Dunes and Dingos and the Last Hurrah

Our last big trip for this journey was a venture to Fraser Island, the world's largest sand island! It's really a big old pile of sand held together by mangroves and other veggie life. We bookended this trip by stays in the Hervey Bay hostel, which I have nothing to say about because Hervey Bay is dead quiet. It even describes itself as the gateway to Fraser Island. So, we had to take a ferry to Fraser. This is how excited I was waiting for the ferry:

[this and all photos from after losing my phone can be credited to Katie Steffy!]

So clearly highly anticipated. The ferry included similar activity. But then we landed! We were in massive land cruisers because you need jacked up four wheel drive vehicles to navigate this place. It's the bumpiest terrain on the planet short of active volcanoes I'm sure. Sarah drove my vehicle [we had two] most of the time and I rode in the back among the groceries. Sarah is an awesome driver. My head slammed into the ceiling [of a huge SUV] at least every minute. We were so jostled we probably all have concussions. But it was so much fun. Sitting with the groceries was great too because we'd go over some serious bump and they'd just surface in my lap. Once I caught a jar of jam with no lid

 Baffling

It was raspberry. Day one was really just lurching around the inland and coming to the beach at sunset. We got to drive on it once the tide went out: so cool! Forest to the left, waves crashing to your right, and you're going 80 kph in an SUV! There were vicious dingos all around too! We took lovely sunset pictures. The sand was so wet it reflected the colors beautifully.

Then we camped in a cabin thingie. We made bangers for dinner and it was delicious, we're pretty good with a barbie now. We all partied together [even Dr. Geyer!] and I did the wop and it was just the best. The next day was jam packed with Fraser: a shipwreck [whch never really wrecked, but was just left to decay on the shore], hiking to a cliff, the champagne pools, spotting tons of whales, and so on.

Still cool

"The General" and "Poseidon"

Then we ferried back!

Hanging on to consciousness

Finally we were ready to head to Brisbane. We went to the Gold Coast first, a famous surfing shore. We went to a beach called Surfer's Paradise, aptly named because all but about 50 feet is reserved for surf craft. We didn't have much swimming area therefore. So Sarah and Torie began building a sand sculpture. It was a big VT, and I was hired as chief moat engineer. I dug those moats with everything I had in me, but we picked a sucky piece of beach and a sucky time because the tide came in hot. Eventually I resorted to flopping down in the sand as a sacrificial barricade to protect the sculpture. This worked feebly at best, but we  finished the sculpture! I'll post the pictures from my camera on Facebook, but it was sweet! I had to get all the sand off so I timidly entered the ocean, which promptly smacked me in the face and engulfed me. The current was incredibly strong, no wonder there's 3 feet of allowable swimming area. I spent all my time and energy sprinting to the far end of the swim area only to not move at all or make some progress and be immediately carried back by the next wave. It was brutal, but I had so much fun.

Finally, we went to the city. Brisbane is a coast city with a river running through the middle, making water taxi a convenient way of getting around. We arrived at night and checked into our swanky apartments, a special treat for the end of the road. Then we all went out for dinner! Really close by was quite a nice bar and restaurant where we celebrated Katie's birthday! We had a fun meal, everyone bought her drinks, and she got the best ice cream I have ever eaten in my life. It was not of this world. I'm still scared about it. We danced In the city at night and had a grand old time.

The next day was our last, and a free day. I awoke to smells of breakfast, everyone had congregated in our apparent to make omelette breakfast! So fun for us to cook all together. We had fresh fruit and brought a whole breakfast plate to Dr. G. Man we're nice. Then we went souvenir shopping, as it was our last chance. A few of us had lunch together in a super hip pasta restaurant which had gummy bears at the hostess stand. I took a totally inappropriate amount of those. Then we dawdled around the city before big farewell dinner! Dr. Geyer got us reservations at an insanely fancy place. They had quail and veal and duck and so many fancy things I was just confused. I had the veal [12 of us did, it was the only thing we recognized], and some green bean fanciness and a peanut butter brownie situation for dessert. It was scary how good everything was. Also how full i was after. During all the fun, Dr. Geyer gave his big goodbye speech. We each had a chance to say a few words, and many did. Many cried too, it was a really wonderful evening together.

