After The Wilds

One of the benefits that my degree level education gave me is that I knew that a camel has a specific heat capacity close to that of a baked potato. With this in mind, and no baked potato options on the menu at the Kings Creek roadhouse, I opted for the camel burger for lunch. It made the walk back to the bus a little uneasy, passing the camel enclosure trying not to look any of the animals in the eye. The burger was delicious and at only 5% fat, much nicer then the tough and overpoweringly strong beef like flavour of Kangaroo that I'd tried previously. I will turn vegetarian one day, right after I give up drinking alcohol and caffeine, but I certainly wouldn’t be able to do any of these things whilst I was in Australia.
The Kings Creek roadhouse is somewhere between Alice Springs and the Uluru-Kata Tjita National Park, home to Australia's most enduring symbol. Transport to and around the area was included with my Greyhound pass, though most other people seemed to get independent tours from Alice Springs. I was the only one on this particular trip and so Mark the driver was happy for us to take a schedule of my choosing for the three days that we would be out there. Approaching the park from the east, you get a glance at what at first could be mistaken for Uluru but is in fact Mount Connor, an impressive enough sight in it's own right but only gets a brief mention in the guide books. It's nothing compared to seeing Uluru or Kata Tjuta for the first time, the names for Ayers Rock and the Olgas respectively by the Aboriginal tribe of the area. 20 kilometres apart, they sit on the desert landscape like some computer generated graphic with their constantly changing colours that seem somehow separated from their surroundings.
At Uluru, there are two options to fill out the day after the mammoth drive from Alice Springs. A ten kilometre walk around the base or the challenging climb up to the top. The Anangu tribe of Aborigine that own the park prefer people not to climb for spiritual reasons. There were certain areas that were closed for sacred reasons around the base and through Kata Tjuta when I went there and so my opinion was that if that they were that much against people doing the climb then they should have just closed it. Aside from respecting the cultural traditions, the climb itself is a risky proposition. There are plaques at the base that are a reminder of those that have died, 33 people in the previous 20 years at the time of my visit. There are steep sections almost vertical for 2 metres in parts, and high winds and high temperatures add to the difficulty. Many of the problems arose from people overexerting themselves or chasing after blown away hats, cameras or other accessories. Back at the hostel in Alice Springs I spoke to one girl who told me the reasons why the Anangu people had their reservations. She told me about the sadness that they feel when people die on their land and each time it happens they hold a ceremony. This much is backed up with the information at the cultural centre but she went on to say that whenever someone is killed the ceremony involves the banging of their heads into the rock until their head bleeds. If that is the case there’s little wonder at the reluctance to perform these ceremonies. Giving all of this careful consideration, I still made the decision to climb.
It wasn’t easy. The true scale of Uluru isn’t revealed until you get up close and it really is breath taking. What looks like small features from distance become towering caves or cavernous valleys. A fixed chain helps with the initial long steep first section that quickly gets the heart pumping. A glance over the shoulder does little to allay any fears – it was hard enough getting up the incline but I was worried about how the hell I was supposed to get back down. But I was passing children and older people that were coming down. If they could do it, so could I. With fatigued legs I made it to the end of the chain section. A trail of white lines continued for another kilometre or so, meandering along the upper sections of the rock through mini valleys and scaling near vertical sections. At every turn I thought the summit was in sight but then the completion of a section would reveal another that hadn’t been visible from below. Eventually the trail flattened out and I saw a group of people standing around, taking a breather and getting their photographs. I’d made it.
And it was well worth it. Having lived in cities for most of my life, it's a rare thing to have such an unimpeded view for 360 degrees, Kata Tjuta standing eerily in the distance and the ant sized vehicles in the car park below the only features in the flat desert landscape. I rested for a while, took on some much needed water and enjoyed the camaraderie with those that made it to the top before setting off back down. The climb up took just over an hour, getting down was less then half of that, the chain section not as troublesome as I’d feared. With a reasonable level of fitness, common sense, a good pair of boots, plenty of water and not rushing, there needn’t be problems tackling the climb.
After getting back down we headed out to a lookout point to see the changing colours of Uluru as the sun set. A few minutes would cast the rock into a totally different shade. The rust orange gave way to glowing reds, pinks and purples that completely changed the mood of the rock. I couldn’t get enough; I left wanting more time to gawp. 'The rock never disappoints,' it said in my guidebook. Damn right.
The next morning we headed out to Kata Tjuta, a set of 36 massive domed rock formations. We set off in the pitch black and arrived at a viewing station to watch the sun rise. Anangu for ‘many heads’, many travellers had told me that they had actually preferred the beauty of Kata Tjuta to that of it’s better known counterpart. We headed around and into the rocks themselves and walked through the valleys in the chill morning air, the character of the rock faces changed at different angles including a spooky similarity to the head of Homer Simpson on the drive in.
We then made our way to Watarrka National Park, another 500 kilometres away. The park is home to King’s Canyon, a great spot for hiking in more red centre wonderment. The trail was more moderate then the previous day’s exertions and so I could savour the colours and the details of the canyon faces a bit more as Mark led me up, around and down the canyon past water holes and feature filled crevices.
Since I elected to take a tour that just provided transport I'd needed to sort out my own accommodation and food. Unfortunately the Ayres Rock Resort and Kings Canyon Resort had the monopolies in the area. I’d heard the rumours beforehand; their attitude was that most people would only be visiting once so why provide a good service? I just paid for a bed in the dormitories which were extortionately priced. On the ride back to Alice Springs I spoke to some people that we’d picked up who had gone for the whole package which had included paying $160 for a twilight champagne dinner overseeing the rock. They told us it had consisted of a poor barbecue with cheap sparkling wine. I’d spent $3.50 on a microwave lasagne. The crass commercialisation of the resorts almost ruins the whole spectacle of the area.

