Cairns: Adventure Capital of Australia! And The Great Barrier Reef Itself!

I am literally less than 24 hours from leaving Australia and boarding a plane to New Zealand, so here's a wrap-up of my last big Australian trip!! (As mostly told in photos... more words to be added once I get my feet back on American soil!)

Day One: White Water Rafting on the Tully River (Grade 4+ Rapids...yikes!)

Let me preface this by saying that I had never before gone white water rafting before this trip. So I was in for a treat...

We look like a cross between retard children and UN Peacekeepers. Sah-weet!

Some parts of the river were calm and beautiful.... others were not!

Taking a break from rafting... to jump right into the rapids! Very "King of the Rock" a la Mulan.

We hit the rapids!

My friend Anna loves this picture of me because she says I look like a "warrior."

The rapids at some parts got so intense that two of the girls in our raft were thrown out and flushed all the way down two series of intensely flowing and VERY sharp and rocky rapids. They were scared SHITLESS and so traumatized that they refused to get back in the raft after lunch. They described the experience as "feeling like we were drowning and certain to die." That's how intense the rapids were! Anna and I were holding on for DEAR LIFE. At one point, I turned to look at her as we were being sucked into a rapid and I could see my fear reflected in Anna's eyes!!! It was horrifyingly and deliciously fun.

Day Two: Exploration of The Great Barrier Reef aboard Passions (the name of our boat!)

The deck of our tiny-ass and VERY rocky boat, Passions. Perhaps they named it Passions because the boat ride is so rough and rocky? Eh?

Sunbathing for a few last minutes before we get to the reef. The bottoms of our sting suits are on already. We were given sting suits for snorkeling and diving so that jellyfish wouldn't be able to sting our skin! Australia is full of crazy deadly animals...

And once we got to the reef, the snorkeling began. I've only been snorkeling once in Cozumel? and it was beautiful but NOTHING compares to the Great Barrier Reef itself!!

Check out the zebrafish towards the back! If you can't see because the photo is too small, click on it and it'll enlarge. There are some beautiful colors on display here.

Me and my snorkeling gear!

Schools of fish. What kind? Who knows! The coral beneath them is especially beautiful though... (Ok I swear when I get home I am doing some research on the coral and fish that I saw! Promise!)

After snorkeling, we suited up for scuba diving. I can't express how anxious I was to scuba dive for the first time-- I'm mildly claustrophobic and the thought of depending solely upon oxygen in a tank was scary to me. But I sucked it up and suited up.

We are sassy and ready to have the time of our lives! (Sidenote: What surprised me was how heavy the tank and equipment were! The weight was almost reassuring though... with this much equipment, I knew I wouldn't run out of air or drown! Or at least I hoped...)

Scuba diving brought us a lot closer to the reef and we saw more diversity in coral. Uttler breathtaking in real life. This picture does it NO JUSTICE!

At the very bottom of the reef we found a sea cucumber. The instructor snatched the camera off my wrist and took a picture of me with it. And I'm so glad he did because this photo is beyond words. (FYI for those who are curious: The sea cucumber felt really slimy and squishy and I was afraid I would squeeze too hard!)

A brightly colored parrot fish. We saw tons of these just nipping at the coral and destroying it!

After scuba diving, we went to another reef around Michaelmas Cay, a tiny but famous bird sanctuary island. The island was literally only a few hundred feet wide and had a tiny beach that we snorkeled off of.

The reef at Michaelmas Cay was much closer to the surface than the previous Paradise Reef. Swimming on top of the water, I was always worried I would kick a piece of coral and kill it! Especially with those huge gangly flippers of mine. You can tell in the picture how close the reef is to my body, and this was just floating on top of the water!

The reef was overall so amazing and stunning. At Michaelmas Cay the coral and fish were only a few inches away at all times--we got over an hour to hang around the waving, cascading, and sensuous coral.

Final photo of the scuba diving equipment before we left the boat:

A quick photo of the lagoon in Cairns. Because the water immediately surrounding Cairns is FILLED with treacherous jellyfish (known as "stingers" in Oz), there is a manmade but incredibly lush and picturesque "lagoon" near the harbour. Of course, its artificial beauty was no match to the wild reef.

Day Three: Biking in the rainforests of Cairns.

We didn't think anything could top the experiences of white water rafting or seeing the Great Barrier Reef in person, but day three was equally as fun...although in a different way.