That night of course we celebrated extra hard at the Down Under Bar, another backpacker bar. We danced and laughed so much, and met such cool people! A ton of rugby fans and players were there because of a huge match happening this weekend, and they were wild! I made friends with a dude Luca from Milan too! Mostly we just had a really fun time together. The DJ found out a massive crowd of Americans was there so he played stuff like party in the USA and country roads and stuff, so we danced on a table and it was ridiculous. We left a little after 4 am, in full knowledge we needed to leave for the airport at 7. No regrets!

The 12.5 hour flight to LA gave us plenty of time to recover. This time we gained time instead of losing it, so I ended up experiencing June 21st for 40 hours. it was Ben's birthday too, so we were wishing him happy birthday endlessly. In LA I had to say goodbye to all my new friends however. They continued on to Dulles while I turned around and caught a flight to Honolulu. I'm visiting one of my best friends here for one week. So I'm still far from home, but the journey of Australia has ended.

I'm in one piece with only one gnarly scar [disappointing], but with a million awesome memories. I'm stoked I got to know 15 people I knew nothing about previous to leaving the ground in Dulles one month ago. Thank you all my teammates for being you [insane]. Thanks mom and dad for hearing my crazy proposal in March and rolling with it! Last, thank you so much  for enjoying the adventure with me. I hope your curiosity for this ridiculous continent has only been intensified, you have to see it for yourself. It was a taxing month, but I'm absolutely stoked that I did.

G'day mates!

I'm on a boat.

Wowowowow! So I'm in America once again, finally catching up on my blogging. You ask, well what about the past week Lauren? What gives? In this episodes friends you will find out exactly what gives, though I apologize for my silence. So we left off in Whitsundays the night before my boat voyage. We arose early next morn and set off on a long walk around the shore to the marina of Airlie Beach. We were picked up there by two tan, blond, strapping lads that turned out to be our crew! They led us to our sailboat, the Hammer, a sweet racing sailboat that would be our home for the next 36 hours. We were led below deck where we were introduced to our cozy living quarters. This place was SMALL. And it's able to house 23! Luckily our group of 16 had the place to ourselves, plus our crew of 3. The beds were little mattress-clad shelves jutting out all over he place. The ceiling was quite low too, and windows from room to room left no privacy. Luckily we're all quite close by now. Most fun was the windows in the ceiling everywhere, so you could creep from above deck, or pop up from below like meerkats. We soon met the crew: Will is 19 and hails from England [and is CRAZY, such a cocky guy, though quite finny], Neils is 20 and from Holland. Both came to Australia fresh and looking to learn to sail and got this awesome gig sailing around beautiful islands with tourists! Our third crew man was the Skipper [a captain- type position], Micko. He was such a bro, he's awesome. He let me steer the boat the first day as we made our way to Whitehaven beach, which is on Whitsunday island and is a very impressive beach. It has the finest sand in the world, it's pure white and the water is light blue and so clear. It's one of the worlds most beautiful beaches and there's no development at all on the island. This sand was used to make the Hubble telescope lens, it's that big of a deal. If you steal any its a massive fine. So we landed on the other side of the island and took a hike to a beautiful lookout over the beach, it was actually breathtaking, post-card status. We snapped some pics and trotted down to the beach! We frolicked around in the water in our extremely attractive stinger suits [like thin, embarrassing looking wet suits], splashing each other and feeling out about being somewhere so beautiful. I went for a lovely walk around the beach, which meanders in and out from the forest line and includes a series of sand bars. The coast wraps around too so he area is a secluded sort of horseshoe shaped paradise. We found neat shells and swam with stingrays! Their tails are MASSIVE, no wonder it killed Steve Erwin. These were peaceful ones though and nowhere near our hearts. Then I went to my bag to take a picture with my phone. Then I realized I had set my phone down at the lookout to take a picture for my friend and never picked it up. Then I got to do some [panicked] running as I returned to the lookout to search for my phone. Unfortunately, all the beach merriment gave someone time to take my phone, a mondo bummer. I asked everyone on the deserted beach if they'd seen it but no one had. Alas, I was separated from the Internet for the remainder of the trip. Anyways, the beach was lovely. Next we did some more boat things and suddenly it was nighttime! We had an awesome night playing games with Will and Neils and spotting dolphins, squid, sharks, and fishies as they came right up to the end of our boat. I drank a ton of tea. We could see the stars really well too, it was magnificent. Then I crawled onto my shelf and let the ocean rock me to sleep! The next day we awoke and snorkeled the Great Barrier Reef! This sucker is the largest living organism in the world! Mountains of coral were right under me, and if I held still fish would erupt out of every cranny and swim all around me, I could even poke them. It was beautiful and salty. The rest of the day was sunning like lizards and drinking tea and...SAILING. IT WAS AWESOME. We felt so speedy, and I got to be in charge of turning this crank to adjust the winches to control the front sail. It was incredible, the boat zips around at a huge tilt, 40 some degrees, so everyone [except me as special winch girl] has to sit on the high side and hold on to prevent sliding back. It was SO COOL. And sails are just beautiful. Aaaaand that was really it for Whitsunday! Sailing is neat. Here are pictures I stole from others.

