Australia (Part 1b)

February 2001

This unfeasibly large account uses occasional Aussie slang to confirm that they have not yet learnt how to construct complete English words.

It was February 2nd. We had three weeks before we had to be in Sydney to hand over the campervan to “rellies” (relatives) flying in. This would give us enough time to see as much ‘Outback’ as possible. By the time we rolled into Sydney, the campervan would have covered 11,000km since leaving Mildura.

Back in Victoria, it was still very hot and dry. In 37’C temperatures, there was a total fire ban everywhere. On the radio, we heard of a large bush fire being tackled near our route. There were 25 fire engines, 3 helicopters and 3 planes dumping water/sand and 3 observation planes.

From Melbourne, we headed west for the Great Ocean Road which wound through some of the nicest coastal scenery in Australia. A lovely vista around every corner, stunning surf beaches and ancient rainforests (it said in the guide). We checked out ‘Bell’s Beach’, famous as the last scene in the movie “Point Break”, where the anti-hero attempts to surf some of the highest waves in the world. It was as calm as a millpond and not a wave in sight (the final scene was actually shot at a Queensland Beach – but a big Oz surfing competition takes place here). Patrick Swayse would have looked pretty stupid here today.

Roadsigns warning of wildlife had been comically altered. The Kangaroos had been redesigned to look like dinosaurs with spiny backs and large jaws of teeth and the koala bears looked like little devils with horns and webbed feet. The scenery was lovely as we pottered around the narrow twisting roads past the beaches and through the forests.

We reached the precipitous cliff line of Port Campbell National Park, where strong waves have eroded the limestone headlands to create huge isolated rock stacks. These ’12 Apostles’ strung out down the coast are now a major tourist sight. In the late afternoon sun, set near the vertical vivid orange and yellow cliffs, and rising out of the light/dark blue sea, they looked stunning.

There were other geological wonders to see along the coast including ‘London Bridge’ which was a limestone outcrop that had two arches and the sea passing between them. Or rather it did. In 1990, the arch connecting it to the mainland collapsed leaving 2 tourists stranded. They must have been rescued by helicopter. It was the only way to get off.

The following day, we headed north west from the sleepy town of Warrnambool into South Australia. We would drive over 900km today along the coast up to Adelaide and collapse in Port Pirie. Entering South Australia just before Mount Gambier, we had a nervous time when we hit the reserve tank. There was no traffic on the road. We reached a garage on fumes and decided from then on to always keep spare fuel aboard. Our first ‘crow eater’ (Oz nickname for South Australians) was a happy chappy at the garage. The clock went back 30 minutes, but we found this out much later. From here on, Jo and I took turns to drive 200km each for the rest of the trip. Just so we kept awake on the long straight barren stretches.

Heading for Adelaide, it was just miles and miles of desolate dusty flat yellow landscapes along the Young Husband Peninsula with an endless sea of white and pink salt flats. A flock of pelicans flew over. At Kingston, we saw ‘Larry the Lobster’, a 60ft high red fibreglass lobster promoting the town’s most famous product.

We drove straight through Adelaide without stopping (since we would be passing through on the ‘circuit’ later). Port Pirie was a boring industrialised port town and the campsite was full of mosquitoes, midges and ‘blowies’ (large flies that bite – also known as ‘Dunny budgies’ - flies that hang around the outside toilets). We were ready to hit the ‘Dinky Di’ (real) outback. Or “Woop-Woop”.

The Stuart Highway runs between Adelaide and Darwin. It was 800km to Coober Pedy, 1400km to Alice Springs and over 3000km to Darwin on the northern coast. Which gives you an idea just how big this place is. I had visited Alice Springs before from the north, but I had never covered the Stuart Highway from the south.

The ‘road trains’ started to appear. These are enormous 52 metre trucks – with 3 wagons and 36 wheels. Essentially, they are 3 times the size of your average European truck. They are the bloodline for the outback – roaring around with food, fuel and supplies and roaring out with livestock for the markets. They had given me lots of rides on my last visit. We also saw a couple of freight trains on the railway that ran parallel to the highway. They had 90 and 70 carriages.

There is no little traffic on the straight flat roads north of Port Augusta – we counted one vehicle about every 15 minutes. But when the road trains roar past you, you know it. Stones bounce off the windscreen and your vehicle gets blown around. The nice thing is that with so little traffic, all the “truckies” and everyone waves as they pass you coming the opposite direction. We got so used to doing this, it was almost depressing when we finally reached more built up areas and people stopped waving. The other thing that disappears are the radio stations. Outside the large towns, there is silence on the airwaves. There is also no sign of the “Pollies” (police).

The pancake flat land turned bright orange with green scrubland below a bright blue sky. The flat horizon stretched miles into the distance and the road disappeared into a mirage of light as if it was covered in water. We kept the windows down to keep the 35’C temperature at bay. The roadside was littered in kangaroo and sheep carcasses in different states of decay. Occasionally bleached white sets of bones would poke out of the sand. A large wedge tailed eagle sat on the latest dead roo pecking at the entrails, surrounded by huge black crows. Pairs of emus would occasionally appear, but the very shy birds would take off if we stopped to take a photograph.

We passed the vast ‘out of bounds’ Aboriginal reserve of Woomera, which after World War Two was originally a launching site for British experimental rockets. It was desolate. More salt lakes appeared, the size of small cities. Lake Gairdner had small brown hills poking above the salt flats. It was like looking across a layer of white cloud above mountain peaks. Except that the highest hills in this area were only 150m tall.

The roadhouses were few and far between and designed for road trains, so the fuel pumps were a hundred feet apart. They were the only civilisation to be seen until we reached Coober Pedy. The petrol prices are much higher in the outback (up to 20% a litre higher), but you don’t exactly have much choice when the next one is 150-300km away.

Coober Pedy, 850 kms north of Adelaide, in the heart of South Australia’s outback calls itself the ‘Opal capital of the world’. Tourists I’ve met call it the “rectum of the Universe”. It looks like the town planner was “from arsehole to breakfast” (all over the place). It developed as an isolated settlement on the edge of the Stuart Ranges on beds of sand and siltstone surrounded by a stony, treeless desert. The town has virtually no vegetation, just piles of sand everywhere where people have been mining. They only get 5” of rain a year and the ferocious heat (it was 35’C today in the shade!), forces 50% of the population to live ‘underground’ in rock houses where the temperatures hover around 24’C day and night.