We went for a bike tour around the rainforests of Cairns, and it was the most relaxing and wholesome fun I've had in Australia. There was an Australian family of four on the trip with us, and their kids were so cute. It was definitely the perfect way to end our Cairns vacation. And it made me miss The General so much! (My super-chic robin's egg blue road bike that's currently lonesome in Boston without me.)

Cairn's infamous sugar cane fields with a background Cairn's distinctive mountains, the "Misty Mountains."

The bike rack attached to the back of our van. I was the only one of my friends who had to wear a safety vest. It was sooo dorky that it was COOL.

The four of us with the two kids from the trip! Notice how they too are also wearing safety vests.... hah.

The place is really called "Devil Pool Lookout" but some wise guy scratched off the letters so now it's "evil Poo Lookout." I got a HUGE kick out of this, as you can probably tell.

Okay so probably no one but Andrei and my parents and Thao have read this entire post, so I'll sneak in one story here that I hope most people won't bother to read:

We were scubadiving for over thirty minutes at the first reef and I had no problem with breathing or swimming... until we neared the surface. Earlier I had had a problem with weighing myself down, i.e. sinking, so my instructor placed some extra weight stones in my belt when we got halfway down. Then when we got down, I was sinking TOO much, so he pressed a button to inflate my vest a bit so that I would float.

Well, then I started floating TOO much, and I reached the surface before my friends and the instructor did. I just started floating away from them (they didn't notice!) and rose towards the surface, and surprisingly I didn't panick a bit. However, when I got to the surface the water was incredibly choppy and rough. The waves battered me around and soon enough I felt the saliva build up in my mouth. Within minutes, I was vomiting my breakfast out into the wide open ocean (I had reached the surface at this point and taken out the mouth tube... so no I didn't not vomit into the equipment!)

As is the case when I vomit, I felt immediately better and was ready to calm myself and get back under the water, when suddenly my instructor emerges and asks me if I'm okay and starts inspecting me all over. I signal to him that I'm okay, just feeling a little bit nauseous and TOTALLY embarassed at this point (my instructor was seriously HOTT and here I was with bits of vom all over me...). Luckily, he just laughed and told me that it was no big deal... and that THE FISH LOVE IT WHEN THIS HAPPENS! I started laughing at the thought of fish congregating around me to eat my vomit. It was both really gross and really funny.

And... on that note, that's the end of this post!
I am seriously behind in packing and ready to head out to New Zealand! My internet access will probably be even more dismal in New Zealand than it's been in Australia, but keep on the lookout for a short post or two. (I am staying for a few days with my cousin in Hamilton, and I will definitely be posting pictures of his baby, my 8-month-old second cousin! She is the first baby in our family since my brother was a baby, and that was 13 years ago!)

Much Love from Down Under (for the next few hours at least),
Xu

uluru part four

Day Four and Five -- Uluru

Uluru. No more words needed. (If you click on the photo you can get the zoomed version, where you can see the rivulets of water from the rain.)

Day Four finally brought us to Uluru, also known to Westerners as Ayer's Rock. You could see Uluru from miles and miles away since it completely dominated the skyline. Literally, there was nothing but shrubs and a few sad-looking trees surrounding the area. The task of the day was to walk entirely around the imposing Uluru. Needless to say, it was a LONG walk, taking about three and a half hours. The total distance we walked was 9.8 km, which translates to 6.1 miles. But it was beautiful. And luckily it was still a little cloudy and drizzling with rain--I know I would have passed out if we had walked for almost four hours in the blazing sun.

A map of the base walk, which also shows you the shape of Uluru from above.

When recalling his trip to Uluru, travel writer Bill Bryson (who I also have a crush on) describes an eerie feeling upon seeing the rock that he says felt like a genetic pull towards the rock. He says that somehow, even if you've never seen the rock before in your life, "You know this rock."

I had that same feeling as I walked around Uluru and saw all its intricate details, including caves, small pits in the rock, Aboriginal cave paintings, and other unique formations that you can't see from mere photos. Walking the trail around Uluru, I felt some primal instinct telling me I belonged here. As if all mankind was somehow connected to this rock in the middle of nowhere. It was almost a religious feeling. I can't necessarily describe it.

One of my favorite formations was the "Wave Cave" that we're standing under in the picture above. Caused by wind being swept up and tunneled across this same cave over and over, the rock has been worn away to look like the crest of a wave.