The bow!

Whitehaven. Wowza.

Micko the thug

Ahoy

Next: Fraser Island and Brisbane!

Hacking Through the Rainforest

Out of the outback and into the rainforest. We landed in Carins, slept, and awoke to day day 21. Carins is a beach town but is really touristy, so the day wasn't insanely exciting. I went for a run with Sarah during which the floodgates of heaven opened, so that was wet. But we got to explore be city! About half the group went skydiving that day so they were tied up all day. But those of us without the funds went to the beach! It was called palm cove and it was beautiful. We splish-splashed and made silly hairstyles and it was delightful. Geyer took us all out to a "half-way done" meal [though it's more like 2/3] at a fancy restaurant, which was nice because the tropical weather allows all he registrants to spill out onto the sidewalks. We enjoyed the night and he got us wine and all that good stuff. I tried crocodile! It's delicious. Then we went to a slightly shady night market with really awesome stuff  like tiny glass elephants, hand painted boomerangs, all sorts of things. And that was Carins! The next morning we made a beeline for Daintree- a rainforest across a river right on the coast. The area we stayed was across a ferry over the river, up an insanely curvy road to Cape Tribulation beach house, nestled nicely in the jungle. It's no-kidding Tarzan status in there. Soon after arriving we hopped in a big van with jail-car type seating, where we all face each other in the back. The guy, Lawrence Mason took us to the edge of the dense rainforest and led us on a 4 hour tour through the steamy mess. He had a machete to hack through vines and everything, it was insane. We saw plants that can give you 24 hour stinging agony, huge spiders, vines that rip your skin apart, and the biggest trees ever. This was stuff I couldn't believe I was seeing.

Lawrence, machete, stinging plant.

Rainforest

Big tree!

The forest is the Daintree Rainforest, the oldest rainforest in the world. We walked and sweated and got caught on vines and tripped over roots and rocks. It was wet and slippery, everything you can imagine. We stopped at a creek and had a small rest from the labor of stumbling all over the place.

Then we emerged into daylight! We spent the rest of the evening relaxing at our hostel/resort, which was only different from the forest in that there was a paved path. It was a series of little cabins strung along a winding path from reception to restaurant. There was a path leading to the beach of Cape Trib, which was beautiful because the sand is always wet and hard, so you can walk right across it. At times, the water, sand, and sky were all the same steel gray color and it was like you were in a room with no ceiling or floor. It was such a relaxing place. For entertainment that evening we found a huge cicada in the boys bathroom and Nathan caught it. We then found an enormous spider in her web on the side of the path and threw the little sucker into the web. We had to tickle it with a stick to get Olga [the spider] interested but then she struck! She stabbed it with her fangs and slowly killed it while the cicada tried to box her. Then she wrapped him up a little with her long legs. Then she ripped its head off!! And we watched [and filmed] the whole thing! It was night time so we lit the scene with our head lamps, it was the most enchanting thing I've ever seen. All the people walking by on the path thought it was so funny to see 7 Americans clustered around like we were watching a discovery channel show. Wow Olga. What an artist. Was that really sick and weird of us to do? Probably. But we just came out of he bush so we were fine with it. Now we have driven all day to Whitsundays, a beautiful beach town. We'll board a sailboat tomorrow morning and won't get off until the next evening! While at sea, I'm going to snorkel the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living organism on the planet! Wish me luck!