Why would anyone live in this godforsaken area? Opals. They were discovered here in 1915, and this area now produces 85% of the world’s supply. The dusty town was awash in opal souvenir shops. The 3,500 population has 45 nationalities – prospectors who came from all over to try their luck and got stuck. There are signs warning you to watch where you walk and drive since there are over 300 tunnels/shafts around the town which have not been refilled. The Coober Pedy Opal festival being promoted for Easter included the ‘Sausage Tossing Championship’ – (3 attempts to hurl a “mystery bag” as far as you can). Mystery bags (or “snags”) are the Oz nickname for sausages since they never know what goes into making them – could be pig, could be koala. They still taste great with a drop of “dead horse” (tomato sauce). One of the tourist attractions here was to join the “postie” (postman) on his daily run of 600km! It was certainly a unique place that grew on us.

Walking past the local forlorn aborigines that hung around the ‘bottle shops’ looking for handouts from thirsty tourists, we took in a view of the town from the ‘Big Winch’ lookout. Then we entered ‘Desert Cave’ – the “World’s Only Underground International Hotel” where there was an excellent display about the town in the tunnels beneath the hotel. We also took in the small, quaint peaceful ‘Catacomb Church’ excavated in the side of a rock in 1977. It was cut out of the sandstone in the shape of a cross.

Just outside Coober Pedy lies the ‘Breakaways Reserve’, golden yellow and white isolated hills in the desert. It was here that they filmed “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome”, “Ground Zero” and most recently “Red Planet”. Val Kilmer was said to have “cracked the shits” and “done his block” (i.e. lost his temper) being stuck in Coober Pedy during filming. What? No McDonald’s Val? “She’ll be right”. It was a spectacular barren landscape. Nearby was the infamous ‘Dog Fence’. A 2-metre high wire barrier was constructed in 1914 across 3 states to protect the sheep country in the south from the native dog – the Dingo. Running over 5,300km, it is said to be the longest fence in the world and much of it is still standing.

Later that “arvo” (afternoon), we rejoined the Stuart Highway and headed for the Northern Territory across the same landscape as south of Coober Pedy. I inadvertently managed to run over a large lizard on the road. My first real ‘road kill’. Birds often sat on the roads, flying off at the last second. Jo managed to hit one of these too. It was unavoidable. The land gradually turned bright red, and there was more green scrubland. We were forced to hole up in a windy campsite at Kulgera Roadhouse as the rain poured down and started to flood the road. The campsite turned into red mud.

We were in the ‘Red Heart’ of Australia. The Northern Territory, a state that sits above South Australia is the least populated area of Australia. Only 1% of the population lives in 20% of the country’s area. 22% of this population is Aborigine. The N.T. also has no speed limits on the roads! You can roar along the empty roads as fast as you dare, but not in a campervan.

The smell of dead cows by the side of the road kept us company as we turned west at Erldunda Roadhouse onto Lassiter Highway and made for Yulara to see Ayers Rock. It was strange to see horses and cows grazing again after all that desert. We passed by Mount Conner, which is the same height as Ayers Rock and marooned in isolation can also look like it when you first see it. Over millions of years, the centre of Australia rose out of a vast, ice-covered inland sea to produce some of the most dramatic landscapes on earth.

When I had last visited Yulara in 1985, it had recently opened as a new tourist complex. Arriving now, it had appeared to grow about 3 times the size with more accommodation, a huge campsite and supermarket, and ten times the number of tourists. It was now called the ‘Ayers Rock Resort’. The packed campsite cost an extortionate £10 a night but had a pool.

We headed straight for the ‘Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park’ up the road. The majestic Uluru (the Aboriginal name for the world famous sight that we call Ayers Rock), 348m high, stood out like a enormous stranded red rocky iceberg in the middle of the desert, surrounded by low lying green scrubland. Geologists believe that the rock goes down 6km into the earth. We are only seeing the tip. It was a wonderful sunny, afternoon, 36’C and perfect for a 10km walk right around the base of the rock. There was noone else around.

The sides of the rock are sheer with large boulders around the base that have fallen/been eroded off the side by wind and water. There were steep dry gullies where waterfalls would infrequently appear heavy rainfall. I had been fortunate to see this on my last visit when it had rained for the first time in 3 months. Many parts of the rock are sacred to the local Aborigine tribe called the Anangu.

We learnt about them at the ‘Cultural Centre’. Tjukurpa is the foundation of Anangu culture providing the rules for behaviour and living together. It is the traditional law that explains existence and guides daily life. White Australia calls it ‘Dreamtime’ – the time of creation to the present day. Tjukurpa is existence itself – past, present and future.

According to the beliefs: the beginning of the world was unformed and featureless (a bit like Tony Blair). Ancestral beings (e.g. giant snakes, Big Bird) emerged from this void and journeyed widely, creating all living species and the features of the desert landscape that we see today. Uluru (Ayers Rock) provides physical evidence of feats performed during the creation period. The details have been passed down over time using story, song, dance and ceremony (since the Aborigine culture has no written word). The Anagu learn about Tjukurpa in stages throughout life. Consequently, the Aboriginal elders are the most revered because they are the most wise and not like we treat old people – worn out and past it (my parents excluded of course!). We learnt about the legends that took place at Uluru and then went to watch the sunset.

Which was ok, but not brilliant. We waited 2 hours for Uluru to display colours from gentle dusky blues and purples to fierce oranges and reds, fading to grey with the last remnants of the day. It was the wrong time of the year for the best colours, but it was better than when it rained at my last sunset here (Doh!). As dusk set in, there was a spectacular lightening storm behind us. The wind picked up and blew a gale beneath the thunderclouds. Back in the campsite, in the dark, with no lights, we had fun trying to light one of their gas BBQs in a gale. It took two of us and a lot of teamwork, but we managed to keep it alight and cook a meal.

We were up before “sparrow’s fart” (dawn) at 5am, but there was already a lot of activity around us. Everyone was heading out to climb Uluru. They have now declared that noone can climb it after 8am, because of the heat. Are we getting soft or what? Every year just because a few tourists have collapsed from heat exhaustion, the rest of the world now has to get up early. I did it at midday last time and survived? What’s the problem?

By the time we drove there and parked up, there were already 100 tourists staggering up the steep climb. It was a brutal start with a 45’ incline – steep enough to have chains to hold onto. It went on and on. We passed everyone on the climb including a young Japanese male tourist on his hands and knees trying to lose his last meal. Honestly, I did try not to laugh.

As you reach the plateau at the top of Uluru, the surface is fluted with wide smooth trenches that you climb down and out of. These have been caused by the strong winds passing over the top. It was like walking across a huge burnt wrinkled crisp. Last time, I had run up the rock (well only the last bits) in 27 minutes. This time it only took 35 mins to walk it! Across the desert we had seen the nearby Olgas range being spotlit by the rising sun and these were our next destination about 55km away.

