JULY 17 - 19 PREVIOUS | NEXT | HOME | CONTENTS | ABOUT | SEND EMAIL Swamped Schedule, Relentless Roadtrip Friday, July 17; Angorichina - Coober Pedy The unseasonably wet weather north of Angorichina dictated that we change our itinerary. We had intended to travel north to William Creek today (William Creek consists of a single but famous pub in the middle of nowhere) via the backcountry Oodnadatta track, but the unpaved track was effectively closed due to flooding. Steve informed us that there were three other buses stuck at points along the track, and that we were not going to risk joining them. Instead we decided to backtrack as far as Quorn and join the Stuart Highway at Port Augusta. This highway, which is the lifeline between Adelaide and Alice Springs, would take us 522km north to Coober Pedy, although we originally weren't due to arrive there until the following day. The day unfolded as a long and unremarkable road trip. We stopped for coffee in Quorn, for roast chickens in Port Augusta, and for lunch in Pimba, where we munched on the aforementioned chickens. We stopped in Glendambo for no other reason than to pee at the filling station. It didn't look like there was much else to do in Glendambo anyway. It was a town centred on a few businesses that depended on passing traffic for their survival - a motel, a filling station, a restaurant. Reading a billboard beside the road, I discovered just how dependent the town was on that traffic. The Stuart Highway didn't always run through Glendambo, it used to thread its way through the desert 44km to the west, through a town called Kingoonya. In those days, Glendambo didn't exist. For some reason that the billboard didn't explain, the powers that be decided to move the highway, depriving the delicate traffic-dependent businesses in Kingoonya of their customers. They had no choice but to move with the highway, creating the new town of Glendambo. I thought about how annoying it must have been to have to start afresh in an environment which is challenging enough to exist in under normal circumstances. Temperatures get up to 50 degrees Celsius in summer, and down to -5 degrees on winter nights around Glendambo. There is nothing but flat and desolate scrub all around and there is nothing to do. Nothing changes from day to day, except the faces of the greasy truckers who overnight on their way to somewhere else. Outback windmill. I formed a completely unsubstantiated theory about why the road was moved. The desert through which we were travelling is part of the Woomera Prohibited Area, a no-trespassing military zone of approximately 127,000 square kilometres. Rumours abound about the closeted activities that are or were carried out in the area - weapons trials, rocket launching, atom bomb testing and spy satellite monitoring. Maps of the area show the zone's borders and nothing within it. The Stuart Highway is the only unrestricted corridor through the area, and I was willing to bet my day's beer ration that the highway was moved to make room for some classified scientific or military operations. I found myself feeling sorry for the people in Glendambo, but my pity was short lived. The swindling weasels in the filling station charged me twice the normal price for a bar of chocolate. Our lunch in Pimba was memorable merely for its setting. At a truckstop by the edge of the highway, we pulled into a muddy and empty parking area the size of several football fields. The area had received about a quarter of its annual rainfall within the last week and the red mud stuck to our shoes and invaded our bus. At a covered shelter in the middle of the parking area, we set up our tables and set about making lunch. We turned a large industrial cable drum on its side and used it as a table upon which to tear apart our succulent roast chickens. Outback Extremes: A drilling platform being transported on a 128-wheel trailer. We had a boiling kettle and fresh bread, salads and sliced cheddar. Steve moved the bus to block us from the wind whistling in over the desert. Sitting on a 128-wheel trailer adjoining the parking area was a drilling platform frame the size of a large house. A fifty-two car freight train passed by while we were eating. I remember thinking that if we could make lunch here, we could survive anywhere. We must have looked funny though, huddled on our gourmet island in a sea of mud. Everything is more extreme in the outback - distances are larger, rail and road trains are longer, prices are higher, temperatures are higher, sunsets are more spectacular. Later, as the sun was setting, an impromptu stop at the side of the road for one girl's quick photo turned into major