Feb 09 - Outback Nick and Wolf Creek

When we got to Adelaide we discovered the tour company had booked us a basic dorm room in a backpackers, which was alright for me and Anthony, but my parents hated it. Somehow all four of us had failed to spot the tell-tale words “overnight dorm accommodation included” on the invoice. We decided to upgrade our accommodation to hotels for the rest of the trip. Whack it on the plastic and to hell with it. I certainly wasn’t going to complain about a bit of extra luxury!

After the Great Ocean Road trip we had a free day in Adelaide. I did laundry while my parents went with Anthony to find him a dentist for his toothache. It is a small city, easy to explore on foot, but our sight-seeing was curtailed by scorching 43˚C temperatures. That’s a heatwave even by Australian standards. Stepping outdoors was like walking into a furnace. We smeared ourselves with as much suncream as possible and went out to do some shopping. Then we sat out in one of the parks, which was deserted. Anyone with any sense was sheltering indoors. My mum got a bit ill due to the heat, but she recovered once we sat down in a cafe and gave her some water.

Later on we had dinner and a few drinks with Seana, a Scottish girl we met on the trip. Everyone had an early night. I was suffering from a profusion of inflamed mosquito bites all over my back and shoulders, due to sleeping next to an open window in Halls Gap. Much as I was grateful for the holiday I was tired of living out of a rucksack and starting to feel like I was losing my grip. Every day I’d pack; then unpack; then pack again; then unpack; living in a permanent state of travel.

The day after, it was time to start the next leg of our journey, an epic six day trip through the desert that would bring us to Alice Springs. No more coastal rock formations for us now. We were joined with some of the people from the last trip and a few new people, including a cantankerous old lady called Esther who seemed decidedly out of place. Other than that the group was mostly young travellers in their twenties. It was a big group; the pavement was strewn with backpacks and mounds of luggage as we loaded up the van’s massive trailer unit.

Our guide was Nick, a burly man of the outback who dressed in khaki shorts like Steve Irwin and carried a fearsome Bowie knife. He had a different style to Dave (the last guide), much more serious in tone and less extrovert. However he too was a bloody good guide and turned out to be a right laugh once we got to know him.

On the first morning we stopped in a country town for breakfast, passing through the last set of traffic lights we would see in a very long time. The road north into the desert was long, straight and lonely. South Australia was the only colony in Australia to be settled exclusively by free men, not convicts, and they always make a big thing of this. It’s hardly a populous state, made up mostly of farming country and arid desert plains. Most of the farmlands inhabited in the 1800s soon dried up, leaving a trail of abandoned settlements stretching north.

Much of our time was to be spent on travel; be it on the road, packing up the trailer unit or unpacking it. Nick organised us with military precision. This was by necessity, as the distances we covered were huge and the places we would visit were unimaginably remote (from start to finish the road journey from Adelaide to Alice Springs measured about a thousand miles). Everybody pitched in preparing the meals – we mostly survived on burgers and salad, those staples of Aussie food. Flies were just extra protein. All of the supplies and cutlery were carried in two or three big cooler boxes in the trailer and had to be carefully looked after.

Our first stop was at the Kanyaka homestead, a cluster of stone ruins dating from the 19th Century. The farm was abandoned long ago when the lands dried up, and it presented quite a ghostly spectacle. The weather was once again scorching hot, topping 40˚C. Nick warned us gravely that it would get even hotter as we travelled farther north. For now I felt safely protected with a hat and sunscreen. We’d all bought fly-nets too – an essential item of headgear for keeping out the marauding waves of flies.

We travelled on into the hills of the Flinders Ranges, and went to look at some Aboriginal rock paintings in Yourambulla Caves. Nick explained all about the local indigenous cultures, and it was clear he held them in high respect and wanted to give us a comprehensive education on them. He told us lots about the native wildlife too. The paintings were simple groupings of animal pictures and symbols and apparently date back to 5,000 years ago. Up until the 20th century the caves are thought to have been used as a school for the Aboriginal children.