Other famous landmarks include what looks like a giant's footprint. Aboriginal legend has passed down stories of two giant brothers who created Uluru from dirt like normal-sized kids would create a huge mud pie. When one of the brothers climbed down from his mud pie creation, he supposedly left this footprint mark.

As we walked around Uluru, there were certain sections of the trail that we were not allowed to photograph, known as "Sacred Sites." These are places where Aboriginal men and women used to conduct their rituals, and today some of these sites are still used. Fines of thousands of dollars are imposed on tourists that try to snap a photo of these sites. The thing is, the sites are no more amazing-looking than the piece of the rock before or after it. There are generally no markings on the actual rock to denote sacredness, just signs put up along the trail telling tourists not to photograph. Still, it was confusing walking around the rock and asking every five minutes, "Are we still on that sacred site or what?"

Since it'd be incredibly boring to describe every detail of the Uluru base walk to you, I'll just include a few pictures:

The texture of Uluru. Don't the pits in the rock behind me resemble human faces? VERY creepy, if you ask me!

A close-up of Uluru's texture

The walking path, surrounded by golden grasses (somewhat reminding me of Kansas!)

Waterfalls over the rock.

A (secret?) cave nestled high up in the rock.

A cave with cave paintings.

The walk around Uluru was inspiring beyond words. It was entirely different from anything I've ever done before, and the idea of a HUGE monolith stuck in the center of the desert is still hard to wrap my mind around. This was by far one of the coolest thing I've ever done in my life!

And that wasn't the end of the day.

On the ride back home from Uluru, we stopped an hour outside Alice Springs to do a camel ride at a camel farm. For a measly $5 Australian dollars, we hopped onto a camel that RAN around a paddock guided by a dude on the ground. It was such a bumpy ride, and I didn't realize how tall camels actually were until I found myself on the hump of one! I took a video of it which would be too slow to upload here, but here's a picture of me after I've disembarked from my camel, Bert?


And finally, the bus ride home:

The people on the bus (the couple in the front is the badass European couple I've mentioned a few times)

Day Five -- flying out of Alice Springs

Even though the heat was unbearable, the number of flies inconceivable, and the rain frankly unbelievable, I was sad to be leaving the Outback. It was truly the most random trip I would have in Australia (termites? torrential downpour? camels?) but probably also the most fun.

Only when I got back home to Sydney did I realize how incredibly thirsty I was on the entire Outback trip. I drank probably half a dozen Powerades and liters upon liters more water during the length of the trip, and I felt thirsty ALL THE TIME. All I can say is that the night we got back from Alice Springs I was so grateful to be in civilization again! (And then I had to pick up Andrei from the airport ten hours later.)

uluru part three

Day Three--Kata Tjuta

(For more info on Kata Tjuta, click here.)


If I had to choose one word to describe day three in the Outback, it would have to be "PREPOSTEROUS!" If I could choose another word, it would be "wet." And if I had a third, it would be "breathtaking." A strange combination of adjectives, day three brought us to Kata Tjuta, also known to Westerners as The Olgas.

That morning we woke up, rolled up our swags, and ate breakfast before jumping into the van for another day in the Outback. Looking out the window, we watched the sun rise over the desert. We spotted a couple of feral (wild) camels a hundred meters from the road. Apparently the Australian Outback is the only place left in the world where wild camels live. Some of the best Australian racing camels are sold to the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, for participation in camel races that often have cash prizes of millions of dollars. Our guide, Dan, was training for a camel race in Saudi Arabia in August. (If you couldn't tell by now, I had a huge crush on Dan the entire trip because he was your quintessential rough and tough highly masculine Aussie outback guy.)

We arrived at the start of the Kata Tjuta trail early in the morning, and the sky was already darkening with the oncoming rain clouds. I donned my awesome hat, stuck all of my valuables in my über-cool fanny pack, and stuffed some bottles of water and crackers into a reusable bag that I had claimed from Paddy's market. Jumping out of the van, I thought to myself, "Hmm, maybe bringing all this stuff with me is a mistake... it looks like it's about to rain." Nevertheless, I didn't want to leave all my valuables in the van while we were gone, so I arrived at start of the trail with my ipod, cell phone, wallet, and camera on me.