activity as the bus almost completely unloaded to capture the same photograph. The Italian recorded the sunset with his video camera. Bill scolded everybody with "Now remember people, you all have perfectly good sunsets at home" as he scrambled down the aisle towards the door, camera primed and ready. We got into Coober Pedy at about 8 o'clock in the evening. I was relieved, because at that stage I was getting so bored that I was counting the reflector posts at the side of the road. By counting the number of reflectors between signposts indicating the number of kilometers left to Coober Pedy, I figured out how far apart the reflectors were (I got 290 metres) and then, determine how many reflectors we had to pass before we reached Coober Pedy. I kept Denise up to date with my running estimates, but she was disappointingly unimpressed. We couldn't pick out much of the town in the dark, but I did see that our bunkhouse was built into the side of a hill. I already knew that most of the buildings in Coober Pedy are built into the sides of hills or built entirely underground - this provides comfortable living conditions during the fiercely hot summer days. Walking into our bunkhouse, the concrete floor sloped downwards and the entrance opened out into a large dormitory, with curtained-off alcoves each containing two bunk beds. The walls had been carved out of the red rock, and were rough and scarred from the drilling machine used to dig out the room. The wall opposite the door and the ceiling featured deep parallel striations where the rotating drill bits had cut away at the rock, while the side walls were patterned with circular and wavy marks where the side of the machine had scraped its way through. The walls and ceiling had been coated with a red-brown spray that prevented dust and particles from crumbling and falling off, giving the room a warm terracotta feel. The ceiling was no lower than in an above-ground house so there was no sense of claustrophobia, and overall the underground house was far less peculiar than I had expected. "A bag of your best value wine please waiter!" We had dinner in a pizza restaurant. I sadly drank my last beer ration and could sympathise as I watched Hanneka, a Dutch girl, squeeze the last remaining drops of wine out of a silvered bag. A group of us taught Hanneka tasteless English slang and had a great time being incredibly crude. Some of us moved on to an underground bar in the hotel opposite the restaurant, where we drank and chatted until words and phrases became slurred, and verbal exchange became difficult. We stumbled across rooftops (i.e. walked over a hill) to get back to our hostel. I was asleep as soon as my head hit the stolen airline blanket masquerading as my pillow. Subterranean Settlement, Dodgy Dog Fence, Galaxy Guide Saturday, July 18; Coober Pedy Steve took us on a tour around Coober Pedy in the bus, and we caught our first daylight glimpses of this bizarre town. We took in the drive-in movie theatre, the hospital, the supermarket, the football field, the police station, the school and playing field, the swimming pool, the courthouse, the adult education centre, the Catholic church, the unused Aboriginal state housing, and the central business district. That sounds like a lot, but it took less than fifteen minutes and we were only going at about 10 miles per hour. Coober Pedy tumble dryer vent. Coober Pedy is unique. It is in the middle of the desert, 700km from Adelaide, and almost as far from Alice Springs. It was established just before World War 1 as a opal mining settlement. It has since been developed into one of the world's largest sources of opals. Anybody with a pick and the desire to work hard can obtain a mining licence for a small fee. With the licence comes a claim to a area of desert 50 metres by 20 metres, which the prospector can mine in search of an opal seam. Fortunes have been made in Coober Pedy, but searching for opal is a matter of luck. There is no reliable technology available to seek out the seams of precious stone, which means that opal mining is mainly guesswork. This fact has kept large risk-averse mining companies out of the town, leaving the buried treasure to be discovered by devious and eccentric individuals. The area is a tax collector's nightmare. All transactions are conducted in cash, bundles and bundles of it. Dealers pay prospectors in cash for uncut stones. Australian and international buyers fly into Coober Pedy with briefcases full of money, trade intensely with the dealers, and fly back out again. It is up to individuals to declare their income for tax purposes, and not surprisingly, residents of the town are somewhat