In and Out of the Outback
Trip Start
Feb 13, 2008
1
10
15
Trip End
Jun 17, 2008
Adelaide,
Australia
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
So, it's been a little while since my last post, and hopefully I haven't offended anyone too much with those political jokes. If so, I hope enough time has passed that you've forgotten about them or forgiven me. I'm in Adelaide in the state of South Australia, and my trip is now more than halfway over. I realize that I haven't made a post since Tasmania, so I'll start my update from there.
I didn't find anyone to share my rental car with, so I continued my trip alone. I extended my rental period for two extra days and decided to visit Cradle Mountain - Lake St. Clair National Park. The top part is called Cradle Mountain because one of the mountains looks like the silhouette of a baby sleeping in a cradle. I didn't initially plan on visiting the park, but the manager at the Launceston hostel told me that within an hour hike I could walk through five distinct types of forest and breathe in a really healthy oxygen cocktail from those various forests. It was definitely a nice hike and I could see some different types of forests, but I don't feel any healthier. Afterwards, I drove another few hours to the town of Queenstown. I didn't have any information on Queenstown but I eventually found a motel/hostel. I met a pretty crazy (and drunk) Australian in the kitchen who kept talking to me even though I didn't want to talk to him that much. I also met some other travelers, one of whom is also a Couchsurfer. Since the place and the people were so shady there, we ended up talking to each other for a while. The next day I continued driving to the Lake St. Clair side of the national park, but I didn't spend too much time there. I was pretty intent on returning to Hobart. Before my flight the next day, I went to an outdoor market in Hobart called the Salamanca Market. It was just decent, but the thing that made it nice was the abundance of live music acts. A Chilean folk band ended up stealing the show and attracting huge crowds with their South American folk songs.
That afternoon, I arrived in Melbourne and tried walking around randomly until I found a hostel, but after a while I got tired of lugging all my stuff around and found one online. On my first full day, I decided to join an organized hostel outing to an Australian rules football game. Melbourne is the sports capital of Australia, and they particularly love "footy" (Aussie rules football). The stadium seated about 100,000 and was huge, but the best thing about it was that it was just a 10-15 minute walk from downtown. Two local teams played and the atmosphere was pretty great. The next day I changed hostels and met a pair of British girls who were really into soccer. I joined them that night to watch two English Premier League soccer games, and we stayed up until 3:30am watching Manchester United vs. Arsenal. For the next few days, I explored different sights in the city - including the Queen Victoria Outdoor Market, the Shrine of Remembrance (war memorial), National Sports Museum, and a videogame exhibition at a museum called the Australian Center for Moving Image. The videogame exhibition was cool because it traced the history of videogames and had a ton of games available for playing, from old-school stuff like Pong to recent stuff like the Nintendo Wii. I think the exhibition was also featured in museums in the US and Europe. I met two Couchsurfers for drinks on my last night, which was pretty interesting because it was three strangers sitting at a table who've never met. It was pretty good until the local Couchsurfer got worked up over American politics, which seems to be a surprisingly hot topic among Aussies, Kiwis, and Britons. I guess it's understandable, since a lot of America's actions have significant influence for the course of many other countries.
Next, I flew to Alice Springs in the center of Australia. Even as the plane was getting ready to land, I could see that this was the outback. It was really dry and dusty-looking, and I was surprised at how many trees were able to grow in this environment. This was also the first time I saw more than a few Aborigines. I tried to catch some last-minute one-way rental car deals, but my efforts were fruitless and I ended up spending a few days hanging around and not seeing much. I spent a good deal of time with some Korean travelers, and to my surprise they thought my Korean was pretty decent. I would've preferred to get a rental car special, but when I couldn't get one I eventually shelled out the money to take a bus to Uluru (aka Ayer's Rock), a huge rock in the middle of the outback and a sacred site to the Aborigines. Although I'm glad I saw it, it wasn't quite worth the price I paid. I guess you win some and lose some, plus it's hard to leave Alice Springs without seeing the quintessential feature of central Australia.
I was about to book a bus ticket south to Adelaide on Monday, but late Sunday night a flyer caught my eye on the hostel noticeboard. Someone was driving a car from Alice Springs to Adelaide and wanted to share the ride and petrol costs. It said she was leaving "earlyish" the next day, so I called at 7:30am and we were on the road by 8 o'clock. It was an Australian woman who was moving back to Adelaide from Darwin (in the north central region of Australia), and we got along pretty well. Over two days, we drove 900 miles and about 18 hours south through the outback toward Adelaide (hence the quote at the beginning of this entry). We took a lot of wacky pictures and saw some cool sights; my travel mate Heidi is pretty good at coming up with spontaneous poses for pictures. Central Australia is known as the Red Center, which is pretty accurate since the dirt and sand ranges from a deep red to a strong orange. Along the way, there were tons of dead kangaroos which became roadkill. In fact, kangaroos get hit so often that the steel bars on the front of some SUV's (which in the U.S. are called brush guards) are called 'roo bars. The landscape out there is pretty incredible - it range from tree- and shrub-covered sand dunes to flat open spaces with sparse clumps of yellow grass. That was some remote territory, which is great to see and drive through. We stopped in Coober Pedy for the night, which is an opal mining town. All around the town, there are mounds of dirt that have been dug out to search for opal, and apparently visitors have walked through the area and fallen into deep holes. Coober is also famous because many buildings have been built into the cavities of old mines, so my room in the hostel was about 20-30 feet underground with solid stone walls. It was a little freaky at first, but I got used to it. The town also has one of the top ten unique golf courses in the world, which I visited. Someone basically built a few tee boxes in the desert and made putting greens from topsoil. There isn't any grass at all here, but apparently its uniqueness attracts golfers from all over the place. The second day (today) we continued driving and finally arrived in Adelaide about ten hours later.
I realized a long time ago that being in a big city alone is tough - it's a lot harder to meet people randomly. So far, about half my Australia trip has been centered around Sydney and Melbourne, which are really big cities and thus made my experience lonely at times. Also, my Couchsurfing experiences thus far have been ok but not great. However, I'm looking forward to the next 3-4 weeks because I won't be in a big city for a while and I still have faith in Couchsurfing. I'm in Adelaide which is a nice-sized city, and what makes it better is that I'm planning to meet my road trip mate again while I'm here. After that, I'll be taking the Indian Pacific train to Perth, on the west coast. The train is called the Indian Pacific because you can ride it from Sydney on the Pacific Coast to Perth on the coast of the Indian Ocean, or vice versa. I'm hopping on in the middle, so the trip will be about 36 hours. I have two Couchsurfers that I'm planning to meet in Perth, so hopefully those two experiences will be better than the first two.
The west coast is a lot less-touristed than the east coast and should be good fun. Talk to you soon, mates!
Comments
Awesome!
keep rocking! have you heard blu king brown?