Getting back to Alice Springs felt a little strange after seeing what I had. Walking back to the hostel in the evening, I noticed how all the houses had fences around them and most had burglar alarms that went off as I passed - the four legged and barking kind. I wondered what it was that led to this paranoia in such a small quiet town. Maybe it's those damn hoodlums that come over and cause trouble from the next town, 1500 kilometres away.
Overseen by the MacDonell mountain ranges, I found Alice Springs to be a pleasant town despite the harshness of the surrounding environment, it’s isolation from the rest of the world and the stark racial divides. Nowhere more were the segregation issues more evident with whites going about their business ignoring the groups of Aborigines that congregated at the town’s edges. Drunken Aboriginal people waste their days sitting in the dried up Todd riverbed or hang around in the Todd Street mall. Very little interaction between the two groups was in evidence, each seemingly unaware of the other actually being there.
I’d got to know Mark pretty well over the few days during the trip out to the two national parks which gave me the chance to pick at his knowledge. He’d told me Dreaming stories of significance about features on Uluru, Kata Tjuta and King’s Canyon and given me some further insights into Aboriginal culture.
“They can be very tough,” he began with one example. “Say you’d beaten up someone from my family quite badly. To get some justice a punishment might be decided upon, say a spearing through your leg. If you accepted it then justice would be seen to be done and the issue finished with. If you hadn’t opted to accept it, you would have been cast out of your family and tribe, bringing disgrace to you and your family. However, my family would still need to see some kind of justice done, someone else from your family would take the punishment on you and your family’s behalf. That person would have had great honour put on them and they would have been well looked after. A lot of the Aborigines in the towns and cities now are people that have been cast out or are descendants from those.”
I was interested on his opinion on how the two cultures could be integrated. “It’s obvious that there are real problems with segregation, what do you think can be done?” I said.
He thought for a moment. “The problem is that those guys coming into the cities can claim all sorts of benefits. Anybody with any Aborigine blood can make a claim and the government has put in place probably the most generous welfare system in the world. But as you’ve probably seen yourself, the streets are full of Aboriginal people that spend the money on getting drunk or on drugs and this angers a lot of people. The government have gone too far in helping them.” I detected an edge of bitterness to his voice as he talked.
After the wilds of other outback towns Alice Springs had a comfortable feel to it. I whiled away a couple of days hiking some of the desert trails outside of town, visited the Historical Telegraph station and climbed Anzac Hill with it’s better then expected view of the town with the MacDonell ranges in the background.

