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Anyway, the plan was to travel to India, from the furthest away corner of Australia, using surface transport as much as possible and only flying when it was unavoidable. After India, i intended to travel on to Europe the same way. This was a journey i'd been wanting to do for years. I've done so much flying between Australia and Britain - most of it over approximately that route - and i was sick of looking down out of the aircraft window at all the places i wanted to see at ground level. I'd flown over those places eight times - and once round the other way, over the atlantic and the pacific. That's a total distance of close to two hundred thousand kilometres in the air! I felt very strongly that that was enough flying for one lifetime. Now it was time to travel at ground level.
To call it a plan is misleading really. It was more like a vague goal. There was an element of prediction in it too. The closest i can ever come to what most people call "planning" is a fairly accurate prediction of the future, based entirely on intuition. sometimes i'm close. Sometimes i'm way off. But one thing's for certain, i never really know where i'm going till i get there. And sometimes even then i'm not too sure!
The journey began at Wyndham, which is in the hills near the far south coast of New South Wales, the very furthest south eastern corner of Australia, on the new moon at the beginning of February. That's a fairly arbitrary starting point really, as it could just as easily be said to have begun in Melbourne in January. Or in Brisbane last November, in Cairns last July, Melbourne last May, Delhi last January, London the previous December, Wyndham the September before. Or even in Sydney in late 1988, which was when i really began travelling. Since then, i've rarely spent more than a few weeks in the same place. And, more often than not, two weeks has been my maximum. However, as i came to realise gradually over the next few months, this particular journey was really the completion of one i'd started nine years before, in November 1985, when i left London to live in Australia.
Anyway, at the time, this particular leg of that very long voyage began for me at Wyndham at new moon on the 2nd of February, 1995. New moon is a good time to start such a journey and every significant leg of it over the next few months began on a new moon. I've been aware of the concept that it's good to start new things on the new moon for some years now, and it's always seemed reasonable to me. However, until that point, i'd never found myself in a position where i was able to, or even where i particularly wanted to fall into step with that particular natural rhythm. The rhythm of the tides, the rains and - very likely - the rhythm of the winds. But now, suddenly, it more or less just happened. It was convenient, but it was also a conscious decision. And from the way things worked out over the next few months, i realized it was one of the smartest decisions i've ever made in my life. I seriously doubt, now, that i'll ever start anything important in my life again at any time other than on the new moon.
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My friend Phil's got a hundred acres near the small village of Wyndham, in the cattle farming and forestry country inland from Eden. About eighty acres of it's forest. Regrowth, of course, recovering from being seriously destroyed by logging and cattle farming, but beautiful and constantly growing nevertheless. This was the closest i had to a home, the closest i'd had to a home for years, although i hardly spent much time there really. It was a base and somewhere i was always happy to arrive back to.
My bedroom was a large tarpaulin, supported in an inverted vee shape by a frame made out of old teepee poles, open at both ends and with a grass floor. It's right in the middle of the paddock at the southern end of the property, not too far from the kitchen. I'd sleep out there in the summer and the winter, in frost and in rain - although, when it rains i usually got wet and had to take refuge in the kitchen! Every morning, i woke up and look out the end of the tarp at kangaroos grazing on the grass of the paddock. At night i'd wake up to weird, cough-like noises as they do whatever it is they do at night all around my bedroom. In the morning, too, there were birds in every tree, fluttering around, looking for breakfast and calling to each other across the spaces between them. Also, unfortunately, there was the distant mooing of the beef cows in the ugly bare fields of the next door cow farm.
After a few short days in the peaceful, natural environment of Wyndham, during which i shaved off my mohawk - and every other bit of hair on my head, it was back to the noisy, polluted concrete nightmare of Sydney. From there, we had to get to Darwin, the northernmost city in Australia and the closest point to Indonesia. There's a massive desert in between Sydney and Darwin and there's no direct route from one place to the other. You have to go either west to Adelaide and then north, via Alice Springs, or north, via Brisbane and north Queensland and meet the Alice to Darwin road at Tenant Creek. Either way, it's a journey of close to five thousand kilometres.