lacking in the honesty of their declarations. Whenever there is a census in Coober Pedy, half of the town's population disappears for a few days to escape official notice. Nobody knows the true population of the town. The Coober Pedy Drive-In Despite the enormous financial turnover that the town must generate, it couldn't be less apparent from the condition of the place. Houses are rough and unfinished, cars and trucks are falling apart, and the residents would never be mistaken as wealthy. Coober Pedy feels like a large and untidy back yard. Rusting mining equipment is scattered around, flimsy corrugated iron fences delimit property, and piles of rubble form a miniature rolling urban landscape outside the dugout houses from which they were excavated. Metal chimneys poke out of the sides and tops of hills - narrow chimneys, tall chimneys, fat chimneys, sealed chimneys, chimneys that smell of laundry, chimneys with winches, chimneys with plumbing - the list goes on. The football field is a flat area of red dust, distinguishable as a playing field more by the lack of scrub and rusting wrecks on it than by the feeble-looking goalposts at either end. Alongside the football field is the drive-in movie theatre, its parking area overshadowed by the enormous white screen and its tangle of rusting supports. A shoulder-height wire mesh fence pointlessly encloses the drive-in, whose screen must be visible for miles around in this flat landscape. There was no movie playing on the weekend of our visit, as the annual eight-ball pool championships were being held in the pub. Steve drove us past the dugouts that were constructed by the South Australian government for the homeless Aboriginal people in the town. Unfortunately, nobody consulted the Aboriginal people before excavation, or they would have learned that the Aboriginals are superstitious and will not live underground. The dugouts remain unoccupied. The hospital is relatively new and has 20 beds. There is one doctor, and it takes three weeks to get an appointment to see him. Any serious injuries are handled by the Flying Doctors, who may take the patient to Alice Springs or to Adelaide. Mothers generally travel to Adelaide to give birth. View across the Coober Pedy rooftops. The new courthouse is a prefabricated cabin. The old courthouse was blown up. Apparently one of the dangers of living in Coober Pedy is that most of the population has easy access to explosives and aren't hesitant about using them outside of their mines. The town has a silent code of ethics. Many crimes occur that are never solved, or not investigated beyond a certain point. People keep quiet and police refrain from overstepping the unspoken and limited boundaries of their authority for fear of retaliation. Everybody knows what goes on, but nobody says anything. Court cases for charges more serious than speeding or petty theft are heard in Adelaide, in case the new courthouse is blown up by somebody unhappy with some aspect of the trial. Over 40 different nationalities live in this town of two to three thousand people and the police force of ten officers and a few detectives have jurisdiction over an area the size of Belgium. Friction between nationalities is inevitable and the problem is occasionally solved by dynamite. One Coober Pedy citizen, fed up with the delays of the telephone company in coming to repair his telephone, blew up all of the public telephone boxes in the town. He figured that the telephone repairmen would thus be forced into coming out and doing some work. Coober Pedy Mutant Mining Bus. Moonlighting is the practice of raiding another person's mine in the middle of the night. Such an activity is looked upon as an extremely serious violation of Coober Pedy's unwritten laws, so serious that the offender may never be seen again. Steve told us a story about a Coober Pedy patient who turned up at a hospital in Adelaide to be treated for an enormous gash in his leg. When asked by the nurse about the cause of the injury, he claimed that he tore his leg on sharp coral while scuba diving. The more likely cause of his wound was a carefully-placed bear trap down a Coober Pedy mine in which the man was moonlighting. Getting treated at the local hospital or having the Flying Doctors brought into the town would have alerted the entire community to his activities and may have led to injuries of a more serious or permanent nature. Instead he drove the 7 hours to Adelaide to be treated in relative anonymity. Coober Pedy's one and only tree, reportedly welded together from the remains of the first trucks to reach the town. Despite the swift and severe unofficial justice dealt out in Coober