The walk through Kata Tjuta is known as the "Valley of the Winds." (I found this inspiring immediately since my favorite anime film is Miyazaki's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.) As we were being briefed by Dan, however, it suddenly started pouring rain. We gathered under a round roofed hut to finish our briefing, and Dan and this hardcore European hiking couple headed off towards the trail in the pouring rain before me or any of my friends could ask Dan to unlock the van so we could put our stuff back inside. I distinctly remember looking at one my friends at that moment, and all we could do was shrug at each other helplessly before heading off in the pouring rain towards the majestic Kata Tjuta.

Take a moment to realize that this is the middle of the Outback, characterized by no rain and absolutely no moisture in the air. Just in the last post I was telling you how I was suffering from heat exhaustion and how the flies were seeking cool solace DOWN OUR THROATS. The walk through Kata Tjuta, however, was wet and chilly. And we were told that it only rains in the Outback once every few years. Preposterous! Totally turned my concept of the Outback on its head.

It's hard to describe exactly how hard it was raining as we were walking. You know when you're in Boston and it suddenly comes raining down in a TORRENT, out of the middle of NOWHERE, and it continues for about five or six minutes before it stops and clears up into beautiful sunshine? That's how it was at Kata Tjuta, except instead of a flooding rain lasting six minutes, it lasted about twenty six. Imagine twenty minutes of pounding, *relentless* rain falling from the heavens!

The fact that the trail was just a cleared path of gritty red rocks and gravel didn't help the trek. Everything was flooded with water, including the trails. In fact, at some points the water came up past my ankles, and my sneakers were soaked through in a matter of seconds. Walking on the trail was also treacherous, since rocks were slippery under our feet and stones shifted with the flowing water so that no patch of land was 100% safe to walk across. At one point in the trail, it was a steep, rocky downward descent that was so unsafe that my friends and I slowly inched our way down.

Meanwhile, the rest of my body was also having a hard time keeping dry. I was only wearing a WHITE thin cotton t-shirt, a Calvin Klein wireless black bra, soffe shorts and underwear, and I was soaked through to the bone immediately. My shirt became nearly transparent and was plastered all over me in a potentially sexy way, except under my shirt I had tucked in my camera (inside its case) and my fanny pack (containing my cell phone, ipod, and wallet) so that it looked like I had a fanny-pack-shaped tumor growing under my shirt. I also clutched my reusable Paddy's Market bag against my chest OVER my shirt so that the rain wouldn't get in.

The rain on Kata Tjuta was so incredibly beautiful and the the water cascaded over the rocks in stunning waterfalls, but the entire time I was thinking "@#$% ^&*@# %^$* My stuff is going to get ruined!"

A photo from a friend who actually was brave enough to take her camera out during the rain! Look at all the waterfalls!!!!

It was wet, wet, wet!

The rain eventually calmed down and the fog lifted over the mountains. Here are some "after" pictures. The entire place was breathtaking.

Having survived the rainstorm. Happily, my head was kept dry during the entire storm because of my uber-sweet hat. But check out how my shirt is drenched and nearly transparent. My shirt was SO heavy with rain that my bra was compromised in this picture! (The green bag is the reusable bag I was referring to--it's made of a material that's a cross between cloth and plastic.) Also check out the badass fog.

It rained so heavily that creeks suddenly emerged where there used to be no water. This is a picture of our group crossing one of those newly formed creeks. These new creeks would be the site of frog spawning. Dan told us that there is a certain species of frog that digs underground and secrets tons of quick-drying mucus that envelops them entirely in a hard mucus shell. When water from rainstorms seeps down into the ground, the mucus casing around the frogs soften and they awake to come up to mate. All around us were the sounds of frogs calling to each other. It was deafening but so cool to hear.

Within minutes after the rain stopped, the sun came back out and blazed brightly. My clothes dried within minutes! The waterfalls dried up quickly, too, but I was able to snag one good photo:

Waterfall on Kata Tjuta

Back to blue skies, red earth, and the need to wear sunglasses!

Happily enough, none of my electronics got ruined. In fact, hardly anything of mine got wet. Somehow the combination of cradling my stuff under my shirt and holding a bag over it kept the rain from getting in. However, I had another friend who had her ipod and cell phone inside her backpack and even used an UMBRELLA, but both her cell phone and ipod were wet beyond repair. The Outback is utterly INSANE. As my friend said, "Who the hell would expect rain in the middle of the desert?"

