Outback Adventures 1: Darwin up to Alice Springs

July 5, 2008

My roommates in the hostel were slobs. Their garbage, clothes, stuff, and filth was scattered all over the room. When they came into my room at 4 AM, they made a huge racket. The bed sheets in the hostel were made from plastic (I presume to make them easier to clean). I could already tell that my hostel was one of those “party hostels” -- the kind I generally avoid since I generally prefer to sleep at night when I want to, rather than get completely wasted every single night. I decided that I didn’t like my hostel, right away.

So, in the morning, I got out of there. I needed to find breakfast. My hostel did not provide any. Later, talking to other people, I learned that other hostels in Darwin were cheaper AND provided breakfast. I guess, by bad luck (or bad planning), I ended up in the stupidest hostel in Darwin. I guess that’s what I get for booking it at the last minute.

Anyways, I wandered around the quiet streets of Darwin in the morning. The weather was good -- warm, humid, and sunny -- just how I like it. Cairns was a bit too chilly in the morning for me. I eventually found a little diner with a little Asian man behind the counter. I ordered myself some eggs, sausage, toast, and coffee for breakfast (I had been eating muesli and milk for breakfast for at least a week now, and needed a change!), and sat down to eat. The owner was friendly and we chatted a bit, but it was a bit hard since his English wasn’t that great and his accent was strong. At one point, he asked if I had a girlfriend (which is actually a fairly common question from Asian people). I said, “no”. After he asked, I also told him that I was traveling alone.

After paying for my food and was about to leave, the owner said something like, “You come back 1 PM for 150?” I was confused. I wasn’t sure if I heard him correctly. 150 what? At first I thought he wanted to sell me drugs. I asked him what he meant. He opened a newspaper, turned to the classified ads, and showed me picture of a girl on an ad for an escort agency. Woah! This restaurant owner was also a pimp and he wanted to cut a deal with me! I guess he assumed since I was traveling alone and didn’t have a girlfriend that I wanted to buy the services of prostitutes! I’m not kidding! Once I figured out what the man wanted, I smiled, said, “No thank you,” and got out of there. Sheesh.

The rest of the day wasn’t as interesting. I walked around the beach and streets of Darwin to stretch my legs and look at the sights. There weren’t many. Darwin is a small place. I walked past the beach, the park, the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly Building (also called the “Wedding Cake” because of its appearance). My Lonely Planet said that I could find free Internet at the Northern Territory Library, but when I got there, I found out that it was closed for refurbishment. Bah!

I went to the travel agencies near my hostel and booked myself onto a tour for Litchfield Park the next day and booked some buses the next week to take me from Alice Springs to Coober Pedy, Adelaide, and Melbourne. All of my travel (and there was a LOT of it) for the next two weeks was booked and paid for. My plans were quite aggressive:

July 6: Wake up 6 AM for an all day tour of Litchfield National Park near Darwin. Return to Darwin that night to sleep in hostel.
July 7: Wake up 5 AM to start a three day bus tour from Darwin to Alice Springs. The distance between the two cities was about 1700 km. The night would be spent camping in a tent near Katherine.
July 8: Wake up 6 AM for day two of the tour. The night would be spent camping near Tennant Creek.
July 9: Wake up 6 AM for day three of the tour. The night would be spent in a hostel in Alice Springs.
July 10: Wake up 5 AM to start a three day bus tour of The Red Centre of Australia. The total distance covered in the bus tour would be about 1400 km. The night would be spent camping in Yulara.
July 11: Wake up 5 AM for day two of the tour. The night would be spent camping near Kings Canyon.
July 12: Wake up 5 AM for day three of the tour. The night would be spent in a hostel in Alice Springs.
July 13: A much needed rest day in Alice Springs.
July 14: Take a 9 AM bus for ten hours from Alice Springs to Coober Pedy and stay there overnight.
July 15: Sightseeing in Coober Pedy during the day. Take the overnight bus (about ten hours) from Coober Pedy to Adelaide.
July 16: Arrive in Adelaide about 6 AM. Sightseeing in the city during the day. Take the overnight bus (about twelve hours) from Adelaide to Melbourne.
July 17: Arrive in Melbourne about 8 AM. Essentially a rest day since I’ve already “done” Melbourne. Staying in some hostel somewhere overnight.
July 18: Leave from Melbourne Airport on flights to Samoa. It should take most of July 18 to get there.
July 18 (AGAIN): Since I have to cross the International Date Line to get to Samoa, I will arrive there early on my second iteration of July 18.

That’s some kind of travel for 12 out of 13 days in a row. I don’t think I’ve ever covered that much ground in such a short amount of time ever (excluding airplane flights). Oh well. There was a lot I wanted to see and I spent too much time sitting around in Melbourne and Cairns. Now I had to catch up! I’ll write more about these sections of the trip after I actually execute them, of course!

The rest of my day in Darwin wasn’t so exciting. I had a voucher for a free “backpacker meal” at the Vic Hotel in Darwin, so I had free fried rice and stir fry pork for dinner. I got the voucher (and a bunch of others) after I booked my tour package at the Peter Pan travel agency in Cairns. I intended to use my free meal vouchers as much as I could over my remaining stay in Australia.