Pedy, the town has a remarkable sense of community. I was told about a well-liked local girl whose death in a car accident caused such sorrow in the town that all work stopped on the day of her funeral, which was attended by some 3,000 mourners. The school's playing field is the collective pride of the town. It had been planted with grass in the year prior to our visit, and was thriving on the recycled water with which it was sprinkled. It is the only grass in the town, much envied by the town's dusty brown golf course. The swimming pool, also on school grounds, offers standing room only during the summer months. The TAFE (Technical and Further Education) college in Coober Pedy is the only one in Australia that grants a certificate in opal cutting. The Catholic church of St. Peter and Paul is dug into the side of a hill and accessed by a narrow passageway. The passageway opens out into a low-ceilinged and rough-walled chapel which feels uncomfortably claustrophobic. The vast, intricately designed cathedrals of Europe with their high ceilings and lofty naves would look pityingly on this small Australian cousin. The same cathedrals, however might envy the absolute silence and sanctity inside this church in a hillside. Opal mine. Our group took a tour of an opal mining museum and (of course) its adjoining gift shop. We were led through a typical opal mine and a typical Coober Pedy two-bedroom dugout house. The house was amazing in its adherence to normality in such a setting, with carpets on the floor, paintings on the walls and lamps hanging from a ceiling still exhibiting the teeth marks of the drilling machine. Notably absent from the house was natural light, draughts, and external noise. There could be a cataclysm outside and somebody inside might never know. It has happened too - astonished residents emerging from their homes to discover the mess wreaked by freak sandstorms. Relaxing outside our underground bunkhouse. Denise and I wandered around the town as the sunny morning turned to afternoon. For the first time since leaving Sydney, I got to strip down to a t-shirt, and I thoroughly enjoyed the winter sunshine which gently warmed my body without delivering the searing heat of summer. After lunch some of us just lazed around outside our bunkhouse and chatted, much like the groups of Aboriginals a few streets away, except we didn't have any dogs and they had lots of them. Later in the afternoon, we took a bus drive out to the Breakaway Range about 10km north of the town and gazed from a plateau out over a vast and desolate wasteland spotted with brightly-coloured hills. The Breakaways have been the setting for well known Australian movies such as "Mad Max" and "Priscilla: Queen of the Desert." While we were rambling about in the bus, we came across another film set. Actually, we didn't just "come across" it, we saw it from miles away and Denise, Queen of the Desert and Mad Dave search in vain for the Breakaways. purposely went to take a look. The movie being shot was called "Pitch Black," and we trundled curiously past a plywood spaceship and a fake rock formation even more bizarre-looking than those which naturally occurred in the area. From what we could piece together, the film's story would be based around a spaceship crashing on a remote and desolate planet, where the survivors have to deal with some very unfriendly prehistoric monsters. I can't wait. We came upon the dog fence and drove parallel to it for a few kilometres. This remarkable 9600km fence runs from the Great Australian Bight on the south coast of Western Australia to Surfers Paradise in Queensland on the east coast of the country. That's a seriously long fence - way longer than the Great Wall of China (a mere 7200km) and long enough to circle the perimeter of Ireland six times over (in case we ever need to defend against REALLY persistent dingos). The fence was built to keep the dingos in the northern part of the continent out of the sheep-raising territory of the south. Apart from its scale, it is completely unremarkable. The chain-link fence is about 5-6 feet high and extends about a foot into the ground, to keep the dingos from burrowing underneath it. The fence posts are made from tree branches, rusting iron bars, Dave, only slightly less dusty than our bus. shelving supports and a bunch of other struts that look like they were salvaged from a rubbish tip. Regular fence posts are non-existent, as there are no trees around Coober Pedy to make them from. I kicked the fence, sure that it would topple, but it didn't budge and a slightly bruised toe convinced me of its sturdiness. It costs a fortune to maintain the fence, which is paid