It's a strange and preposterous world.

A "before" picture of Kata Tjuta.

An "after" photo.

That afternoon we went to an Aboriginal cultural center to have lunch and learn more about the Aboriginal stories of Kata Tjuta and Uluru. Halfway through the cultural center, more shit went down! Reports of a hail storm had reached the center, and our guide Dan yelled at us to get back into the van so that we could reach our campsite and prepare for the hail.

HAIL, in the middle of the desert? What the hell?! But nothing was quite beyond our comprehension after the rainstorm that morning. We were still confused and nervous, but we crowded back into the van and drove to our campsite. This time, the campsite was a real place, complete with roofed pavilions, picnic tables, and even a bathroom with a bunch of shower stalls. And.... a laundry room. Dan told us that most groups passing through lay their swags down on the ground outside, but because of the hailstorm this wouldn't be safe enough. So... we were told to covertly take over the laundry room and lay our swags down there before the other tour groups got the same idea. Taking over the laundry room wasn't TECHNICALLY allowed, but it would keep us dry and warm for the crazy weather ahead.

So imagine a group of 20 people rushing out of the van and grabbing their swags and running to put them down into a cramped and dusty laundry room. It was an insane and hilarious frenzy!!! Meanwhile, Dan was busy throwing up a bunch of tarps over the bus and attaching them to one side of the picnic table pavilions in the hopes of creating more shelter for us--because he thought surely not ALL of us could fit in the laundry room. (He was wrong.) Well, even after the tarps were all up (attached in some places with duct tape and bungee cords), there was absolutely NO hail.... there was some rain as we were eating our dinner of Asian stirfry, but there was NO HAIL!! As a group we had worked so hard to create a shelter for ourselves, but the weather was fine throughout the night. It was really pretty funny, looking back on it.

Despite the lack of bad weather, we slept in the laundry room that night in our sleeping bags (which had a bunch of dead termites in them from the previous night, I might add). All 20 of us managed to fit into that cramped room, and Dan slept in the aisle of the van. Come to think of it, the crazy badass European couple might have chosen to sleep outside just to show us how crazy badass they were.

And that's how we ended day three of the Outback: smooshed inside a laundry room and so exhausted that we fell asleep at 9PM.

Preposterous, wet, breathtaking... does that about cover it?

uluru part two

Day Two --- KINGS CANYON

We were picked up ridiculously early by our tour guide, Dan, who drove the five of us and about ten others to the middle of the Outback. The first day we visited Kings Canyon, which was created thousands of years ago from a tiny crack in the rock that eventually became the canyon it is today. The visit to Kings Canyon was blisteringly hot and bright. You won't understand until you've experienced it, but the Outback sun is terrifying. I wouldn't want to be exposed to the Outback sun for more than a few hours, and I can understand now why all the animals in the Outback only come out at night.

Today's Predicted Temperature Range... It was HOTT with two T's.

After a few hours at Kings Canyon and a near-heat-exhaustion experience for me, we hopped back on to the van and kept driving through the Outback desert. For miles upon miles there was absolutely nothing out the window except red desert and short, scraggly shrubs growing by the edge of the road. It was an altogether deserted and alien place--like stepping foot onto a Mars that just happened to have a bit of vegetation. Surreal.

A few hours away from Kings Canyon we FINALLY saw Uluru:

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Just kidding! That's not Uluru---it's FOOL-uru! Commonly mistaken for Uluru, FOOL-uru (aka Mt Connor) is actually a mountain, not a monolith like Uluru (don't ask me the difference--I still don't quite understand. As far as I can understand, Uluru is one giant chunk of pure rock, whereas mountains are made up of dirt, rock, and other organic matter.)
ANYWAY, so FOOL-uru. Not Uluru. FOOL-uru. (This pun made laugh for perhaps five minutes straight, and then chuckle until we arrived at our campsite. HEY--when you're in the middle of nowhere with nothing to entertain you but lots of red dirt and your dying ipod, you would get a kick out of FOOL-uru, too.)

After another few hours of driving we arrived at our campsite.

Proudly holding up one of my firewood contributions.

The campsite was literally in the middle of nowhere--no electricity or running water or sign of civilization nearby. We had twenty minutes to gather as much firewood as we could before the sun set and we lost our light, hence the picture above.

