next to the station was an old boarding school. If you've ever seen (or read the book) Rabbit-Proof Fence, the boarding school will be familiar. A few generations ago, Aboriginal children who were part-white were taken from their families and placed in these boarding schools. Some things I read claim that it was an admirable attempt by European gentlemen to take care of the children they had fathered, and others claim it was a less-admirable attempt to wipe out the Aboriginal race. Either way, many of those children never saw their families again. Now they're known as the Lost Generation. I know the same sorts of things happened in the United States, but somehow it's more interesting if it happened in another country.

The trail wound through some hills and an old graveyard. From the tops of the hills I could see all around Alice Springs, and there's truly nothing there. The idea of so much nothing was another thing I couldn't wrap my mind around. When I got back into town, there was a festival going on. Yay, I like festivals! There were giant bug replicas that had been carried down the street in a parade (I missed the parade). And there was music and food. It was like being at the fair!

While wandering around town, I saw a sign that said "Marriott's Pool Repair". I wondered fleetingly if the Marriots were Mormon, since it's a big Mormon name in the United States. The next day I went to church and met the Marriotts! That was pretty funny. They invited me over for lunch after church, and then they took me to the train station. Finally, I was getting out of Alice. It wasn't like I couldn't see the beauty in the desert landscape, and I'm sure Alice Springs is gorgeous to those who like that kind of thing, but I'm just not a desert dweller. I was tired of the dust, and the flies were awful: black flies everywhere that would get in your ears, nose, mouth, and eyes. Besides the idea that walking to the next town would take more than a month made me feel a little bit claustrophobic, if that makes any sense.

I got on The Ghan, named for the Afghans who, with their camels, laid the telegraph cable and built the rail line. And there I ran into one of the big Taiwanese groups that had been on my Uluru tour! We were sharing a train car. That was pretty fun. Once the train started going, it didn't stop until we got to Adelaide. There was no reason to stop, because there are no towns at all between Alice and Adelaide. Just more sand and desert. We did get to see lots of kangaroos, so that was fun.




After 22 hours on the train, we arrived in Adelaide. Hooray! Green grass, trees, water, fountains, ocean! We got there in the afternoon and my plane was leaving the next morning, so I made the most of it. There were so many pretty places in Adelaide that I'll have to go back to see them all again. And the next day was the flight: Adelaide to Auckland to Los Angeles to San Francisco, then taking the BART from San Francisco airport to Oakland airport, then flying to Spokane. I was kind of a wreck by the time I finally got home, but it was worth it. I have to go back to Australia and see the pretty parts. I especially want to see Tasmania, the Great Barrier Reef, and Perth. Someday.