The Olgas, are now called by their former aboriginal name of ‘Kata Tjutu’ (‘many heads’ – I’d call it ‘many sweating tourists heads’) because it is composed of 36 smooth red, multi-sized domes. The range is 200m taller than Uluru and I’d say are a lot more interesting because of the strange domes that tower above you. We walked the lovely 8 km “Valley of the Winds” trail right in and around the spectacular domes with a couple of lookout points. There is also a shorter ‘Olga Gorge’ walk which I’d done before. I’d also had a scenic flight over the area but the cloudy skies put Jo off the idea today.

We decided to leave the tourists behind and head for King’s Canyon 300km away. Returning back along the Lassiter Highway, we stopped at Curtain Springs Cattle Station for fuel. The property is, get this, 1,028,960 acres (4,162km) in area. One farm in the Outback! It was bigger than Luxembourg. There were bored looking camels available for rides. You will find camel ride available everywhere in the Outback. The pioneers used them as transport and when the trains/roads finally appeared, they were let loose in the desert. Now, Australia exports camels to the Middle East.

We stayed at the Kings Creek Station campsite which had a 147m borehole to get fresh water from under the desert. Water was apparently scarce, but even they had a small swimming pool to cool off in. A large 2-ft long yellow and brown lizard wandered around the van eating thousands of ants with its long pointed tongue. Ants are a real problem when camping in Oz. Some are huge and they give you painful bites, but usually they just crawl everywhere, especially over your feet and get on your nerves. A further problem is that fine red dust gets into your vehicles everywhere.

The majestic King’s Canyon lies in the Watarrka National Park and is now a major tourist attraction (‘Australia’s Grand Canyon’) which I had missed before. While not exactly on the scale of the Grand Canyon, it is a spectacular 300ft red gorge with vertical sides, clusters of domed outcrops on top, and water holes with palm groves below. We climbed up to the rim to do the breathtaking 7 km ‘Kings’ Canyon walk’ right around the edge. The rising sun enhanced the stunning bright red/orange colours. There were heart stopping views from thin overhanging ledges with nothing below. At one point, while Jo chatted to a Dutch family, I stood on the edge and yelled “I can’t take it anymore” and jumped. Jo and family apparently did a doubletake. Had I really jumped? They didn’t know there was a 6-foot ledge below me. They breathed a sigh of relief when my head poked up from above the ledge. I was told that it looked very realistic and scared “the crap out of us”.

The sheer vertical walls were the most spectacular I had seen in Australia. The beehive shaped rock domes above the canyon had a ‘Lost City’ effect of golden brown/red layers of sandstone that were minutely cracked, like the ruins of a lost Aztec city. The local aborigines called them ‘native cats’ that had been squatting here since the Dreamtime. White Ghost gum trees and River Red gum trees broke up the rocky barren red landscape. I descended to the cool, shady ‘Garden of Eden’ waterhole beneath the vertical walls for a relaxing dip while ducks honked around me. I’d rate Kings Canyon as unmissable if you ever come to Alice Springs/Ayers Rock.

Back on the Stuart Highway, we had the Erldunda Roadhouse campsite completely to ourselves. Our own private swimming pool and loud collections of comical galah birds with their grey backs and pink chests, white cockatoos, green parrots, the mohican headstyles of the crested pigeons and inevitable large deathly black crows. But the ants were everywhere.

The Henbury Meteorite Craters were up the road but along a terrible unsurfaced road. We turned back after a couple of kilometres because the road was impassable without 4-wheel drive. The landscape got greener as we headed for Alice Springs. There was obviously water under the desert. We saw a sign to say that we had crossed the ‘Tropic of Capricorn’.

Alice Springs (23,000 pop) lies in the geographical centre of Australia in the middle of nowhere. It takes days to drive there from either north of south. It began life as a telegraph station on the 1872 Adelaide-Darwin telegraph line to link Australia with the rest of the world. Everyone has heard of Alice Springs. It is the epitome of the Australian Outback. What it offered us was a supermarket, Internet and civilisation after days of being self-sufficient.

Since my last visit, when the roads south were still unsealed, it has really turned into a tourist Mecca in the Outback, but still retains a normal small town feel to it. The drunken aborigines are still fighting in the streets as I remember it. This Arrente tribe believes that enormous ancestral caterpillars formed all the topographical features in the area, but so would you if you drank what they did. The restaurants had improved, the shopping malls were bigger and I think it wouldn’t be a bad place to live. Who could resist the sign over the Alice Springs Saloon door which proclaimed ‘Tidy Dress or Bugger Off!’ At our caravan park at Heaviside Gap just outside the town in a gap between the MacDonnell Ranges, we could feed the cute dirt brown rock wallabies which descended from the cliffs at sunset (some with their baby joeys sticking out of their pouches). The campsite even had a free entertainment night – a reptile show, a didgridoo player and folk singer. We must have liked Alice Springs. We stayed 4 days while the temperature hovered around 36’C. The heat made it difficult to sleep at night here. There is plenty to see here and these are a few recommendations:

The ‘Royal Flying Doctor Service HQ’ has a good video, information centre and museum. This is the story of how medicine, aviation and radio were jointly put to work in order to help people who lived or travelled around the Outback. This uniquely Australian venture which was launched in 1928 now covers 7 million sq. km (an area larger than Western Europe), and was a major influence in getting the Outback settled. If someone in the Outback gets ill or hurt themselves hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, the Flying Doctor is the only help. They land on the roads, paddocks, wherever they can. I always thought that it was just one man – a doctor who flew around, but there are actually a pilot, a doctor and at least one nurse in a fully equipped $3 million hospital plane.

One of the most interesting exhibits was the ‘pedal powered radio’ which greatly improved Outback communication in the Outback in the 1930s. You pedalled away as if on a bicycle to power a generator to operate a 2-way radio. This should be reintroduced into modern day gyms so people can yap to their mates while exercising and make mobile phones redundant. It allowed the women in the outback to hold ‘galah sessions’ to swap the gossip and remove the isolation of being the only woman on a farm. It also enabled them to contact the Flying doctor and eventually was used by their children to get lessons from the ‘School of the Air’.

This is another unique Australian venture and worth a visit to their headquarters in Alice Springs. Started in 1951, this is how the children of the Outback get their education. They tune in every weekday for various lessons. The teacher sits in the HQ at Alice Springs and conducts the lessons via radio. They cannot see the teacher and vice versa. The educational material is shipped out to the farms and homework returned. The teachers attempt to visit the kids at least once a year on their farms and 3 times a year, the kids and families spend a week in Alice Springs so they can put faces to voices and meet everyone.