But you're probably also wondering about the net that I'm wearing over my face. Wait--did I fail to mention this to you earlier?? Oh yes, right. So there are MILLIONS of flies in the Outback. Buzzing, whizzing, germy, great big black flies that stick to your body and land on your shirt to suck the sweat off of your profusely sweating body because there are no other sources of moisture available. There are no lakes, streams, creeks--NO water, ANYWHERE. (There was water when we were there, but more on that later.) So the flies take to human visitors, attempting every two seconds to dart into our open mouths. As Dan, our tour guide, explained, there is so little shade in the Outback that the flies get excited by the prospects of spending a few seconds in someone's mouth--JUST TO GET OUT OF THE SUN. THIS PLACE IS INSANE, I TELL YA!

Our insanely beautiful campfire.

The Outback at Night (currently my desktop background!)

That night we all ate delicious stew out of a big communal pot and slept under the stars in "swags," which are big heavy-duty canvas sleeping bags that you can fit a thin mattress and sleeping bag into. We looked like a couple of sacks of potatoes lying on the ground. Lying in our swags, we looked up at the millions of stars in the sky and debated whether there were more stars in the universe or more grains of sand on Earth. The stars were all crystal clear and perfectly luminous. It made me miss the days of the old (i.e. hundreds of years ago) when man could still camp out and see the stars from anywhere on Earth. As we fell asleep we watched shooting stars dart across the sky. One piece of advice our tour guide Dan gave us: If you do see a shooting star, don't call out because by the time you do, the shooting star will have disappeared and your friends will be pissed! And so under the stars we slept.

....And here's when the story gets really really GOOD...
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A few hours later (how long, I'm not sure since I had no light available)...

I suddenly wake up feeling like there are thousands of tiny pricks of fire and ice on my skin. I literally feel like my entire body is being licked by tiny, individual flames, and it HURTS like a mother!!! Lying in my swag I am thinking I have gone CRAZY--what else could explain why I was feeling like millions of bugs were crawling on me when everyone else around me was sleeping soundly in their swags?

I jump up out of my sleeping bag and swag and run over to the van, where there are some flashlights. I am wearing only soffe shorts and a thin cami. I grab a flashlight, turn it on, and shine it on my body (probably waking up two or three people in the process). And what do I see? I see a bunch of tiny little ant-like bugs crawling all over me. They're small and black and rapidly scrambling all over my body. Now, unlike some, I am NOT a girl to be freaked out by bugs, so my first reaction was to think that I was just being INSANE or half-asleep for thinking that these little harmless-looking ant-like bugs could be causing me so much pain. It literally felt like my skin was being assaulted by tiny darts. It couldn't POSSIBLY be the bugs. So what do I do? I brush off the bugs I can see and I go back to my swag to try to get back to sleep.

Literally THIRTY SECONDS later I am back to standing up over my swag and freaking out. The crawling/itching/pinching feeling hasn't stopped and it's more tortuous than ever. I dash over to where our guide Dan is sleeping and I wake him up gestapo-style with a flashlight in his face.

"Dan... I think there are some, like, bugs or something that are crawling all over me..."
He turns over, and without even looking at the bugs on me, he goes, "Oh yeah, that'd be the termites."

.... the TERMITES? There is no fucking wood out here in the Outback!!!

"Uh Dan, termites?"
"Yeah, they probably think you're wood and they'll just take a bite out of you to check." He chuckles. ...HE CHUCKLES.

"Uh... okay HOW DO I MAKE IT STOP?"
"Move your swag a few meters away and spray some of this bug spray around your swag."

I do move my swag and within ten minutes I feel the crawling painful pricks on my skin subside. I have obviously moved out of the prime termite territory. I toss and turn and try to go back to sleep. It's hard because the feeling of all those termites biting at me is a sensation I can't forget easily--even writing this today, nearly 6 weeks later, I still feel the sharpness of that CRAZY pain. It's an unimaginable sensation that I would wish only upon my worst enemies.

I try going back to sleep, but at this point it is hardly worthwhile. We have to up in two hours anyway. I am just drifting off into sleep when suddenly I see my friend Lisa a few meters away standing up over her swag, performing the exact same stunned dance that I was doing earlier. She is brushing her arms and legs, stamping around her swag, and looking around in disbelief. She has got termites.