At first, we were going to go via Queensland and spend a bit of time in Brisbane on the way. There were a few things i wanted to do there, a few loose ends i needed to tie up from a couple of months before when i'd lived there for four months (the longest i'd been anywhere for years!) That would have meant a sixteen hour train journey from Sydney to Brisbane and then two or three days on the bus from Brisbane to Darwin.
But we changed our minds. Going via Brisbane seemed to complicated and it would take a long time to get to Darwin if we hung around in Brizzie for a while. Somehow, going the other way seemed a better prospect. We wanted to go by train all the way to Alice, but there was a problem with that idea. The Indian Pacific, which runs from Sydney, on the Pacific coast, to Perth, on the Indian Ocean, and stops at Adelaide twenty four hours into its three day journey, leaves Sydney on Mondays and Thursdays. The Ghan, named after the Afghani camel trains that used to do the journey before the railway, and which goes from Adelaide to Alice Springs, leaves Adelaide on Thursdays. I personally hate Adelaide and neither of us wanted to have to spend several days there, so this was a problem. We could go via Melbourne to Adelaide, which takes approximately the same ammount of time, but that seemed too much like going back on our tracks. Nicki'd only just managed to escape from Melbourne and neither of us wanted to end up back there again so soon - even if it was only for a couple of hours between trains.
In the end, we decided to get the Indian Pacific to Adelaide and then the bus from there to Darwin. Nicki's got a friend in Alice Springs, so we'll probably stay there for a few days on the way up. There are two bus companies which run between Adelaide and Darwin. One, McCafferty's, is good - the drivers are friendly and helpful and the buses are in good order. The other, Greyhound Pioneer, is terrible - the drivers are miserable and unfriendly and the buses are always breaking down. It's not hard to decide which one to catch.
It took us a week to escape from Sydney. It wasn't too bad as we both had a lot of things we wanted to do there, but still we were both desperate to leave after a few days. Monday's train was a bit too soon though, so we bought tickets for the one on Thursday, economy class sleepers. We were going to have a night on the bus the next night, between Adelaide and Alice, and the idea of getting a good night's sleep on the train first was an attracive one.
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I loved the economy sleeper carriage of the Indian Pacific. You get a small twin berth cabin in a car with a beautiful, wood paneled wavy corridor running down the middle - walking along it when the train's moving is like something out of the "haunted house" at the funfair. It's one of the very few examples of inspired design i've ever come across. The cabins are small, but not unbearable. There's two facing seats, a couple of very skinny cupboards a drinking water fountain and a pull-down stainless steel washbasin, with hot and cold running water! It was certainly the most luxurious train carriage i've ever travelled in - and this was only economy class. First class must be incredible!
We took plenty of food with us, as you can never get vegan food on trains. This was probably the most comfortable and pleasant 1800 kilometres i'll ever get to travel - in surface transport, anyway.
It was an interesting trip. Once we got off the coastal plain where Sydney's situated, the first part of the journey was through the Blue Mountains to the west. There are a few towns on the train route on the eastern side of the mountains, the most well known one is probably Katoomba. They're almost far outer suburbs of Sydney, as they're within commuting distance of the city, but they're surrounded by densely forested mountain landscape which has the feeling of being a million miles away from that deranged and inhospitable metropolis. Lithgow comes later, somewhere around the highest bit of the line and then there's Bathurst, with it's much hated jail, as you head down the other side of the range. From there on it's pretty well flat all the way to Adelaide, with a fair chunk of desert, or semi-desert as you go out towards the mining town of Broken Hill. Broken Hill's in New South Wales, but it's getting close to the border of South Australia at this point and they use South Australian time here, which is half an hour behind the time on the east coast.