As the ‘world’s largest classroom’ covering an area of 1.3 million km, it is used to improve the social interaction of the children as much as education, because stuck in the middle of nowhere, they may not meet anyone other than their families for long periods. After the age of 12, they have a choice of going to boarding schools in ‘the Alice’ (as locals call it), private tuition on the farm by a governess or correspondence courses. The ‘School of the Air’ also taught Aborigine communities. Gradually, Information Technology was being implemented. 50% of the 300 pupils now have PCs with Internet access and the plan is to give every child a PC. I could see that ‘video conferencing’ would be the next logical step if the Government ever got around to financing it. As with the Flying Doctor Service, the Govt helps with capital costs, but operational costs are all funded by voluntary contributions and fundraising. We sat and watched a radio class for 5 year olds being conducted with an American tour group which brought “a tear to my eye” and was a “heart-warming experience”.

On Saturday afternoon, there was only one thing to do – go to the ‘races’. The racecourse just outside town is maintained freely by aboriginal convicts. Today, they had invited the convicts to watch the races for the first time. “A world’s first” they proclaimed. There were 5 races of short length – the longest was less than a mile because it was so hot. In-between the races, the punters followed/gambled on other races occurring around the country. The race program had some handy hints for betting. ‘Rangatani’ – “still a maiden after 41 attempts”, ‘Dash In Front’ – “Has plenty of early speed, but finds it hard to finish his races off”, ‘Lucky Enz’ – “Not likely to trouble these”.

That evening, the famous ‘Ghan’ train was about to head south for Adelaide. In 1877, they decided to build a railway from Adelaide to Darwin. 50 years later, they had only reached Alice Springs, because they had built the railroad in the wrong place – on a usually dry flood plain that then periodically and inconveniently flooded and washed it away (along with the road). They also built it with two different sized rail gauges. The top speed was 30kph and there was no telling when you’d arrive. In the 1970s they built a new railroad in a better place. The old line was used in ‘Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome’. Near the station was an old pioneer cemetery with a few graves, one of which told of Johann Christian Kadow who in 1903, aged 22 ½ years old had died from “foul air”. I’ve got friends who suffer from the same thing after drinking too much beer.

Just north of the town, lies the original 1872 ‘Telegraph Station’, now restored into an interesting historical site. We had a real ‘ocker’ guide who had many stories about it. It only took 2 years to string a telegraph line between Adelaide and Darwin, which was a remarkable technological achievement in those days, considering the area hadn’t even been explored until the 1860s by William McDonnell Stuart. Alice Springs was one of the 12 ‘repeater’ stations between the two cities. Vast wet cell jamjar batteries boosted the messages – 80 jars made up a battery and they had 3 to maintain. From Darwin, a cable under the sea linked it to Java and across to London, which reduced the time it took messages to pass between London and Australia from 3 months (via ship) to a few hours. They used 36,000 trees to build the telegraph poles to carry the line, but bush fires and termites kept up a continual maintenance problem. They were eventually replaced by iron telegraph poles, which took 10 years to replace the original ones.

The ‘station’ was a self-contained unit, which only got its supplies from the south once a year via camel trains. “If you forgot to order it, you had to wait another year”. The camels carried everything from food to a piano. Water was provided by a waterhole next door – Alice Springs, named after the wife of the man in charge of the whole operation. Here’s a secret: it isn’t actually a spring! A town called Stuart developed a few miles away, but everyone had only heard of Alice Springs. When the station closed down in 1932, it was easier to rename the town Alice Springs.

The ‘Dreamtime Trail’, on the doorstep of the Alice is a lovely day’s journey which extends along the spine of the West MacDonnell Ranges (the ‘West Macs’) with the beautiful low lying hills guiding you on either side through the desert scenery. There are many tourist attractions here – gorges and waterholes, which are always popular. We drove the 130km to the end of the road to work backwards. The Glen Helen Homestead was located by a sandstone gorge near the Finke River. This is apparently the oldest river in the world. For 100 million years, it has pretty much kept to its same river course. How do they know this? The gorge was flooded with a waterhole, which was impassable.

Our main activity today was to walk around the ‘Ormiston Gorge Pound’ walk. On my last visit, I had walked the “Ghost Gum” walk up through the towering gorge, attempted to skirt a waterhole by climbing a steep cliff, got stuck and had to jump 40ft into the water to get down. This time, we tackled the 16km trail that took you around the bowl of mountains nearby and then through the gorge from the other direction. We followed a well-marked dry sandy track around the hills with a fine lookout over the circular bowl of red/orange mountains under clear blue skies. Then crossing rivers via boulders, we entered the gorge along dry rocky riverbeds with enormous red sandstone cliffs on either side. It’s the biggest gorge in the area. But yet again, the waterhole was full. I couldn’t persuade Jo to swim it so we attempted to climb up the sides and go over the top. We were met by terrible spiky grass that punctured our skin, and had to battle through sharp bushes while flies buzzed around in blistering heat of 36’C. We had some water, but it had been a steep climb and we seemed to be getting nowhere. We made a rational decision to go back down and walk all the way back round. By the time we returned after 5 hours of walking and 25km, we were shagged out from the heat and the best of the day had passed. But it had been a good lesson in how you could get lost in the Outback, rapidly dehydrate and noone would ever find you.

On the way back, we took in a few more sights. The ‘Ochre Pits’ have played an important role in traditional Aboriginal life. It can be mixed with water or animal fat to produce a paste or paint and is used to decorate the body during ceremonies or as a healing power. They also use it for their cave paintings. The exposed pit ranged from deep red through to bright yellow and pure white, the colourful layers caused by the presence of iron oxide in varying quantities.

Ellery Creek Big Hole was a beautiful large waterhole, surrounded by red gum trees and towering red cliffs. I had a relaxing dip in the cool water. This is where the locals from Alice come to visit the seaside! Late in the afternoon, we skipped the other sights – Serpentine Gorge, Standley Chasm, Simpson’s Gap. I had seen these before. They are nice enough, but Kings Canyon and Ormiston Gorge take some beating. The Dreamtime Trail is still one of the nicest drives in Australia.

Tennant Creek lies 500km north of Alice Springs. En route, as road trains thundered past, and tall red termite nests appeared by the roadside, we visited a few sights. Barrow Creek Roadhouse was originally another of the telegraph stations, but I had memories of arriving here at 2.30am one night in 1985 on a bus with Dawn. She had gone inside the bar to get a cup of tea and come out with the offer of a job! When she had walked in, the truckies and locals had given her a round of applause, thinking she was the new barmaid/waitress. She got talking to the owner and promised to return after we had toured the ‘Top End’. She spent 2 months in this barren place but it was an experience. I hadn’t even bothered getting off the bus. The bar was one of those places where everyone pinned messages, trinkets and crap to the walls. The place was covered in trivia.

