Edmond Chan

The road from Alice Springs to Adelaide in South Australia was a monumental 1,500km. After several days in the desert, it was great to be driving through a proper city, through the outer suburbs to the heart of the CBD. Adelaide is known for being a conservative city. It has strong colonial heritage and a population keen to remember its history as a non-penal settlement. Its original city planner designed the centre of the city as a square mile with streets (North Terrace, East Terrace, South Terrace and West Terrace) marking the CBD boundary. This square mile is surrounded completely by a ring of parkland, which itself is protected from development. Adelaide‟s suburbs extend beyond this ring of greenery.

After Damo dropped us off, we set up camp in a very basic hostel just off the CBD in Franklin Street. There was no air-conditioning in the dorm despite temperatures being in the late 30s. It was so hot in my dorm that we had to leave our windows fully open at night; luckily there were no more flies but now we‟d wake up bitten to shit by mosquitoes. Still at that price, it wasn‟t that bad. My hostel was only a couple of streets away from the well-stocked Central Market filled with gorgeous delis and foodie delights, and next door to the market is a large Chinatown off Gouger Street with delicious food catering to a backpacker‟s budget.

After catching up with Kay Johnson, an old friend from work in the UK, Rich and I explored the CBD in some of the most extreme temperatures I‟d ever experienced. At midday, it would touch around 38 degrees and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The North Terrace is packed full of interesting places to visit; for example, the Art Gallery of South Australia is a stunning building next to one of the universities with superb paintings by some of the early pioneers of Australia, with the Tasmanian wildernesses being particularly popular subjects. Next to this is an impressive museum, the South Australian Museum. Aside from exploring the CBD, we crossed the River Torrens into the “green belt‟ where we spent much of our time playing golf on the Adelaide City Golf Links, North Course; just idyllic afternoons. The evenings were great fun as well; Adelaide usually gets pretty short shrift from both backpackers and residents of the more glamorous Australian cities, such as Sydney and Melbourne. However, I found it to be a fun and very liveable city. I was lucky enough to be visiting it during its festival season. I was there during a month of the Garden of Unearthly Delights in Rundle Park which came alive during the night, a huge, alternative carnival with various tents and arenas dedicated to theatre, comedy, circus acts and plenty of live music. I was also there for the start of the annual Fringe Festival, claimed to be the biggest Fringe Festival in the world. Not for nothing, it seems, is South Australia known as the Festival State.

Adelaide also has a great beach in the Glenelg suburb. Glenelg is twenty minutes out of the CBD on the tram and has a feel not unlike Brighton on the English south coast. It’s laidback, chilled out, liberal and hippy – a really great place to spend a couple of days. The beach there is stunning; it’s almost impossibly long, the waters are incredibly clear and the sands are invitingly pristine. Here, I met up with a friend of mine from back home, Nick Souter, who was on a medical student exchange. He’d already been in Adelaide for a few weeks and was loving living in Glenelg. It was fantastic to see him; a familiar face from back home. He was with some of his friends who were on the same medical exchange and, with them, I enjoyed my first ever Aussie barbeque with proper “snags” on the barbie and ended up on a boozing session on Hindley Street (the main nightlife district of Adelaide), riding mechanical bulls in bars. The next day, we went to the Norwood Food, Wine and Music Festival which more than 100,000 people attended. You buy a glass at the start and use it to buy wine from the hundreds of stalls belonging to regional producers. At one stall, I was asked by a woman what I thought of

the Barossa Valley (a famous wine-producing area near Adelaide).

“I haven’t been yet, I’m afraid.” And I probably won’t because soon I’m off to the Great Ocean Road in the other direction!
“You what! Are you fucking joking? You come to Adelaide and you don’t go to the fucking Barossa? Can you believe this guy?”

