Anyway we spent a couple of days in Melbourne just chilling out and catching up with Larissa who I hadn't seen in ages. Was nice just to chill out doing not too much. We took the Overland train to Adelaide and so far all of the train rides are super boring. You get to see a lot of nothingness that is the outback which is nic, but if you are planning on road tripping around the outback at all then I don't think its necessary to take these journeys. Not for the prices they charge anyway. For foreigners though it remains a cheap way to get around the country and see all of the big cities. Most of the passengers were old Australians doing trips around. In fact there are almost no young Australians travelling around the country. Just old people and foreigners. We got into Adelaide and just caught up with my friend Michael. No time to do anything as we would be coming back here later on. We picked up the Ghan the next day to head to Alice Springs and passed through yet more boring scenery. The seats recline well though and you can sleep fine. The food is also reasonably priced so you don't really need to bring your own.
Then we arrived in Alice Springs. There really isn't much to do here. Its a pretty depressing city. I had been told about the drunken aboriginals hanging out, but nothing can quite prepare you for how thoroughly depressing it is. Cannelle even asked 'what did we do to these people?' Fuck me. I have never seen such abject hopelessness as this and I have travelled all over the place. We managed to buy all of the supplies that we would need on the road trip for around $100 and just chilled out for a couple of days. I played some football with guys at the hostel and just chatted with a bunch of random people. Eventually Saturday came and Laura and Varun joined us. I told them that there wasn't much to see and so we just did a food shop, picked up the car and set off down the Stuart Highway. While picking up the car they twisted our arm to get a full insurance which was lucky for us as you will see later. The guy was super road and when Varun was spelling his name he had to correct his spelling with 'No its an I. I for idiot'. He and Cannelle had trouble keeping a straight face after that one. We were off and running on our outback roadtrip. We visited Rainbow Valley on the way and took the car onto the first 4x4 track. It seems that most of the 4x4 tracks in Australia really don't require a proper 4x4 as we took our Mitsubishi Outlander onto most of them. Only the high clearance tracks would probably have been too much and we didn't want to risk the car on those tracks as we were uninsured for them. Rainbow Valley is very beautiful and we had the place to ourselves which would happen a lot on the outback trip. We didn't get too far from Alice Springs before we had to stop for the night. The famous roadhouse no longer has a dingo playing the keyboard, but it still serves decent camel burgers. Varun realised he had forgotten his tent and so we had to call Coober Pedy to check if they had one in stock for the next day. Luckily they did. We were woken up by an emu patrolling around our tent. I was hoping it was a portent of all the wildlife we were going to see on the trip.
The next day we got cracking early (a theme for the trip) and set off for Coober Pedy with relays of driving. On the way we stopped off to visit the Breakaways and the Castle north of Coober Pedy. This actually ended up being the highlight of the trip for 3 of us. Not so much for Laura as she had seen similar rock formations in Salta in Argentina, but at least I now knew why that region was so popular as I had missed it when I was down there. Won't be so spectacular for me now when I get down there. The Breakaways look a little like the painted desert and if you can't get down there then you should definitely get to this place. It looks like runs on an artists palette with the range of colours and the yellow and white castle is really nice. The dog fence is just a fence and the moon plain is a bit of a waste of time, but the others are definitely worth visiting. We made it into Coober Pedy and decided not to stay in the underground hostel (one of two regrets and the only one we could have changed). The city looks like an industrial wasteland and you can see why it was used for films like Pitch Black. Went to see the spaceship from the film set and climbed the central hill for a sunset over the plains. The sunsets in the outback are something else completely and every one is uniquely spectacular. I think when you are out here you get that sense of great emptiness. You can't really appreciate it in photos as I think half of the appeal of places comes from their emergence out of the complete nothingness. I mean you drive for 5 hours seeing absolutely fuck all and then all of a sudden you emerge from the nothingness and in front of you is something unique, spectacular and utterly isolated. Though Coober Pedy was not one of these places lol. We got chatting with some older travellers. The 4x4 and caravan community are very chatty around Australia. People say Kiwis are friendlier. I disagree. They are just comparing the South Island with Queensland. Thats not a fair comparison. If you compare the South Island with Tasmania or the Outback then you find its more or less the same.
In the morning we went up to see the big winch. I liked it while everyone else was underwhelmed. Oh well. Can't please everyone. We tried to visit an underground house but they were all closed so we ended up just seeing an underground church which was super cute. We left and drove up through the moon plain and were aiming to camp in the painted desert that night. The only problem was the rain. It was raining sporadically and we were driving on an unsealed road. We weren't insured for this. Damn it. We eventually got there and somehow even managed to spray sand into the boot of the car. we didn't clean it until the end of the holiday. The painted desert is beautiful but so much smaller than I imagined. Varun didn't tell us it was so small or we would have walked around for longer. Its a pleasant place to be and once again we had the place completely to ourselves. Special. We saw our first kangaroo like animal as well. We are not sure if we ever saw a red kangaroo or if they were all euros. I now think that this one was a euro and the ones at kings canyon were possibly red kangaroos. We decided not to camp there as we weren't sure about the weather and so we decided to drive on back to the Stuart Highway. Its a beautiful place though. We had completed our first few days. We also got feedback from Laura about Queensland. She had said it was nice but not spectacular, which seems to be most of Australia, especially given the prices. She most liked the barrier reef and fraser island. Oh well. No regrets as I think we will come back and do Eastern Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Queensland on one giant diving and wildlife holiday in the future.
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