We also passed through Wycliffe Well, ‘the UFO Centre of Australia’ with a picture of an alien and “Earthlings Welcome”. Apparently there have been more sightings of UFOs here than anywhere else in Oz. But I’d put it down to the drinking, since the roadhouse offers ‘the largest range of beers in Australia’. After all, there was nothing else to do in this place.

The ‘Devil’s Marbles’ up the road were a weird and wonderful collection of gigantic orange coloured rounded boulders, many of which are precariously balanced on top of one another. They were fashioned out of granite masses, which had 3 sets of joint planes at right angles to one another. These were eroded into mass rectangular joints 3-7m wide. The rock flaked away like an ‘onion peeling’ over millions of years to gradually round the corners to the extent that most of the boulders are now egg shaped or spherical. It was a remarkable sight, and they were very difficult to climb. The aborigines believe that they are the fossilised eggs of the Rainbow Serpent. They have always used it as a water supply. There is a special frog that hangs around here. When it realises that the water level is going down and a drought is about to start, it fills itself up with water and burrows under the sand, gradually releasing the water into its body over a period of months until it rains again. It is called the “Water Absorbing Frog”. Not a lot of people know that.

Tennant Creek (3,800 pop) was recently voted the “friendliest town in Australia” and we found the locals very chatty. It is an old gold mining town in the ‘Golden Heart’ of the Northern Territory. Legend has it that it was first settled in the early 1930s when a beer wagon broke down and the drivers decided to hole up and consume the freight until they were rescued, but the real story is just as strange. Two prospectors teamed up and discovered gold. Not very remarkable except that one was a one eyed man called Jack Noble and the other a blind man called William Weaber. Their discovery led to Australia’s last gold rush town and the biggest open cut gold mine in the country (34 tonnes in 45 years) until it ceased in 1985. New gold mines are still being discovered. We visited ‘Noble’s Nob’ (oo-er) to see the remains of the open cast mine – originally tunnels which had collapsed. Tennant Creek also had one of the original Telegraph Stations just outside town which, unlike Alice Springs had not yet been restored and was just a deserted boarded up set of buildings surrounded by termite nests and butterflies. It was like stepping back in time to witness relatively untouched history. After its construction in 1872, it had been the only civilisation for travellers for hundreds of miles. The first man to cycle across Australia in 1897 stopped here to get his bicycle repaired by the blacksmith. I had no idea that someone cycled so far so early on. How did he do it without roads?

Just north of Tennant Creek lies ‘Three Ways”, a 3-way road junction. We were coming from the south. We had two choices – continue north to Katherine 600km away, or turn right for Queensland, a mere 450km. With our time schedule we had to turn right, but we would be back this way to turn north on the second phase of the Great Aussie Experience.

We followed the endlessly flat Barkly Highway across the endlessly flat savannah cattle country of the Barkly Tablelands. It is essentially the old lakebed of the ancient inland sea which once filled Australia. Tall steel windmills would sprout up to pump up water via boreholes from the Great Artesian Basin. This basin provides the lifeblood for all Outback settlements. The statistics are phenomenal: It covers an area underground of 1,711,000 km (squared) and drops to a depth of 3000m. They estimate 8,700 million megalitres of store water (can anyone tell me what is a megalitre – a million x a million litres?). The age of the water is anything up to 2 million years old. The average temperature of the water is 30-50’C. The Maximum temp is 100’C. Every town and farm needs a borehole to access it and some go down 3000ft.

There was little to see across the endless flat horizon. Large lizards scuttled across the road, large birds of prey swooped down and vast road trains splattered rocks against the windscreen. There was only one roadhouse in 460km, but we were carrying extra fuel just in case. The Tennant Creek Visitors Centre had also warned us about the road possibly flooding. “Make sure you have food, water, books and mossie repellent”. It had flooded 2 weeks before and traffic was stranded for days. Tropical storms were already battering the area immediately to the north, cutting off towns and the creeks would soon fill and flood the only road going to Queensland. We expected the worse, especially when it began to rain, but we got through. Road crews were repairing some parts of the road which had been washed away.

I was sorry to be leaving the Northern Territory. It is my favourite state, but I’d be back. 8,000 km after leaving Mildura, Victoria, we crossed into Queensland at Camerool, the former droving capital of NW Australia. It falls within the 41,000 sq. km ‘town limits’ of Mt Isa, 186km away and the road from here to there is called the ‘longest main street in the world’. Consequently, Mt Isa claims to be a town larger than Switzerland. It may have been a main street, but after floods, its condition was terrible – often an unsurfaced single track where road trains would force us off the road. There was no point playing ‘chicken’ with these monsters. We passed the remains of a large bush fire, which had scorched the earth and just left burnt bushes everywhere. In the distance, we saw another in progress. Massive plumes of black smoke filled the sky. At first we thought an aeroplane had crashed and was burning out of control.

As we approached Mt Isa we could see the tall 270m smoke stack from the massive mining operation which dominates the town of 24,000 people with 50 nationalities. It was the largest town we’d come across since Alice Springs. We were now in the state of people known as the ‘Banana Benders’. I’d passed through here before, but never stopped and so we spent a couple of days taking in the sights.

Mt Isa owes its existence to the mighty Mount Isa Mine (MIM) which is the world’s biggest single producer of silver (5th) and lead (3rd) and 10th amongst the top producers of copper and zinc. It is one of the few places in the world where all 4 minerals are found in close proximity. The minerals were discovered by chance in 1923 when a prospector’s horse called ‘Hard Times’ was thirsty and headed for a stream.

As Australia’s largest underground mine it produces 11 million tons of ore a year. 35,000 tons of rocks are processed every 24 hours. The actual mine is 5-km long, 1.2 km wide with 32 levels that drop to 1.6km below the earth’s surface. As they dig deeper (and they intend to go down to 48 levels), the temperatures increase. At Level 32 in the Copper Mine, the temperature down there is 60’C. Vast air conditioning systems have to be put into place to cool it down to 30’C. There is 900 km of tunnels under the ground and they have just constructed a 1 in 7 road so that they can now drive down into the mine. They have also recently completed a sulphuric acid plant to utilise one of the waste products from copper smelting which produces 3000 tons of the stuff every day to be used in agricultural fertilisers. Every morning at 8am and evening at 8pm, when the shifts change, the mine has a “firing”. This is where they blow up the next section of rock underground to be processed that shift. It is a massive industrial conglomerate that never closes.