for by both the government and the farmers (through a fence levy), but its effectiveness has always been in question. Video footage has been captured of one clever dingo leap-frogging from another dingo's back to clear the fence. The remaining dingo can only look on enviously as he sees his fellow dingo trot off into a paradise of unwitting sheep. After we had returned to our bunkhouse and darkness had fallen, we navigated through chimneys to the top of a hill nearby and listened as a local astronomer gave us a guide to the night sky. Martin the Starman had been called on as a spontaneous addition to our adjusted itinerary, and he delivered an interesting talk, beginning with the movements of the sun and the moon and expanding to describe elements of our solar system and our galaxy. The desert sky provided a near-perfect planetarium, although a few nearby streetlights hindered our viewing with their glare. After an enormous dinner and dessert I was so full I had to lie down. Predictably, I fell asleep, not waking until it was time to go to bed. I hate it when that happens. Pessimist Poetry, Masquerading Monolith, Rugged Roadhouse Restrooms, Shutterbug Sunset Sunday, July 19; Coober Pedy - Yulara, Northern Territory <<Beep! Beep! Beep! The sleep-shredding tones of my alarm. Turn it off. I didn't set my alarm clock. My alarm clock is in my backpack. Where is it? My backpack is in the bus. Turn it off. I don't have it. Whose alarm clock is beeping? Where is it? What time is it? It can't be 5:30 already. Wasn't Steve supposed to wake us? Have I slept in? Where is my watch? On my wrist. Beep! Beep! Beep! Struggle to wrestle arm out of sleeping bag. Open eyes. The big hand is at the twelve, and the small hand is at - shit, its really dark - small hand is at the three. No, that can't be right. Look again. Yes, its definitely at three. What moron has set their alarm clock for 3am? Beep! Beep! Beep! Shrill echoes bounce around in the stone bunkhouse. Its still going. Everybody must be awake by now, its been going for at least a minute. Why doesn't the owner shut it off? Maybe it will turn itself off. Its not stopping. It has to stop soon. Can the owner not hear it? Maybe it fell down behind the bed. Any moment now the owner will shut it off. Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Any moment now. Count to ten, it will definitely be shut off by ten. One, two,... Reaching for the clock. Five, Six, Seven... Fumbling for the button. Nine, ten...now! Beep! Beep! Beep! Fuck. Its not stopping. Is the owner in a coma or something? Maybe the idiot is in the bathroom and can't hear it. I'm not getting up. I'm going back to sleep. I can ignore it if I try hard enough. Roll over. What was I dreaming about. Close eyes. Closed already. Beep! Beep! Beep! No use. Wide awake now. Isn't everybody else awake? They must be. Why doesn't someone shut it off? Why doesn't somebody yell out? Silence amongst the clamouring. Somebody say something! I cannot be awake alone. I'm not getting up to turn it off. Its not close to me. There are 36 other people in this room. I'm not getting up. How long before the battery dies? Forever. Where is the noise coming from? Beep! Beep! Beep! Everywhere. Concentrate. Its coming from near the door. Is it the next alcove to ours? I don't want to get up. Someone else will get it. It must be annoying somebody else more than it is annoying me. It is not stopping. Will I have to get up? Will I have to rummage around someone's bed while he or she lies there, deaf to my suffering? 35 pairs of ears, tracking my progress, straining in the darkness as I trod across the stone floor. Their hopes pinned on me alone. Would they blame me? If I failed, and I had to retreat to my bunk with the alarm still screaming, would I be cursed by my fellows? Beep! Beep! Beep! I might have to get up. This is stupid. Everyone is thinking the same as me. Everyone is waiting for someone else to turn it off, waiting for me to turn it off. Beep! Beep! Beep! It is almost normal now. Maybe I can ignore it. Go back to sleep. No good. Trying to ignore the shrieking, I can think of nothing but the shrieking. Beep! Beep! But wait! Footsteps. My footsteps? No. Scrabbling. Voices? No, not voices. Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Stop. Vacant silence. Its off. Its quiet. One hundred times more quiet than regular silence. Unnatural silence, like everybody is holding their breath. Nobody move. If I don't make a sound, maybe I am still asleep. First one to break the silence is to blame. Why didn't YOU get up and turn it off? I'll wait. Roll over. Quietly! Silence. Sigh. Sleep. Dream.