Even though I had to wake up early the next morning (6 AM), I decided that I had a few hours to kill before going to bed that night so I went to my party hostel’s bar to have a couple drinks and do some socialization. I saw a table full of guys playing cards so I sat down to join them. It turns out they were a bunch of technicians in the US Navy on leave in Darwin. These guys had already spent time in Japan and Korea and were now stationed somewhere in The Outback to the south of Darwin. The guys were pretty hilarious. The card game they were playing was an old card game I had been playing since I was in high school (at least), Asshole. However, these guys had a drinking version of the game. I know I’ve played lots of variations of Asshole before, but never as a drinking game! The President got to make his own rules. The same guy got to be President so many times that he basically controlled all the action in the game. After a while, you had to take a drink if you made eye contact with him, but had to ask him permission to drink first. Needless to say, he abused his power a lot. Oi. I got sucked out to another bar with the guys, too. I didn’t get to bed until 1 AM (about two or three hours after I originally wanted), but that’s okay. I had fun!

July 6, 2008

It was the first day of my hectic tour schedule. The target today was Litchfield National Park, about 150 km south of Darwin. I had to wake up at 6 AM so I wouldn’t miss my tour pickup.

There are two famous national parks near Darwin, Kakadu and Litchfield. Kakadu is the more spectacular and famous one. I really really wanted to go there, but I didn’t have time. It was located farther from the city and really required two or three days to enjoy. Since I really only had one day to see national parks from Darwin, I had to choose Litchfield. Nevertheless, Litchfield Park was still really good and I don’t regret my decision.

The first stop was the Jumping Crocodile Cruise on the Adelaide River. While waiting for our boat ride, we got to take turns holding pythons. I know that I had already had the chance to hold snakes in Australia (back when I was in Byron Bay), but I had to try it again.


The cruise was really good. I enjoyed it more than my crocodile cruise on the Daintree River from the week before. On this cruise, we weren’t restricted from approaching the crocs. The cruise operators were able to induce the crocs to jump out of the water by teasing (and eventually feeding) them with big pieces of buffalo meat.


We saw about four crocs. Since they knew that they would get free food, many of them swam right up to the boat expecting food. These same crocs have been being fed this way for years, so they all knew the drill.

I also saw many birds: mostly kites. The boat operators fed the birds by hand, so big flocks of them followed the boat and swooped down to get their nibbles.

After the cruise, we continued to our first stop in Litchfield Park (after a short stop under a banyan tree for lunch): the termite mounds. These mounds were huge! Check it out!


There were two kinds of mounds that we saw. The bigger ones were the “buttress mounds,” named for the buttress-like protrusions. The buttresses were cooling structures for the mounds. Our tour guide told us that the termites made the mounds from a combination of cellulose, saliva, and feces. They grow about one metre every ten years.

The other kind of mounds were made my magnetic termites. Instead of tall buttress-shaped structures, these mounds were flat, rectangular structures. The skinny dimension of the rectangle always faced north-south and the wide dimension always faced east-west. The termites were born with compasses in their tiny brains and were able to tell the direction. That was their form of temperature regulation for their mounds. In the mornings and evenings the wide sides of the mounds would catch more sun in order to warm the mound. In the afternoon, the skinny side of the mound would face the sun, to avoid overheating the mound.

The rest of the trip involved visiting various waterfalls and swimming holes. The weather was warm and sunny and the water was brisk and refreshing. At the Wangi Waterfall, I tried to swim right up under the falling water itself, but the current was too strong, so I settled for sitting right beside the water. At the Buley Rockholes, the water fell between a series of connected rockholes. It was great for swimming and diving. I got to sit right under a small cascade and let the water pummel my back and shoulders. It was like a natural jacuzzi!

That night, our tour guide dropped us off on Mindil Beach in Darwin. It was Sunday night, and there was an open air market set up with lots of food and souvenirs to buy. The beach, itself, was the main attraction there. There were hundreds of people set up there watching the sunset. Many of them brought lawn chairs and picnics. The sunset itself was spectacular. I captured many beautiful pictures there, especially since sailboats, yachts, children, and other people kept placing themselves in the frame just for me!


July 7, 2007

Another early wake up: 5 AM. It was the first day of my three day tour to Alice Springs on Outback Safaris. We had about 1700 km to cover. Most of the tour was spent sitting on a bus. The ride was occasionally punctuated by stops at various points of interest. Since this was The Outback, these points of interest were far and few in between. As we rode further and further south from Darwin, the landscape became more and more barren. At first, there were lots of green trees. As we got farther and farther from the tropical monsoon zone near Darwin, the trees for smaller and further apart. The dirt got redder and redder. We weren’t technically driving through a desert, but were going through a semi-arid zone. By the geographer’s definitions, it got slightly more rain than a real desert. That didn’t matter to me. It felt like a desert to me.

My tour guide was Jason. He was a cool guy with a soft voice and a funny laugh. He listened to music loudly on the bus to stay awake during the long drive. Most of his music was hip-hop, cheesy 80s pop, dance and the occasional alternative classic. He used to be in the army, and it was funny that he would sing along to even to the cheesiest and girliest songs.