The last quarter or third of the trip was depressing. The countryside all around, for as far as you could see, was badly fucked agricultural land. Australian farmers have got a lot to answer for! But their greed's fucked them now. The even greater greed of the banks has combined with land degradation and bad droughts, made worse by intense deforestation, to almost destroy Australian agriculture. And it serves them fucking right!
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One thing they can do right in Adelaide is make beer. This is the home of Coopers, one of Australia's best beers. The Coopers in Adelaide tastes like i remember Coopers tasting. Nowadays in the other states, it's disgusting - i guess they must brew it in other places now or something, i suppose it's a lot more popular than it used to be, so they probably haven't got the capacity to make enough in Adelaide. It's a beer that's fermented in the bottle, rather than artificially gassed, which is what makes it so good, but in other places nowadays, it seems like it is artificially gassed and it tastes totally different. But it was nice to have a drop of the old style Coopers - it made me remember why i used to drink so much of it!
Then, only a few hours after we'd arrived, it was time to get onto the bus and leave again. It was only about half full, which is the way you want it on a long journey like that.
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I woke up as the bus came into Coober Pedy late at night. It was a totally unremarkable, dull-looking country town. It's known for mining of some fancy stones or other - opals, i think - and probably a few other things as well, but i'm not really sure. Anyway, i didn't see any sign of anything that would ever induce me to get off a bus there!
On the way out of town though, i saw something quite fascinating. It was further proof of my theory that humans and ants are very closely related species. The countryside all around the town was littered as far as the eye could see with what looked like giant ant hills, glowing white in the moonlight. I assume they must be the product of greedy and uncaring people mining for opals. I don't know why the ignorant bastards can't fill the holes back up again. Maybe they think the human anthills look good - monuments to their greed and destructiveness.
The South Australian desert is really very green! It had obviously been raining there recently. When it got light i was kind of surprised by how much vegetation there actually was. In some places it was flat as a pancake, all the way round to the horizon, which was pretty weird, as i'd only ever seen that on the ocean before. In other places there were hills.
I'm afraid i haven't got much to say about this. It's a very strange area, but it's impossible to really experience it from behind the windows of an air-conditioned bus.
Alice Springs, or Mparnte in the language of the local Arrente aboriginal people, is a weird little town. I found it very unfriendly for such a small town. Twenty four thousand people live there, but a large proportion of them are pretty transient really. Most people are there because there's work there - and most of that's in government jobs. There's big defence force establishments around the place and there's also a lot of american military there too.
We went to Hermansburg one afternoon to visit a friend of the woman we were staying with. It's an aboriginal community about 140 kilometres west of Mparnte.
Hermansburg mission was built by Lutherans last century sometime and the original mission buildings are still there, including the whipping tree, complete with it's ugly chains. They're nice people, christians! The place is plagued by stupid tourists in their four wheel drives and campervans, who almost certainly haven't got the faintest idea what they're gawking at. The place is, in reality, a concentration camp built to aid the Brutish colonizers in their conquest of Arrernte country. This mission and many dozens more were set up and administered by evil missionary bastards, whose mission was to totally destroy the culture and spirituality of the aboriginal people as a coordinated part of the drive to wipe them out completely and deliver their lands into the hands of the rulers.
Fortunately the tide of history wasn't on their side and the aboriginal people survived. The bastards did so much damage to them and their land, though, that it could take them centuries to recover - if recovery's ever really possible.
However, the aboriginal people from this part of Australia have been luckier than those from the south east of the continent, where most of their culture, land and language has been permanently destroyed.
It makes me sick and angry to see priviliged white wankers, mindlessly sightseeing in a place like this, which is a monument to the imperialistic arrogance and greed of their colonial culture. It's also a place where aboriginal people are struggling desperately to survive and trying to rebuild their culture now they've been left to run the concentration camp themselves.
I'm not speaking for aboriginal people when i say "tourists fuck off!", i'm speaking as a european and a british person, sickened by what's been done in the name of *my* people.
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I was surprised when the desert ended not far north of Mparnte. I'd always thought it was roughly in the middle of it. But very soon the land became scrubby, dry tropics sort of country, pretty much like Cape York in northern Queensland really.