>> Steve woke us up at 5:30am. We had breakfast and packed up underneath the stars, pulling out of Coober Pedy just as the eastern sky was brightening. The morning light danced with the dewdrops of moisture as they rolled down the window beside me, and through the fog of condensation I glimpsed mine shafts and diggings by the side of the road as we raced past. We were back on the Stuart Highway, heading north towards Alice Springs. Our destination for the day was Uluru, more commonly known as Ayer's Rock, the largest monolith in the world, and one of Australia's most recognised landmarks. I was excited, I had been looking forward to climbing the rock since I first decided to visit Australia. Over the next couple of days we would also visit the monstrous domes of the Olgas, and the spectacular King's Canyon, before heading to Alice Springs and the end of our Wayward tour. We had our first break at a roadhouse claiming to be a town called Marla, where the steadily rising price of petrol to date made a jump to 94.5 cents per litre. Wandering around the forecourt, I became engrossed in a large billboard which was covered by many small hand-painted notices and advertisements. Even the back of the billboard was painted, including a map of the area with directions to the old railway town of Oodnadatta, 215km to the east of Marla over a rough track. If we had not been diverted away from William Creek due to the flooded track, we would have passed through Oodnadatta before joining the highway at Marla, but from what I could gather, we hadn't missed much. Denise's guidebook described Oodnadatta as "a few logically arranged but untidy streets lacking atmosphere or purpose," and evidence on the billboard seemed to corroborate this - the following ballad was painted onto the rear of the board: Oodna-Bloody-Datta (anonymous) ============================= This bloody town's a bloody cus No bloody trains, no bloody bus And no-one cares for bloody us In Oodna-bloody-datta No bloody clouds, no bloody rain No bloody curbs, no bloody drains The bloody council's got no brains In Oodna-bloody-datta Just bloody heat and the bloody flies, The bloody sweat run in your eyes And when it rains - what a surprise! In Oodna-bloody-datta The bloody goods are bloody dear A bloody fortune for bloody beer And is it good? - no bloody fear In Oodna-bloody-datta No bloody fun, no bloody games No bloody sport, no bloody dames Won't even give their bloody names In Oodna-bloody-datta The bloody dances make you smile The bloody band is bloody vile They only cramp your bloody style In Oodna-bloody-datta The best place is in bloody bed With bloody ice upon your head You might as well be bloody dead In Oodna-bloody-datta At Erldunda: Only 250km more to you-know-what. We had lunch at another roadhouse called Erldunda where Lasseter's Highway leaves the Stuart Highway and heads west towards Uluru and the Olgas. Beyond these landmarks, the highway becomes little more than a trail tracing its way across thousands of kilometres of desert into Western Australia. Munching on my sandwich, I watched a tough-looking military convoy fill up at the Erldunda pumps (Woomera Prohibited Area must have run out of petrol), and gaped at a three-trailered roadtrain idling nearby, trying to conceive what would happen if the driver tried to reverse or to parallel park the monster (answer: he'd fuck it up bigtime, no doubt about it). We kicked back after lunch for the last 250km to Yulara, the purpose-built resort town serving visitors to Ayer's Rock and the Olgas. Efforts are being made to refer to these places by their original Aboriginal names rather than those names conferred on them by Europeans, so Ayer's Rock is known as Uluru, and the Olgas are Kaja Tjuta. Roadsigns refer to the landmarks by either one or both of the names. En route to Yulara, we spotted a large flat-topped mesa far off to the south. Steve informed us that this Uluru lookalike is Mount Connor, which, although only slightly smaller than Uluru, is relatively unknown and unvisited because it sits on Aboriginal land upon which you need a permit to travel. Mount Connor's obscurity fascinated me. It wasn't even marked on my map, although I had rarely seen anything which more deserving of the appellation "landmark." Perhaps Mount Connor does not radiate the stunning hues of Uluru at sunrise and sunset, but I could not understand why I had never heard of this "other" rock before. Uluru is plastered over every Australian calendar and tour brochure and feeds an entire industry of souvenirs, but the nearly-identical Mount Connor is ignored, unseen, invisible. It illustrates the extent to which the media and the travel industry influence what visitors