I made the trip from Alice Springs to Adelaide via Coober Pedy without my travelling buddy Grant, who returned to the UK after Uluru. It was sad saying goodbye to him because we’d seen so much together, from South America to Australia, but of course we gave it a manly handshake and a manly hug. On one level, it was great travelling with someone else, particularly with such a good friend; you’ve shared experiences to last a lifetime. On another, it was exciting to be completely on my own and see the travelling experience from that perspective. I was instantly surprised by how much more freedom I felt. It’s not that there wasn’t any before; of course there was. It just that now there wasn’t even the hint of any compromise on where to go next, where to go for dinner, how long to spend in a particular place etc. On your own, you simply get up whenever you want and do whatever you want. It‟s an unbelievable feeling and one that I‟d never experienced before.

Before leaving Alice Springs, I stocked up on books for the road. (Reading is one of the most common experiences between travellers. You have so much free time, both in the actual process of travelling and during the natural lulls as part of the rhythms of the day. You generally want something that’s edifying, something that you wouldn’t normally have the time or the energy to read, but it‟s got to be light; you’re carrying it around after all.)

I used the bus trip to Adelaide as a transit, with the added benefit of squeezing in another slice of classic Outback history in Coober Pedy. Our guide was called Damo, a classic, stereotypical top Aussie bloke. He wore khaki shorts, a matching shirt and just looked pickled pink from all the years of sun. He introduced me to the delights of Coopers’ Original Pale Ale beer brewed in the bottle straight out of South Australia; absolutely delicious stuff and (along with Little Creatures Pale Ale) the best beer that I enjoyed in Australia. I also met Rich West, a great guy from Essex with whom I was to spend a few days exploring Adelaide with.

Coober Pedy is about 800km south of Alice Springs on the way to Adelaide. It‟s an opal mining town, known as the opal capital of the world, where people actually live in houses carved into the rock hills and deep underground. The underground houses have a hobbit-hole-like feeling with a surprisingly consistent and pleasant temperature of about 20 degrees Celsius.

Coober Pedy is properly a frontier town (the nearest settlements are hundreds of miles away) where it’s rumoured that men outnumber women by 8 to 1 (absolute bollocks according to the 2006 Census! 1,084 men and 832 women!). There are danger signs everywhere warning people about disused mine shafts. Rumour has it that, should someone be murdered, these shafts would be perfect for the disposal of the body. We spent the night in an underground dormitory with no windows or any shafts of light; it was easily the darkest night’s sleep I’ve ever enjoyed, more so even than that night in Ollytaytambo in Peru. From Coober Pedy, it was another 850km south to Adelaide. There‟s absolutely nothing to see on the road down; it‟s just rocky desert. The road is almost straight at all times with only the odd kangaroo sign as a point of interest.

We were heading towards Southern Australia, which at that moment was under bushfire alert. Victoria had been particularly badly hit with almost 200 people losing their lives in the fires that summer. As we approached Adelaide, I noticed the landscapes changing; this was more farming country, there was much denser vegetation, which I saw was completely dry. The fires that dominated the national newspapers were in everyone’s minds. The fires that raged in Victoria in the summer of 2009 were incredibly fast moving; to the point that cars couldn‟t out-speed them. I read reports of cars attempting to escape the fires being engulfed in flames. Whole towns and villages were caught by capricious and uncontrollable fires. The press was filled with burned out cars and buildings and there was a national sense of mourning and grief.

We stopped off for lunch in Port Augusta on the coast which was the first glimpse of open water I’d seen since Cairns and visited Port Germaine, which has the second longest jetty in Australia. The beaches on the south coast have a distinctly British feel to them, with a tangibly lighter shade of blue to the skies, and a salty smell to the air, with old-fashioned wooden beach huts, which reminded me of Brighton.

After Cairns, we flew into Alice Springs in the south of the vast Northern Territories (The Outback State); a place almost slap-bang in the middle of Australia. It’s another example of how big this country is: it’s 2,500km by road from Cairns in the far north-east to Alice Springs in the very centre. I’d been looking forward to this for ages, ever since arriving in Sydney. I wanted to see the “real Australia” that I’d had in my mind from the UK; the Outback and the famed red dust. During the approach into Alice Springs, I could see the red desert below.