There were 14 tourists on the bus. Three kids from the German part of Switzerland (Ramona, Denise, David), a Czech guy (Jan), a Polish couple (Marta and Piotr), and Australian girl (Nicole), a girl from Taiwan (Yuan), and some girls from England (Allison, Claire, and some others). We made a good mix of people. We immediately got along. Claire kept flashing me these cute smiles. I had to keep my eye on her!

After about four hours of driving, we ended up at our stop for the day, Katherine Gorge. We had our choice of activities: a cruise, a hike, or canoeing. I chose to do the canoeing. I shared a canoe with Allison, the 19 year old English girl. Marta and Piotr (Peter) shared a canoe, too. They were the first people I met on my travels from Poland (other than a couple girls I talked to for about five minutes in Melbourne). We got along. Piotr called me Roberczik. I called him Piotrek. We called the Czech guy, Jan, Janiczku. If you knew Polish or Czech, you’d find these names funny, take my word for it.

Here’s a picture of Marta, Piotr and their canoe (more like a kayak, in my opinion):


That night we built a big campfire at our campsite. We played campfire games, told ghost stories, drank goon and beer! Goon is essentially really cheap wine in a box. It’s dodgy stuff. The box says that it may contain egg, fish, and nut products. Why would wine contain these things? We also joked around that it contains fishheads, sawdust, and cigarette butts. The wine itself was packaged in a plastic bag inside the box. It was necessary to pull the bag out of the box to squeeze the last wine out of it. Before pouring out the last of the wine, it was backpacker tradition to take turns slapping the bag. Allison even had a t-shirt that said “Slap that goon!” Jason admitted that Aussies didn’t slap the goon... it was a tradition invented by backpackers. Slap that goon!

Our campsite was pretty high class: hot showers and toilets, a kitchen with cooker and fridge, and permanent two-person tents with mats to sleep in. My tent-mate was Jan (not Claire, sorry... though that would have been interesting). I had rented a sleeping bag and slept well.

July 8, 2008

It was a bit chilly in the morning, but not so bad yet. Katherine, even though it was the winter, still had a fairly tropical climate. As I learned a few days later, it was going to get a lot worse.

We were supposed to wake up at 6:00 AM for a 7:30 AM departure. I, however, had been sleep deprived lately, and slept in until about 7:10 AM. I really quickly downed some breakfast, threw my stuff in the trailer and hopped on the bus. Everyone was waiting for me... oops.

The first stop was the thermal springs at Mataranka. Warm water (about 30 degrees) bubbles out of the ground at flows into pools. Given that we were chilly that morning, it was really nice to take a dip in the warm water. We were there for about forty minutes and didn’t want to leave.

We continued down the Stuart Highway to the tiny settlement of Larrimah. It was typical of many of the tiny roadhouses we passed in The Outback... mostly a pub, a caravan park, some fields, and ruins of bygone days of glory. Larrimah had rusting railway tracks and water tanks out back. I quickly fell in love with the scenery. It was a photographic bonanza.



The second photograph quickly became one of the favourite photographs I made on the trip.

We stopped at a few more roadhouses and desolate places before arriving that night in Tennant Creek at the Juno Horse Stud. The weather grew markedly colder the farther south we traveled. That night we huddled around the roaring campfire trying to keep warm. After roasting some marshmallows, people went to bed. We didn’t drink any goon or stay up late that night. We were all tired and it was just too cold.

July 9, 2008

It was not a restful night for anyone. Even though we originally thought it was cool to spend the night camping on a horse ranch, there were many complications... many noisy complications. Dogs barked all night long. The wind howled and rattled the metal walls of the shed. Something spooked one of the horses in the middle of the night and it whinnied longingly for many hours. We all met in the cookhouse for breakfast at 6 AM, weary and shivering. I was awake at about 4 AM, though. I had laid in bed for about an hour before giving up on sleep and listening to my iPod for an hour. Sometimes I manage to fall back asleep after switching on my iPod, but this time I did not.

It was only a few more stops before we reached Alice Springs. The first was a scenic rock formation called The Devil’s Marbles. Piles of rounded, eroded, boulders were scattered across the desolate plains south of Tennant Creek. It was a really cool place.



We arrived in Alice Springs around 3:30 PM. Yes, we had covered 1700 km in three days. We all made plans to meet up again that night at Annie’s Place (a bar and restaurant) for dinner and drinks. Everyone in our group was eager to hang out in a place together that wasn’t freezing cold.

After a few hours to rest and clean up, most of us met up again at Annie’s. The dinners there were really cheap ($5), but the food portions were small. As always, you get what you pay for! That didn’t matter. We lubricated ourselves with beer and wine (not goon!) and had fun. After a few hours we were dancing to the music on the table tops. After a while, I pushed Claire and David partway home in a shopping cart we found on the Stuart Highway.

Did anything ever happen between Claire and me? Except for a lot of flirting, not really. I did like her, though! It seems like I always fall for the girls who flirt and tease, but that’s all. It’s the story of my life!