* * *

The problem with Australian television is that there are commercial breaks every five minutes. My main problem with this was not the fragmentation of the programme or film being watched (although it must be said that the quality of programming is generally quite poor – Neighbours had won best drama at a recent awards show). Nor was it the intrusion by advertisers and marketers with their commercialisation that bothered me. But having been subjected to Scooby-Doo and Cody Banks during the latest coach trip I was happy to find that the evening viewing in the hostel TV room was the movie X-Men. However, what was bothering me was that the ad breaks gave the opportunity for my viewing buddies to start another conversation. Ordinarily this would be fine, but I was joined by a young British girl called Rose who had the twin character flaws of being at the stage of youth where she thought she knew everything, and being born into minor aristocracy so that she thought she knew everything. On the opposite couch was a stereotypical Aussie bloke who helped to run the hostel. He'd done well to get so drunk in the time since he’d picked the two of us up from the coach terminal, though I have my doubts that he spent much time sober. I had my suspicions that the Bundaberg rum he returned to after checking us in was not his first for the day. He was attacking it by the half-pint as if it was water. The mind numbing conversations that the two of them got into run well into the resumption of the film. When they began on the fox hunting ban in Britain with Rose coming out with all the cliché pro-group arguments and Bundy man lapping it up and agreeing like a loyal dog, I was about ready to throw myself out of a window. The problem though is that the hostel was in a dug out, a dwelling dug into the side of a hill in the town of Coober Pedy. As such there were no windows and no elevation from which to throw myself, being as we were, six metres underground.
The town is the world’s largest opal producer - 80% of the world's supply is mined there. Approaching on the coach from the north I saw thousands of tent-like piles of dirt, dumped onto the landscape from the 1.5million mines. The town is one of the wildest in the western world, until ten years ago no families lived there and tourism was out of the question. The regular rioting and fighting would not make for a good picture-postcard scene. You could happily wonder into the local supermarket and buy a few sticks of dynamite for your daily mining needs. The police rarely got involved in matters, the town’s populace sorting out their own problems. If someone was caught stealing for example, they may have returned home to find a smouldering wreck where their car had been. And a relaxing walk in the desert was out of the question; those 1.5 million mines are left largely uncovered.
‘Coober’ meaning ‘white man’, and ‘Pedy’ meaning ‘hole in the ground’, was the Aboriginal people’s observations of the first settlers. Many of the buildings were dug into the ground to escape the extreme conditions with temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius in summer but down into the minus figures during the winter nights. But the main driving force for living womble-like were some of the early miners that arrived who were First World War veterans. With limited timber supplies they used their skills from digging trenches to dig the first dwellings. Even the town’s two churches are dug outs.
I was walking through the supermarket to see if I could pick up some dynamite when a dishevelled looking woman came up to me. Her clothes were no more then rags, her jet-black hair knotted and wild and it looked like she hadn’t seen the inside of a shower or a bath in a long while.
"Where can I get grease?" she asked, as if I knew because I was the only male visible. "It's grease for a car," she quickly added. And there was me thinking that she was going to eat it.
"I'm not sure, lets have a look," I replied and tried to be helpful in looking along the aisles for it. After it was obvious there was no grease or dynamite I gave up as she wandered off, clearly thinking me a poor excuse for a man. When I was paying for my other groceries she re-appeared at the check out behind me.
"I never found any grease," she stated hungrily.
"Oh dear. Why don't you ask the lady at the till?" I suggested. She looked at me as if it was the stupidest idea in the history of mankind and walked off.
I spent my couple of days browsing the many opal stores and other underground buildings and took one of the obligatory mine tours. Rules have come in to formalise proceedings such as mining no longer being allowed in the town itself, though many of the locals get around this by regularly extend their underground homes - one such dwelling has scores of ‘bedrooms’. It’s still easy to set up as a minor, just over $10 and filling in an application gets you a license and some time on a stake of land and the means to get digging are never far away in Coober Pedy. The town could be held up as a success on cultural diversity, attracting people from all over the world trying their luck at mining. Up to 50 or so nationalities could be represented at a given time.
These days, the town has become tamer, opening up to tourists with not just mine tours but an assortment of activities. The desert around town has played host to movies such as Mad Max 3 and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and there are various guided tours into the outback that include the chance to noodle for opals. The place’s isolation is ideal for stargazing and there are ‘sky tours’ available. One of the more popular options is Crocodile Harry’s Crocodile Nest, an underground museum dedicated to a local legend who was the model for the character of Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee. Had I more time or even any skill at the game, I might have been tempted with a round at the golf course. With dry, desolate desert ground, the golf fanatics get their fix by hiring a square section of Astroturf. Players carry it around and set it down when it’s time to take a shot.

The coach leaving Coober Pedy was so full of strange characters that I half expected it to pull up at the lunatic asylum. I'd got talking to two young German girls while we were waiting for it to arrive and we continually exchanged exacerbated glances over to each other at our bus mates. Near the front was an eccentric Italian with the hair of a poodle and a head disproportionately large for his body. He would wonder up and down the aisle waving his head around for no reason, his giant head getting in the way of the film being screened. Just behind him was an elderly woman of what I guess was Greek origin. She found a book that had been left on her allocated seat and made a huge fuss of whether she was actually allowed to sit down. Once that one got sorted out - it being decided that the book was not a paying customer - she would then defend her space with venom when anybody came near, including the poor woman who was to sit next to her and try and get her book back. Behind me was a Chinese man who I guessed was from Macau - every time we stopped he left the coach to empty the fluid content of his sinuses by the roadside. Across from me was an enormous guy who really should have been charged for two tickets. It looked like he'd ordered the works as he manoeuvred several aluminium cartons of Chinese takeaway on his lap and the neighbouring seat. As he got stuck into his beef chow-mien a woman who was walking past the bus paused at the door. She was swaying in the breezeless night air and staggered on as if on a whim while the driver was busy putting bags on board. She headed straight for the back, leaving a slight smell of alcohol in her wake and collapsed into an instant slumber on the back seats. The driver came aboard and did a head count.
"25, 26…27?" he counted out loud. He looked confused as if that was too many. He shrugged his shoulders and got us underway anyway. As we did so a group of Aussie gits toward the back started gobbing off, trying to impress a couple of unimpressed girls. There was also the obligatory woman with screaming child that I think are Greyhound employees due to every bus containing them. The choice of Total Recall for the movie probably didn't help, the kid screaming and crying every time Arnold Schwarzenegger despatched a baddie in a grizzly, bloody way. It was a long 11-hour drive through the night. I'm not sure if the motley crew on the bus said something about Coober Pedy or that my emergence from the outback would be with a bump.