We took in both tours. The first was a ‘surface tour’ around the complex by minibus with an ex-miner from South Africa, where we were taken past the various processes – copper smelting, lead smelting and the two main mine heads (big enough to take vehicles down). We also saw the vast ice cream cornet shaped air conditioners (14 sets of them strung along the surface – half pumping air in, half removing the old air), slag heaps, and workshops with the huge underground vehicles getting maintained. In the middle of the site was an enormous 160m deep hole, a former open cut mine, which was being filled with slag. It would take years. It was very informative tour and I realised that I knew nothing about the modern day mining industry. They were very safety conscious. There were emergency showers for anyone who got burnt in the red-hot smelting processes. We saw the red hot, freshly processed slabs of lead/silver coming out of the furnaces. The copper ore is transported 900km to the port at Townsville, and shipped direct to customers, as is the lead silver bullion which is shipped to the UK to be refined.

The following day, we got to do the ‘underground tour’. Here, we had to dress up in white boiler suits, hard hats with ear protectors and lamps with batteries strapped off the belts, along with steel capped boots, woollen socks, gloves and eye protectors, ID badges and an oxygen respirator in case of an emergency. And it was 35’C outside! There were two safety videos to watch before we descended with another ex-miner from Denmark, Pallie, who seemed to love his new job. We boarded the Lead mining ‘cage’ and dropped down to Level 15, 738m underground at 60kph. It was like entering the lair of a James Bond villain.

Out in a tunnel, we boarded an open backed, 4-wheel drive, Toyota pickup which would be used for the tour. It was diesel powered but fitted with catalytic converters. For the next two hours, we roared around a maze of dark grey tunnels to explore what was going on. The drilled tunnels had cables running everywhere and vast pipes carrying the air around. They were generally dry, but occasionally we drove through vast puddles of water. There was little lighting and we relied on our headlamps when getting out to explore.

We drove down to Level 19 – the main operational level about a kilometre underground, where there is a canteen, and a massive kilometre long workshop assembly area. They bring the equipment and vehicles down in pieces and assemble them underground where they stay until they wear out. Some of this drilling equipment was huge with 6ft high tires – like something out of the “Thunderbirds” TV Series.

We visited a ‘Tele-Mucker’. After the ‘firing’, the rock is collected from the new tunnels by a large bucket dumper by remote control. This guy sat in a little unit with two TV screens and operated the dumper by joystick. To guide him, there were two close circuit TV cameras on the dumper. It would go into the tunnel, pick up 15 tons of rock at one go and bring it out. The rock was then dropped down a shaft into railroad buckets to be shuttled to a crusher and reduced to the size of footballs and brought up to the surface to be processed. He reckoned he could do 100-120 dumps every 12-hour shift.

We saw one of these shafts getting drilled through 180m of rock between two levels. There are many ‘sublevels’ between the main ones and they were picking out lead ore from between the levels. Roof reinforcement is essential at every level and we watched one man, insert a large 6-ft rod into a machine with a steel plate at one end and superglue at the other. Another man would then control the machine to steer the rod into a previously drilled hole in the roof of the tunnel. It would be inserted, the superglue bind it and then the machine hammered in the rod until the steel plate was crushed into the rock. Nice loud work.

It was a strange underground world that few people see. Obviously, as tourists we were kept away from the dangerous main action far below, but it was unique in that it was operational, not just an old mine restored for tourist and consequently very illuminating. Pallie would drive around looking for activities to show us, but it was just fun roaring around in the dark. Back on the surface, our eyes took a while to get accustomed to the bright sunshine.

Mt Isa’s motto is “You’re not a real Aussie until you’ve been to the Isa” and I’d rate the place as unmissable if you are touring northern Queensland. Before we left town, Jo went to see a doctor. She had been bitten around her ankle by insects somewhere in the Outback and her bites had gone septic, oozing out pus (yuck!) for the past few days. The doctor prescribed antibiotics and a new travelling partner. From here to Sydney it was a case of travelling through the interior of Queensland and New South Wales and just coming across strange tourist attractions.

We followed the Matilda Highway, passing through Cloncurry across completely flat cattle grazing land with the occasional herd darting away from the road. We made for McKinley for the night which, with a population of 30, would be ignored, except that it’s pub was used as the ‘Walkabout Creek Hotel’ in the ‘Crocodile Dundee’ movie. Sure enough, it was the same place. We intended to stay at a campsite here and ‘blow the froth off a few’, but the campsite was closed and we pushed on another 75km to the nearest one at Kynuna Roadhouse.

Boy, was this place grim. There were storm clouds and lightening strikes all around us as we pulled into an empty dusty area by the side of the road while road trains thundered past all night. The wind blew the dust everywhere. At least we had power and the new experience of frogs in the toilet! I had popped in around dusk, as you do, to lose my lunch, but couldn’t find the light switch. No matter. Imagine my surprise when I got up, flushed the toilet and 2 frogs jumped out of the bowl onto the seat. I nearly died! It was called the ‘Never Never Campsite’, as in, I’ll never never stay here again.

The town of Winton sells itself on being the home of the ‘Waltzing Matilda’ song. This is Australia’s unofficial National Anthem (it was even sung at the start of the 2000 Olympics). ‘Banjo’ Paterson , the composer, supposedly wrote the lyrics by a nearby waterhole and it was first performed in Winton in 1895. It tells of the “jolly swagman” (drifter) by the “billabong” (Waterhole) and his subsequent death during the local sheep shearing strikes. The ‘Waltzing Matilda Centre’ told the story.

We saw a sign saying ‘Muttaburrasaurus Byway’. This was an unsealed 183km track to Lake Quarry. If you bothered to tackle it, you would find the world’s only known site of a dinosaur stampede! Hundreds of footprints captured in rock. How do they know this?

The tidy, splendid and spacious town of Longreach was famous for three things. All the streets are named after birds. It is. I checked the street map! The original Quantas Hanger from 1922 is also here, when a little known aircraft company (standing for ‘Queensland and Northern Territory Air Service’), started business flying around the Outback and developed into one of the world’s largest airlines. But the main site was the excellent ‘Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame’. This well presented, informative, multimedia driven exhibition attempted to capture the story of the Australian Outback, its traditions, horse culture, stockmen, rough riders and was an homage to the original pioneers. It was one of the most interesting places I’ve ever visited in Australia. Good enough to make two visits over two days. Some of the highlights were the mini-movies of outback plagues (rabbits, mice and locusts), and a “talking drover’. A mannequin doll with a blank white head, had a film of a talking face superimposed as if he was telling stories while sitting around the fire at night. It was very realistic. No matter how many times I walked around the 4 levels, I kept finding something new. The photographs everywhere were superb. Very recommended.