Alice Springs is a city in the middle of nowhere! It sits amid the spectacular McConnell Ranges and there‟s absolutely nothing around it. Darwin is more than 1000km to the north and Adelaide is around 1500km to the South. The first thing you notice in Alice Springs at this time of year (the height of summer) is the extreme heat (around 40 degrees Celsius and just on the edge of bearable). The next thing you notice are the incessant, ever-present flies. They’re easily the most populous creature around here. The things are apparently attracted to the protein in your skin and, for as long as it’s daylight, they never leave you alone. They get in your eyes, your hair, your nose and, worst of all, they’ll rest on your lips if you let them. Horrible when you know where they’ve been! Every tourist wears a fly net like a veil over their head.

From the top of nearby ANZAC Hill, you can see the whole town. It’s the classic Aussie town that non-Australians carry in their minds about the Outback. It’s not very big and is surrounded by absolutely nothing; just red desert.

Alice Springs has the feel of a frontier town, the life-affirming feel of the Wild West. There’s only about 30,000 people here and, somewhat surprisingly, Alice is reportedly the lesbian capital of Australia, with the highest percentage of lesbians in any town or city in the country; it genuinely is a diverse and welcoming place. It’s got some of the harshest terrain I have ever seen. There’s hardly any green at all and it’s more arid than any land I’ve ever come across. Some wildlife does seem to flourish here though such as the rock wallaby, a marsupial not unlike a small kangaroo (they‟re very laidback and gentle to the point where they’ll even eat out of your hand).

Unfortunately, Alice Springs also has some serious social problems. I‟d previously seen little of Australia‟s indigenous population. I‟d seen very few Aboriginal people in Sydney and very few in Cairns. However, here in Alice Springs, a significant percentage of the population is Aborigine. In the week that I was in Alice Springs, I noticed that there were significant numbers of Aborigines sitting all day under trees ostensibly doing nothing at all. It wasn’t until after a few days that I learned that there was a serious alcohol abuse problem within the indigenous community in Alice Springs. Aborigines of all ages are drunk a lot of the time. The problem is so great that all liquor shops have restrictions unique to Alice Springs on the amount of cheap alcohol that can be bought. For example, no boxed wine can be bought before 6pm and, when the boxed wine does become available after that time, it’s available in smaller quantities than other parts of Australia, and only one box may be bought by each person per day with photo identification being mandatory. It wasn’t just in the bottle-shop that I saw this problem; one time, I was walking through the centre of Alice Springs, when a clearly drunk Aboriginal man politely asked me to follow him into the bushes. I couldn’t think of any good reason to go with him, even in the interests of cultural exchange! I politely declined his invitation and he promptly let fly with a volley of abuse; I walked away pretty quickly.

With regard to the problems and issues facing Australia in respect of the indigenous population, having been in the country for less than a month, I‟m in absolutely no position to assess the issues. However, even from my limited outsider perspective, the gulf between the widely-held desire for the indigenous population to integrate into society and the extremely sad reality is enormous. It truly seems that British settlement was a disaster for the Aborigines, the vast majority of whom were displaced from the lands they lived upon, and suffered not only many decades of mistreatment, but also the devastating impact of imported disease and alcohol (apparently, their bodies are ill-equipped to process alcohol). It‟s unimaginable that Aborigines would be able to return to their previous way of living even if they wanted to. The only viable alternative is their eventual integration into Australian society. Of course, one of the biggest means to this is through employment, although this is difficult to encourage when literacy levels and educational standards across the community are well below par. The most astonishing and saddening statistic I‟ve heard regarding the Aboriginal community is that their life expectancy is nearly twenty years shorter than that of non-indigenous Australian people, the average life span of an Aborigine being around just 58 years old. The issues surrounding the Aboriginal peoples are enormous and solutions are not apparent. But the only thing that‟s clear is that the current situation is completely unacceptable. I don‟t think that the absence of solutions is down to a lack of political will; on the contrary, even from the outside perspective of a traveller, I sense a feeling of deep guilt from many parts of Australian society over the current state of the Aboriginal community and, whilst solutions may not be forthcoming, people will surely support anything that‟s an improvement on the current situation.

