Hakuna Matata

I got on the flight on Christmas Day and the cyclone hit Darwin the day after we left. The cyclone became a tropical storm and though it tried to catch us. It never did. The day after we left Tennant Creek to go to Mount Isa, the high way we took to get to Tenant Creek was closed of because it was severely flooded. Some people got stranded and had to wait for the flooding to clear before they could continue their journey. Flooding causes the water levels to rise which means that some crocodiles who would other wise stay in their creeks, now swim into places where they are more likely to encounter humans. We had originally planned a stop at some natural springs to go swim there, because of the flooding and the increased chance of crocodile encounters we skipped that.

In The Netherlands you can’t drive for more than 3 hours and not reach a different country. If you’re in NL and you drive for 11 hours like we did on the first day of our road trip, you could cruise through as much as 4 countries. As we were driving from Darwin and we reached the outback I was just amazed with the vast amounts of nothingness. A lot of the nothingness was desert which was interesting. Because of the huge amounts or rain they’ve had up north it was actually not desert-looking at all, really what we saw in the desert was lots and lots of different shades of green!
I didn't think this road trip business through. I saw the route that Mervyn, the brain of this operation, had planned out for us. But it didn't occur to me that this route would take us away from civilization. I had heard the term ‘outback Australia’ before, and I knew it would probably have to do something with a remote place. What I didn’t realize is that we would be driving through it for days and days. I didn’t think there were paces within the Western world where you could drive for hours without having phone reception. However, in the outback we really only had phone reception when we came near somewhat major towns. Mervyn had a different telecom provider than the rest of us and they gave him a bit more coverage but even he would have to go for long periods without reception. I’m not sure what we would’ve done if our car would’ve broke down, or if another type of calamity would’ve occurred in between towns.. Google Stuart Highway and select the street view and you'll see there's absolutely nothing there. No AA patrol (ANWB), no houses, and a lot of the times not even other cars on the road. Oh well.

For lunch the first day we stopped in a little village. It was freaky. As we get off the main road we see that there’s a cafe at the end of the road. Besides the cafe there are 3 or 4 other buildings but this village seems dead. As we drive towards the cafe, we have to stop because some people are bowling on the road. So we wait for them to move, but they don’t so we carefully drive around them. We park, and hesitantly get out of the car, because on one hand we’re hungry and we need to use the restroom but on the other hand this looks like a place from a horror movie. If it wasn’t daylight we certainly wouldn’t have stopped there. So all of us get out of the car, and where at other stops before and after this one, we would all go do what we have to do and meet back at the car, this time we stayed together until we (or at least I) felt safe. We enter the cafe and it’s the weirdest place. There are pictures all over the wall of random things and people. After I saw a picture of a naked dude on the wall I decided to look at the floor or ceiling at all times. Looking at the ceiling my attention was caught by the dozens of bras, and knickers hanging just above the bar... I told you this place was weird. So anyway, there were quite some people in the cafe, most of them looked quite normal so now I was kind of confident that I could make it to the restrooms and back without being brutally murdered. So I did, and I’m here to tell the story.. nothing weird happened. As I expected there was nothing on their menu that I could eat, but we had bread, avocados and salt in the car so my lunch covered. The others ended up eating something we had brought ourselves also. If you go through the facebook pictures Mervyn posted (I’ll post the link below), you’ll get an idea of the place I’m talking about. It’s a picture with a McDonalds sign.

After our stop in the random place, which was called Daly Waters (I think), we continued or way to Tennant Creek, which is where we would spend our first night. Mervyn and Marko did pretty much all of the driving during the trip. Mervyn is a friend I met at a youth conference in Poland in 2004. He graduated about two weeks ago (YAY!!) and after his graduation ceremony we went for dinner with his two uni friends and their families. It was on this evening that I met Marko, Mervyn's friend.
Marko is a friendly and helpful guy, the only thing is that he kills birds. Little birds.. (notice the name of this blog and see why I'm a little bit worried..) I can’t fully blame him because the birds would just sit on the road while we’re going 100km/hr.. But yeh, the suicidal birds that sit on the roads, Marko helps them out.

We were going to Tennant Creek to see the Devil’s Marbles, big rocks that are sacred to the Aboriginal community and were shaped round overtime by different weather conditions. We were hoping to get to the Marbles before sunset, but we were a little bit too late. Just beside the Marbles there was a campsite. A campsite as in, a place to put up your tents, no running water or electricity. The guys set up the tents while Melody and I attempted to cook. The Australian sun is super quick, once it starts setting you have about and hour before it becomes pitch black. We came prepared and had a lantern, but the serious downside to the lantern and any other sources of light in the utter darkness, is that they attract bugs. Mosquitos, flying ants, flies, beetles.. you name it, we had them, and their families visiting us. Both Melody and I aren’t heroes when it comes to insects so finishing what we were doing and not get to distracted by all the bugs was character building. Since it was dark I couldn’t really see what was in my pot, I tried to keep the lid on as much as I could, I just hoped that none of the creatures found its way there. Eventually we finished cooking and we were ready to have our haystacks (beans, vegetables and corn chips), we ate in one of the tents. It tasted really nice and as we ate we made jokes that it was probably nice because of the bugs we cooked with them. The day after when I was having some of the haystack beans on a sandwich for lunch I actually found a cooked fly in my sandwich... Hakuna Matata..

I promised to update you about the mozzie domes. (Remember the silver platter tents?) We didn’t get any. Instead we just opened the windows to our tent so that we could look outside and see the stars at night. That first night at Tennant Creek I spent sometime watching the stars in the middle of the night. Not because I wanted to see the starts, but because I really needed to use the toilet and I was debating whether or not I was going to wake Melody up so that we could walk there together. That was the deal we made before we went to sleep, if you have to go, you wake the other person. The toilet (read: hole in the ground with four walls surrounding it) was only about a minute away, but we were in the wild, we had spotted a dingo (wild dog that looks like a fox) and we couldn’t be sure what other types of wild life we could bump into. Also we were under strict orders by tetka Maria to go everywhere together, and ‘beat around the bush’ if we had to :) . I didn’t feel like getting up, I was fully trying to ignore my bladder, but it didn’t work, so I woke Melody up and we walked to the toilet together.

The morning after we had breakfast and then walked through the marbles. The were very impressive and beautiful too.

Check out the pictures in this link:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150546252451405.427206.519266404&type=1



To be continued..