After Longreach, we’d pass through quiet undisturbed hamlets, settled around the 1860s, all with famous historical events, but now left to themselves. They all deserved a proper exploration, but we just didn’t have the time. One of the things I like about these small places is the old Victorian architecture – brightly painted ornate iron grills, wooden verandas and balconies. They haven’t changed since construction. They are often like the old Wild West towns you see in movies without the dirt road. Many of the houses in outback Queensland were all built on blocks of wood, so that air could circulate under the house to cool it down. Green painted corrugated iron is the most common roof material everywhere. It was cheap and easy to transport into the Outback but does not exactly keep the house cool.

Ilfracombe was in the Guinness book of records. In 1892, it had the largest number of sheep on a single station (460,000). It also started the first motorised mail service in Australia in 1910. Barcaldine (‘Barcy’) was the centre of the shearers strike in 1891, from which developed a political party that is now the modern day National Party. ‘The Australian Workers Heritage Centre’ told the story. At Blackall, we saw the sculpture of a shearer called Jackie Howe, who in 1892, hand sheared 321 sheep in 7 hours 40 mins. A record that was to stand until 1950 when mechanised shears were used to beat it. It was a lovely statue of him grappling with a large Marino sheep, all 4 legs off the floor. Tambo’s claim to fame was the locally produced ‘Tambo Teddies’ from sheep’s wool. There was even a “Caution: Teddies Crossing” sign on the main street. Augathella had no claim to fame other than being the “Home of the Meat Ant” (what the hell is one of those?).

The modest sized Mitchell had an Artesian Spa, where you could wallow in hot water coming straight up from the Artesian Basin and it even offered a “free camp site”. We didn’t believe it, but sure enough, we were given our own en-suite bathroom on the edge of town. The piping hot water smelt of sulphur, but we weren’t complaining. Loud kookaburra birds woke us up in the morning. There was even an 18 hole sand golf course ($3 green fees and $1 an hour club hire). I liked Mitchell. For a little place in the middle of nowhere, it had made an attempt to attract tourists and keep them amused. They even had a cheap community Internet café, the first we’d seen since Alice Springs. I’d go back there just to take advantage of all the facilities we never had time to use.

The Matilda Highway got bumpier, the road warping in the heat. We crossed over endless creeks with names like ‘Dingo Creek’, ‘Packsaddle Creek’, ‘Christmas Creek’ etc. Roma, the “Cradle of the Australian gas/oil industry” boasted having the ‘Most Expensive Goat Race in Australia”. This Easter, during their festival, small one seater buggies would be harnessed to local goats and whipped down the road as fast as possible for big money. We had missed the “Melon Festival” (oo-er) at Chincilla yesterday. From here on, the traffic started to build up. We no longer had miles of roads to ourselves. Hamlets, towns and vehicles appeared every few minutes and the drivers stopped waving. It was the edge of the Queensland Outback and a return to Australian suburbia.

We holed up in Dalby to have the van serviced. An unremarkable, but friendly town, my father had passed through here on his travels and discovered a park named after him. The ‘Tom Jack Park’. Well it wasn’t named after him, but it made for a good Kodak moment. We discovered a really cheap second hand bookshop here and pillaged it. I also finished my ‘slab’ of ‘Thirsty Dog’ Beer. Which was nice. Toowoomba, apart from having a great name (sounds like a Hippo taking a dump), was full of parks. I read that there was a controversy going on. One of their football stands is called the “Brown Nigger Stand” which has been deemed offensive to the Aborigines. I wonder why?

We were southwest of Brisbane near the Queensland/NSW border when we joined the New England Highway. The final journey to Sydney would be across the Darling Downs along the Great Dividing Range, and past some of the most fertile agricultural land in Oz. We stopped in Warwick, which looked like the English Warwick, in an Aussified way (except that they didn’t have a bloody great 12th Century castle). The ‘New England’ countryside certainly looked English. An undulating country road took us through green hilly pastures full of horses grazing, and modest forested national parks on the larger hills. It was very picturesque and would have been used as a Sunday drive in England.

The New South Wales section of the Highway had various towns with dubious claims to fame. The fruit growing town of Stanthorpe claims to be one of the coldest places in Australia and they even have a ‘Brass Monkey Festival’ to publicise it. Tenterfield is called the ‘Birthplace of our Nation’ because in 1889, Sir Henry Parks, a politician, made the first impassioned speech for the Federation of Australia, which finally occurred in 1901. We visited the Tenterfield Saddler (est. 1870) and learnt something new. There was a very popular folk song called, you guessed it, ‘The Tenterfield Saddler’, written by Peter Allen in 1975 about this place which was a worldwide best seller. It was the story of his grandfather who’d run the place for 50 years. We had never heard of him or the song. Chatty Carol, looking after the place, played it to us and told us some of the stories.

En route to Armidale as we crossed the highest point of the road at 1100m, we did a double take. Crossing the road appeared to be a tortoise. No way! We went back to find an 8” turtle pottering across the tarmac with its little head poking out. What was a turtle doing on top of a hill, miles from the nearest water? I had to make a decision. Should I run him over for extra unique road kill points or escort it to the other side? What do you think?

Once the shell had dried out, I put it on the dashboard… no I’m only kidding. Armidale, at 1000m claims to be Australia’s highest city. It was a modern, non-descript place to stay but a less than a day’s journey from Sydney. At Uralla, we entered ‘Thunderbolt’ country. His real name was the very ordinary Fred Ward, but Thunderbolt sounded sexier. He was an infamous bushranger who roamed and robbed around this area in the 1860s and was finally killed by the police in 1870. There was a fine statue of him on his horse. Tamworth, the “Country Music Capital of Australia” (yee-hah!) had a naff 12m fibreglass ‘Golden Guitar’, but was another character-less town. Do you realise that if you play country music backwards you get your wife back, your house back, your dog back etc? Scone was the “Horse Capital of Australia” with 40 extensive studs around the area and hundreds of horses grazing in paddocks.

The Pacific Highway took us the final 150km into Sydney. It felt strange to drive along motorways again with the traffic roaring past. 11,000km after starting, we had completed the first stage of the trip. Most of the 3-week trip since Tasmania had been new which made it very enjoyable. The Outback is far more interesting to me than the run of the mill, all too familiar, Australian cities. The pace is slower, the people friendlier with time to chat, the scenery remarkable, the traffic non-existent.

Despite the 16-year absence, much of Sydney looked very familiar to me. There had been a few changes: the Darling Harbour complex had replaced old industrial wastelands, there was now a monorail circuit, Internet cafes were everywhere and everyone talked loudly into mobile phones. None of these were here in 1985. Sydney was the first real ‘Western’ city I’d seen since leaving London 16 months ago, and the hustle and bustle of commuters, cars and endless traffic lights was a bit of a cultural shock. It was also full of tourists basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Sydney was now bragging that it was the world’s third most expensive city, but I don’t believe it.