The next day, we took a two hour flight to Cairns, a major town in Far North Queensland (The Sunshine State). That journey gave us a small idea of just how big Australia is: Cairns is just up the east coast and yet is a massive 2,500km away from Sydney. As soon as we stepped off the plane, the humidity struck and we started dripping with sweat; it was like walking into a steam room with all of your clothes on; you feel the humidity in your face, in your throat and in your nose; it‟s literally stifling. Cairns is another world from Sydney; it has a sub-tropical climate and it‟s quiet and provincial. It‟s also far smaller than Sydney and can be walked from end to end in less than 2 hours. It‟s on the coast and we happened to arrive in the middle of the wet season. This again is further evidence of the sheer massive size of Australia as most of the southern part of the country was undergoing a particularly severe drought. As with most things in Australia, even the raindrops are bigger and the rains more extreme than I‟m used to; for example, a neighbouring town had rainfall of 1.3m in just one day!

We were here in Cairns to see the Great Barrier Reef; it‟s absolutely enormous! It’s a massive ridge of coral and rock that stretches 2,600km from just north of Brisbane to south of the Solomon Islands; it’s the biggest coral reef in the world and apparently it‟s visible from space. It‟s made up of billions of tiny coral polyps and, as such, is the largest living organism-made structure in the world. No wonder it‟s regarded as one of the seven natural wonders of the world. We set off early one morning on a huge catamaran to sail the two hours to a part of the Reef called Michaelmas Cay. It took us two hours to get to the Michaelmas Cay and we were treated to excellent service from the crew. They were all expert divers and working on the boat allowed them to mix work with their passion. Eventually, we came to a stop and I saw a small sandy island (the Cay). The crew explained that the island was formed by dead coral particles that collected over huge periods of time. The tiny island was just over 3.5m in altitude and around 1.5 hectares in area; it‟s a wonder that the Cay didn’t just wash away. The sands were blindingly white with green vegetation in the centre. The coral reef that we would be exploring was all around the island and we were warned not to make contact with the reef for two reasons: firstly, that it would probably cut us and, secondly, that, if we did make contact, we would be doing irreparable damage to it. I‟d never snorkelled before and I was really looking forward to getting into the warm waters. We donned our stinger suits (to negate any grumpy stingrays (post Steve Irwin) or jellyfish), flippers and goggles and swam out over the Reef. Even though visibility wasn’t optimal (due to it being the wet season with the accompanying frequent rains), it was still very clear in the water. I saw huge varieties of coral from the plant-like to rock-like to the giant-brain-like and, all around these, a huge variety of fish that were quick moving or achingly slow, from fluorescent extroverts to almost see-through wallflowers, from the tiniest sea-dwellers to specimens more than a foot long. I saw immense giant clam shells about five feet wide and also a few stingrays trying their very best to hide themselves in the sand. I steered well clear of those!

Our trip also included a free introductory scuba dive. Neither Grant nor I had done this before and we were really looking forward to it; it‟s clearly more interesting than snorkelling. Before diving, first, you have to learn simple techniques for clearing your goggles of water (touch the top of your mask, holding it to your face, and blow through your nose), for clearing your mouthpiece (blowing hard into it) and, probably most crucially, techniques for equalising your ear pressure (hold your nose and blow hard or by simulating a gulp). Without this last technique, the headaches caused by ear pressure would become unbearably painful even at just 5m underwater. I had trouble with equalising my right ear but eventually I sorted it. Four of us linked our arms and off we swam under the huge catamaran. I could see the massive anchor chain just metres from me. Our guide took us for an exhilarating half-hour dive that took us under the boat and to other parts of the Reef. At this depth, the Reef is huge (although I‟m certain not as to how large it might get); instead of coral beneath us (as it was where we snorkelled), here the coral was like a giant, solid, high wall; I felt like I was swimming in an underwater ruined city. The fish we saw here were bigger than we saw the ones we saw when snorkelling earlier; but unfortunately, I still didn‟t see a „Nemo‟ fish. Maybe next time!