Once again we did the introductions over the bus’s mic but this was halted by a technical malfunction and never finished. That made learning the names of the new people a bit harder, but soon everyone was chatting away and having a good time. It was a bit of a mystery why Esther had chose to come on the tour – she wandered round muttering under her breath constantly and was appalled by the fact the dorms were mixed. She would probably have been better off going on a luxury coach tour but she seemed intent on saving money.

Our first overnight stop was in a country town with the odd name of Quorn. This was once a railway outpost and agricultural centre but now the town mostly revolved around tourism. It had nothing to do with quorn whatsoever. We stayed at an old mill that had been turned into a restaurant and motel development. Down the road was the grand-sounding Transcontinental Hotel which in reality was a redneck pub.

Now the four of us had upgraded our accommodation we were spared another dorm and given our own room with a fridge and en-suite bathroom. Cold drinks were bought and placed in the fridge by us ready for early-morning consumption. Say what you like about Anthony – he knows how to plan drinks refrigeration for maximum enjoyment.

We all sat out in the long summer evening, enjoying an eclectic barbeque of emu burgers, kangaroo steaks and camel sausages. Vegans must have such a shit time when they come to Australia – it is a country of staunch meat-eaters. Anthony got chatting to a Scottish couple who knew Blackpool well and had even been to Popeye’s, the takeaway round the corner from our house. We were joined by Matteo, an Italian guy from our last trip, and Franco, another Italian.

With some prompting, Nick told us the tough story of his life – orphaned at a young age, he had been left to raise his sister alone. Now his sister, grown up, had run off to join a religious cult in England and severed all ties with him. He’d got back in touch with her eventually but relations were strained – any attempt he made to talk her out of it was met with fresh hostility, and there seemed to be nothing he could do to change the situation. Much like Abdul in Manjimup, he was bravely ploughing a lone furrow in life and not looking back.

The wake-up times on this trip were extremely early, ranging from 4am to 6am each day depending on how much travelling needed to be done. As the sun rose the next morning, we went on a hike to Warren Gorge to observe the rare and timid yellow-footed rock wallaby in its natural habitat. Wallabies are native marsupials that resemble small kangaroos. We saw a few of them watching us tentatively from a distance, and they would disappear into the undergrowth at the slightest movement or noise. They had rather endearing yellow-and-grey striped tails.

The hot weather meant some of the itinerary changed – the more demanding hikes were out of the question in this heat. But we still did a lot of strenuous bushwalking, which I was glad of. The next odyssey we went on was through Wilpena Pound, a huge circle of mountains that resemble a giant meteor crater from the air. After a barbeque lunch we spent the afternoon walking through the woods in the hollow.

Several of us took the more ambitious option of climbing to the top of Mount Ohlssen Bagge, a huge, steep climb. Some of the others made it all the way to the top and saw the splendid views of the surrounding mountains. I got about two-thirds of the way up but couldn’t finish it – the levels of heat were insane and I would have got ill if I’d gone much further. I was gutted I missed out, but everyone has a limit in these circumstances.

Somehow on the way down from the hill Matteo and I got separated from the rest of the group. We ended up waiting in a car park, the wrong car park entirely as it turned out. However this gave me a thrilling close-up encounter with some wallabies skulking in the bushes, and I got some great photos of these strange, shy creatures while I was looking for somewhere to throw away my Calippo wrapper.

Back on the bus, with zero fatalities from the death hike, we left Wilpena Pound. Next off was a stop at Huck’s Lookout, a scenic roadside stop, followed by a visit to the roadside location used in the Wolf Creek movie poster (much of the movie was filmed in South Australia). Everyone was keen to get a photo of this, and Nick posed in the road clutching his bowie knife, looking every inch a psycho outback farmer. He did various comedy poses of ‘murdering’ people too.

We stayed at the mill in Quorn a second night and enjoyed another barbeque. For after-dinner entertainment we of course watched Wolf Creek on DVD. Nick dropped a few hints that he would play a prank on us when the movie reached a scary point – something along the lines of bursting into the room waving his knife – but he didn’t. Sometimes the rough Aussie humour doesn’t translate to us delicate foreign souls, and maybe he knew this. My dad and I watched about an hour of the movie then went to bed. No disrespect to the Australian film industry, but it is a bloody terrible film.