Desert Patrol

This is where it gets good... I spent the last week on a group tour from Adelaide to Alice Springs. There were 17 of us... all young travelers from across the world. The trip in total was 2,850km (1,770 miles) and well worth every inch. The first stop was Flinders Ranges... a mountain region north of Adelaide. We drove right through the center of them on a rocky track, spotting wild kangaroos and wallabies as we went. We stopped at some old homestead ruins... houses built back when people tried farming and living on this land. We spent the night in a small country town... it felt like it was desolate at the time... but it was nothing in comparison with what was to come.

Next day, we did a lot of driving to get further into the outback. We made a few stops in little towns to refuel and went to a locally-famous guy's home named Talc Alf. He's apparently slightly crazy but makes carvings and artwork. A lot of tour groups make this stop because he's something interesting along a dirt road where there is nothing else to see. The day we stopped, he wasn't around, so I missed the chance to see what he was like. We did go to his "art gallery" that was a shoddy bunch of shelves with his artwork.

Our next stop was to a city with a population of 8. There is nothing here but a gas station and a pub. What more do you need, really?

We camped here for the night... sleeping under the stars. No tents... just sleeping bags, while stared at the clearest and widest blanket of stars you could possibly image. It was hard to get to sleep because I didn't want to close my eyes. The sky was gorgeous... not something you would ever see in city.

The next day, we set off for Coober Pedy, an opal mining town. This was the part I was most looking forward to. The city basically exists underground to escape the heat... in the summer, it can get up to 60 degrees Celsius (140F). They burrow into the side of the mountains and live in perfectly normal homes... just their walls are rocks. We did an opal mine tour... learned about how opals are turned into jewelry, and how I can't afford the ring I want. A big, blue/green opal ring was about $700 or so. I settled for a small one though for quite a bit less.

We went to an underground pub, underground church, and we slept in an underground bunkhouse. It's a whole different world in Coober Pedy... from the surface, it looks like a construction site because of the mining equipment, and nothing is built over one story high. But everything is going on underground.

The next day was a long day of driving... long day. About 10 hours of driving through absolutely nothingness. For as far as you can see... there is dry, dusty ground with the occasional half-green bush struggling to survive. The drive would be so worth it though... because the end of this trip is Uluru... the enormous red rock in the center of the country. It's a sacred Aboriginal site and is what anyone coming to the outback is coming to see.

We got there for sunset... and these pictures are nothing compared to the actual site. The sunset changes the color of the rock, so every time you look at it, you see different colors and shading. We woke up at 4am the next morning to go see sunrise, and went for sunset again from another viewing area... it just keeps looking better and better.

We took a 3 hour walk around the rock to see it up close. There are small caves, watering holes, aboriginal artwork all along the sides. It's an amazing structure in the middle of nowhere.

There is certainly more to say... but I will have to begin another post later. Hope you enjoy this one for now.