It is a sprawling giant of a city. 4 million people spread over an area of 70km by 55km. But apart from the spectacular harbour scenery with the giant towering bridge, the sparkling Opera House and the 24 varied and beautiful beaches dotted along the coastline, it was just another city to me. I had lived here, seen everything before and it was a little like déjà vu. Except that the streets were now full of Chinese people who had moved into town en masse since the 1980’s, the women seemed to be a lot more attractive than I remembered and homeless people/beggars were now present.

We had a few reasons to be here. My Scottish relatives Ann & Iain, were flying in from New Zealand on their world trip to take over the campervan for three weeks. This meant we had to find something to do, and leaving the country seemed the most interesting option. We also had to visit some friends and catch up with the Internet accounts.

After picking them up at Sydney Airport (only 20 mins from the centre), I spent a day with them at the harbourside, where we joined the throng of tourists and did a tour of the Sydney Opera House. I had never been inside before, having rather taken it for granted. An enthusiastic lady gave us a good tour, and I noticed that they are still trying to play down the embarrassing fact, that they actually sacked the Danish architect who provided them with one of the most famous and inspiring buildings in the world. The project and budget overran and a new Government gave him the boot and got a couple of Aussies to complete it. It was finished in 1973 after 14 years of political struggle and grave doubts about the outcome.

Ironically, it was never completed as the Dane planned. They scrapped half of the theatres/facilities that were originally designed and so for all their smugness about its greatness, they have a building finished by a committee and accountants. Justifiably, the Dane never talked to or visited Australia again. It was a little like a 60’s version of the Millennium Dome saga in London. Inside, what was architecturally technically brilliant for the 60’s, now looks rather ugly. Boring concrete stairways and pavilions, but the theatres are lovely, with wooden interiors and splendid acoustics. The exterior however, has never lost its brilliance with the white shining tiles of the seven spheres. I call them the “Nuns in a scrum”.

After the campervan had headed off with new owners, we moved into a Backpacker’s Hostel on the edge of seedy King’s Cross for a week. The only thing to have changed was the price. It had cost me $5 a night back in 1984. Now it cost $26. It was strange to be back in one of these places, full of innocent youth abroad on their first great adventure, but we had our own room, could cook and it was central. Ironically, it was one of the only places we have stayed anywhere on this trip without a fan and the humidity in town that week was stifling. I spent half of the week on the internet typing up those huge accounts of Tasmania and the Outback that you probably took one look at and deleted as well as updating my internet homepage.

For our “Escape From Oz” plans, we could choose from various Pacific Islands, but I had already visited Fiji twice (the current Ozzie favourite), and we found, instead, an excellent deal to Vanuatu. A 2 for 1 priced flight and a week’s free accommodation at a resort, after which we tacked some extra days to keep us out of Australia for 2 weeks. My parents had visited Vanuatu and loved it.

The Darling Harbour complex was now a tourist Mecca of shops, restaurants, monorail and the Maritime Museum with an impressive display outside on the water of an old clipper ship, a battleship and a submarine. The Northern Territory Tourist Board had a huge promotional office which included a free music show. A world class didgerdoo player and piano player, played their own compositions live to a slide show of the N.T’s most famous sights (Ayers Rock etc). We also got a display of ‘didge’ playing techniques and background. It was an excellent 30-minute show and very entertaining. Other tourist boards should try the same kind of thing. Paddy’s Market nearby had also turned into a tourist attraction but at least they sold cheap kangaroo scrotum money pouches (get them now before they become fashionable). Finally, I bought a boomerang. Bet it doesn't work.

On the entertainment front, we met up with Murray and Henry one night in a Yuppie bar. We had met them at Da Trang in Vietnam last August, and had spent an infamous day on the “all-you-can-drink” boat which ended up with screams of ‘Ho Chi Min Number One’ (see Vietnam account for the sorry details). Henry had just returned from a trip around South America with his girlfriend and terrible accounts of 3-day bus rides. “Don’t even think about going to Paraguay”. I can’t wait. Murray also told us that a cyclone was about to hit Vanuatu. Thanks Murray. The plague of natural disasters that has followed us around the world seemed to be keeping up.

We also spent an evening with Linda (my old Adelaide flatmate) who was slumming it at her sister’s house. Lia and her (now) husband, Peter had lived in London for a couple of years in 1989 and I had seen a lot of them there. I had last seen Linda when she flew out to London in 1992 to accompany me on a 3-week trip to Russia, which was just opening up. We had flown, with another friend of mine, to Moscow, then up through Lithuania (to visit my relatives), Latvia and Estonia (so Linda could visit her relatives). Mark and I sailed to Helsinki, Finland and then rejoined Linda in St Petersburg. It was a great adventure with many memories. Now Lia was married to Peter, with two children. Linda had decided to leave Adelaide and come and work in Sydney for a change. Over the evening, the champagne and wine flowed as did all the old memories as well as 10 years of catching up and I left rather the worse for wear (as you do).

By the end of the week, we were glad to be leaving. Mardi Gras was about to start – the gay/lesbian festival that has become one of Sydney’s major tourist attractions. Once upon a time, Monty Python used to joke about the Australian motto of “Nah Poofters!”, but times have changed. We were staying a few blocks from Oxford Street in Paddington where it all takes place, and the streets gradually filled up with shaven-headed, handlebar-moustached 40 something men and an attitude of “Bend Over I’ll Drive”. They even painted the white road lines pink. I’m sure it is a great spectacle but it wasn’t my scene. I’d rather see the real thing in Brazil, get mugged into the bargain and be able to sit down in the morning.

Astonishing Australian Road kill Statistics (to date):

Kangeroos - 72, Possums - 29, Unrecognised Birds - 18, Rabbits - 15, Tasmanian Devils - 10, Wallabies - 9, Cows – 8, Lizards – 5, Sheep - 4, Foxes - 4, Wombats - 2, Echidnas - 2, Feral Cats - 2, Galah - 2, Rats - 2, Lamb -1, Cat - 1, Dog -1, Pedemelon - 1, Snake - 1, Dingo - 1, Cockatoo - 1, Rook -1, Magpie - 1, Bird of Prey - 1. (includes 1 lizard and 1 bird which we unfortunately flattened)

Not included: Hundreds of UFO’s (‘unidentified flattened objects’) and 1 Turtle on road kill probation.

Costs in Australia for 51 days in British Pounds Sterling)

Travel - £808.70 (inc £156.15 return ferry to Tasmania with campervan, £279.56 return flight to Vanuatu (inc accom) and £299.55 on petrol for van
Accommodation - £224.67
Food - £199.91
Other - £204.25
Total - £1437.53
Grand Total - £8754.78