In the middle of the night, the bus stopped at Tenant Creek. Three Macafferty's buses and three Greyhound buses meet up at the bus station there and it's total chaos.
The buses come from Mparnte, Darwin and Mount Isa in Queensland, and the idea is that people going to or coming from Queensland can transfer to or from either the north or southbound bus. It's a good system, but it's very weird the way it happens in the middle of the night and they way both companies do it at exactly the same time. The place is probably dead the rest of the time!
Tenant Creek's a much bigger town than i thought it would be. I've always had this picture of a very small redneck town. But i reckon it would be an interesting place to spend a couple of hours - in the daytime.
At 10ish in the morning we stopped at Mataranka. This place is basically a tourist resort at the thermal springs there. I tried to walk to the pool, but i didn't make it because the path was flooded and there were millions of mosquitoes and thousands of weird, pinkish fruit bats which were flying around frantically, squawking and shitting gallons of dark coloured fruit juice everywhere - as fruit bats do! I think there was another way to the thermal pool, but there was only a limited ammount of time before the bus went and i didn't bother trying to find it.
Getting out of the bus as Mataranka was like diving into a hot bath. It was wonderful being back in that jungly tropical humidity again, it had been a long time since i'd been in the tropics in the wet season.
We arrived in Darwin about half three that afternoon. My first thoughts were to wonder if there was anyone i knew in town. I decided if there was my best chance of bumping into them would be in the Mall. Five minutes later, i ran into Barny there. I'd known him for years, but it had been a couple of years since i saw him last. As it turns out, he was almost the only person in Darwin that i knew - i met the other one a week or so later. Barny had arrived the day before from Western Australia.
Darwin was presumably designed by the same idiots who designed Canberra. It's got that same totally characterless, almost non-existent feel to it. It's basically a shit hole - they would have done better leaving it in ruins after cyclone Tracy wiped it off the map on christmas day, 1974. It was quite sad really, as i'd been wanting to go to Darwin for years. I was always fairly sure i'd really like it, but i don't know why now! So when i finally got there, finding that it was an ugly, depressing and dead little hole was a bit of a disappointment. Never mind, at least it's only a couple of hours flying time from Kupang and fortunately, we got to spend most of the two weeks we were there out in the bush, about 70km south of Darwin, which was just about far enough away!
I think the weirdest thing about Darwin was the fact that it seemed virtually deserted. Fair enough, it was the wet season, so there were very few tourists and probably a few less locals than in the dry. But Cairns, in far north Queensland, which has the same population is never that deserted. I found it quite disturbing. But then again, Canberra's like that too. I suppose the two towns are so dull and boring that it's more exciting to stay at home and count your fingers!
Possibly the best thing about the Northern Territory is the almost complete freedom from the sight of that sick and disgusting vanguard of U.S. imperialism, McDonalds. Until recently, the N.T. government refused to let them in. Sadly, McDonalds has considerably more political power than a mere government and Darwin had got its first one a couple of years before. If i'd have known they didn't have Mcdonalds, i would have gone there years ago! There's also a ban on advertising hoardings in the Territory, which is a pleasant rest for weary eyes.
In Darwin, i experienced something i'd seen, but had never happened to me before. When i was in India, just over a year ago, i was aware that Indians weren't allowed into one of the hostels i stayed in and i ended up getting extremely abusive to the owner because of this, amongst other things.
The night before we left Darwin, i found myself in town, with nowhere to stay. When i tried to get a bed at "Ivan's", a backpackers' hostel, i was refused. "This place is for overseas backpackers" i was told, by way of a reason.
"Do you want to see my British passport and my ticket to Indonesia?" i asked, putting on my best pommie accent. "And what's this?" I pointed to my backpack, which unfortunately wasn't shiny, synthetic, "backpacker" style. But it was no use. I was refused a bed in Darwin because i was Australian. It doesn't only happen in India!
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