As a wizened expert in termite matters, I matter-of-factly tell her that they are termites and nothing to be worried about. She looks at me like I am out of my fucking MIND. Like me, she can't comprehend how tiny termites can be causing her so much pain. I tell her to move her swag, and she moves closer to me and away from prime termite territory. We both try to sleep some more.

Less than two hours later at around 4AM we are woken up by Dan. We need to get packed and have breakfast and start the day before the Outback's lethal sun rises and makes the heat unbearable.

I move back over to my pile of stuff that I left in the middle of the night and see two of my other friends still huddled in their sleeping bags. Turns out that they ALSO felt the termites, but not knowing what to do, they just scrunched up tighter in their sleeping bags, hoping that the termites wouldn't get in. Of course, the termites DID get in, and the two girls spent the entire night sweltering within their sleeping bags and trapped in a confined space with a bunch of termites.

Turns out the rest of our camp also experienced the termites, and most people didn't understand what was going on. The didn't understand that they were being devoured by these tiny menacing bugs. Everyone else but me and Lisa just tried to sleep through it (meaning that most of our camp got no sleep that night).

Also turns out that the termites were out in so many numbers that night because they felt a huge storm coming on that day. Termites can somehow sense when a big rainstorm is going to occur, so they were out to reinforce their nests or whatever it is that termites live in.

And turns out the termites were right. That morning we had a monstrous amount of rainfall that drenched us to the very bone while we were climbing across Kata Tjuta.

But that's a story for next time.

END DAY TWO.

uluru part one

Take a deep breath, and prepare yourself for this epic Outback tale.

Day One

Eerie view from the plane

We flew into Alice Springs, and from the plane I could already see that we were in the middle of nowhere. I could see nothing but miles and miles of red desert, with a few roads breaking up the monotony. It did NOT look like a hospitable land, even from a few thousand feet above. And upon landing on the ground and exiting the aircraft, the relentless heat hit me like a punch in the face--it was stifling and caused sweat to begin pouring forth from my every pore--this, I realized, would be my home for the next five days whether I liked it or not. (I did end up liking it, but it was really touch-and-go for that first excruciatingly hot day.)

After checking into Toddy's Backpackers hostel, we wandered the 15 minutes it took to get to town, and there we saw very little. Trust me when I say that there is nothing of merit in Alice Springs save a few small museums and one main street. There was nothing in the centre of town except for a few tourist shops, two cafés, and lots and LOTS of Aborigines lounging around in the middle of the day and in the middle of all that late afternoon heat. (Later we would find out these Aborigines were disowned by their respective tribes for alcohol abuse--which did explain why some of them yelled unintelligibly at us as we walked by. It's pretty sad to think about, really. Remind me sometime to write up my thoughts on the treatment of Aboriginals in white Australia--it's pretty horrific.)

a doctor-in-training makes her way to a museum on medicine all the way across the world...

fully equipped RFDS plane

First stop of day one was the Royal Flying Doctor Service Museum (guess whose idea that was). Only after visiting RFDS did I have a notion of how incredibly isolated and deserted most of Australia is. Let me explain. The premise of RFDS is to send doctors in planes all over the remotest regions of Australia, because in most of the Outback there isn't a hospital even within hours and hours of driving. Essentially, it's a flying ambulance service that responds to calls of distress from cattle ranches and tiny towns. ("Oy! Send someone out here--a bloke's just fallen off his horse and broken his leg in three places!" or "Oy! Send a doctor, quick--my wife's about to pop a baby!) The planes are equipped from top to bottom with all necessary medical instruments and a small gurney; I was most impressed by how much they could fit on that tiny plane. (FYI, visiting RFDS also helped to re-inspire my interest in medicine. Which might make a good story one day when I am a ballin' doctor.)

The next stop was the National Pioneer Women's Hall of Fame (again, guess whose idea that was). It was a very well designed museum housed in an former jailhouse that showcased Australian women who were pioneers in their respective fields, i.e. medicine, public service, film, aviation, etc. But the other half of the museum consisted of rather jumbled exhibits on fashion, irons and ironing boards, kitchen tools, lace doilies--you know, all the material objects traditionally associated with women. Don't get me wrong, it was a lovely museum. Kind of like visiting my non-existent Australian grandmother's house.

The story continues soon... no worries, the actual Outback gets much more exciting than this. Alice Springs just sucks.

Stay tuned for Day Two and a good story about how I woke up in the middle of the night scared out of my mind...