decide to see. If they can't sell it to the tourists, why tell them about it? I suppose that most tourists are satisfied with seeing one monolith, and would rather see the one that is in their guidebook. Going home to your friends and telling them that you climbed Mount Connor is far less impressive than telling them you visited Uluru and presenting the calendar, video, keyring, photographs, mug and t-shirt to prove it. An unknown rock is just a rock, a famous rock is an attraction. My attitude towards Uluru was souring as we left Mount Connor behind, for I felt like I had been told of the options only after a choice had been made for me. Little did I know that my negative demeanour stood absolutely no chance against the awe that would be generated in me by the upcoming experience of Uluru. Our final stop before we got to Yulara was at Curtin Springs, the biggest shithole of a roadhouse to date. They were selling petrol at a staggering 99.5 cents per litre, and charging over twice the usual price for a crate of beer. The outdoor toilets were so nasty that every girl who ventured inside could be heard whimpering in fear and disgust. The forecourt of the roadhouse was a red mud bog. Not surprisingly, we were all back on the bus and ready to go within ten minutes. People say that you never forget your first sight of Uluru, as if its one of those frozen milestones in life like hearing about the shooting of JFK, or the death of Princess Diana. Well, I wasn't around for JFK, I can't remember how I heard about Di, and I don't remember my first look at Uluru. Somehow we managed to get beyond Yulara before it made an impression on me, even though it was clearly visible from the bus for miles beforehand. My theory (yes, another one) is that until I got closer to it and had to comprehend its enormous mass, the monolith looked just like every postcard I had ever seen of it. I was numb to the image of it sitting patiently across the distant horizon and the scene temporarily failed to assault my senses. We dumped our gear at the Yulara campsite, 20km from the rock, and continued without pause onto the designated sunset viewing area. Some resort designer had concluded that this spot was the best place from which to view the rock at sunset, and I can't argue with his decision, although Uluru was so impressive at this range that it would be difficult to find a stop from where it looked unremarkable. We arrived about 20 minutes before sunset, but it was a cloudy evening and the sun was nowhere to be seen. The Wayward army prepares to shoot film. 36 over-eager travellers each took a picnic stool from the bottom of the bus and marched to the top of a low hillock. There they drew forth 36 cameras of varying sizes and complexities and began exposing film as if Uluru was going to disappear any moment. This was the moment that everybody had been waiting for, the chance to make a perfect picture of Uluru, just like the vivid red images in the books and on the postcards. This was also the moment that a malicious film in my camera chose to detach itself from the film cassette as it wound back from the takeup spool. Of all the places to pack up, my camera chose the single most visited and probably the most photographed site in Australia. It's rewinding whirrs ended prematurely with a strangled whine. My attempts to rectify the situation left me with half a dozen fogged pictures, an extremely irritated demeanour, and a resolve never to troubleshoot the inner workings of my camera again while sitting on a camping stool in open desert. All was not lost, however, as I had a small automatic camera with me which stepped forward to save the day. My happy snapping resumed, although at a much lesser rate than many of my travelling companions, Not Uluru who seemed to have become permanently attached to their viewfinders. The clicks of shutter releases and the whirrs of wind-on mechanisms punctuated the minutes as the sun sneaked below the horizon behind a thick band of cloud that deprived us of the inspiring colours we were expecting. The rock unashamedly maintained a steady shade of greyish-brown. Steve When all of the colour had faded from the sky, we bused hack to the campsite and ate dinner. After a few beers around the fire (Denise and I had unexpectedly and ecstatically been able to restock on cheap beer in Coober Pedy), I called home to Ireland from a phone booth with the aid of my parent's credit card (for emergency use only). I found them in the car on the way out to Sunday lunch. They were fine. I told them that I was fine. Ten dollars well spent by my parents, I'd have to say.   PREVIOUS | NEXT | HOME | CONTENTS | ABOUT | SEND EMAIL