Crocs and Kakers [Outback 3]

Day 7- On the road to Kakadu now! We have a new tour guide now, Andy, who is super awesome already, and possibly even more Aussie than Luke. We'll miss him and Kate though, we're sending her a VT hoodie with our signatures so she can be warm in the Alice Springs winters. 

Things have progressed this morning. We're all in love with Andy.

Andy's photography skills.

 He had us do the Wheatbix challenge. Wheatbix is this biscuit of just wheat, it's really crumbly and dry. So you race to see who can eat it fastest. Tori was best at 1:04, and Geyer last at 3 minutes flat. But we lied to Jordan and told her she got 3:11. She still doesn't know. Nathan ran through a bush full of itchy caterpillars and has a rash on his chest, it was so funny. We saw a giant termite home! 

It's made of their poop. We're in a park called Litchfield. We stopped to swim at this waterfall. 

I jumped off a cliff! What a strange country, Australia. A couple days ago we were freezing our bums off in the middle of nowhere, now we're in a tropical paradise. And no one is dead! Just itchy. Then we went and looked at another waterfall high above this place where the country just drops off into flood plains. Then we swam at a third waterfall site where we had lunch. 

There were a bunch of ledges by the falls, so we could climb up and just lie there in the sun and water. So beautiful. The pool was so big you could  swim to the middle and your vision is filled with just cliffs and waterfalls and trees sprouting out of the rock, I wish I could take you all there! Then we frolicked in the grass playing footie and frisbee and eating lunch, and huge birds dive bombed us. Andy taught us dance to a major Aussie song "home among the gum trees." Then we stopped at a gas station/the home of an enormous crocodile. He's a salty so he's huge, 5 meters, and his name is Brutus. We got him to come right out of the water by saying his name in deep voices ["speaking dirty to him"].

He's real!

 There was also a little freshie. And an albino bison. American gas stations don't even have one crocodile. As we were soon arriving at our campsite, we felt a bump under the bus. We'd clipped a wallaby, not unexpected as we're traveling at 100 kmph and they're abundant here. But we broke its leg, so we had to turn around. Andy and a few of the boys went into the bush to find it and put it out of its misery, which is what you're supposed to do Andy says. Sorry little wallaby :( then we camped! We all chipped in to make some curry, and we had cantaloupe  for dessert. We all did line dances for a long time, like the wop, the wobble, cotton eye joe,  Cupid shuffle, and then the gum tree song some more. Then 

 most people went to the little pool nearby but Scott and I made domino structures. Then Jordan, Sarah, and Kelci played go fish with us. I came in last! Then we made card houses! Day 7 ended battling the hordes of mosquitos that lived at the camp.

Scott is a master domino engineer.

Day 8- within the first 10 minutes of being awake this morning we set a kitchen fire. We were just toasting some toast for brekkies, and then the toaster said "pop" and there was a small fire at the outlet, which Andy casually put out. Then he and Ben went over to investigate and there was a bigger pop that almost took them both out, and the toaster was on fire. It turned out that Nathan's Go Pro battery had fallen inside when someone took it out of the outlet, and so that exploded. Whoops. CROC CRUISE this morning. We saw bunches, some quick freshwater whippersnappers, and some saltwater fatties. 

And then we officially entered Kakadu national park!

 It's enormous, the size of Switzerland.  Our newest bus game is bug bingo. We divided up the front windshield into 17 sections, and when we stop tonight, whoever has the most and biggest bugs squished there wins a beer. Then we played car cricket, where each person rides shot gun while 6 cars pass, and tries to get those people to wave. You get a point for each finger they use to wave. I really sucked at it, which saddens me. I need to be a more welcoming road patron. Or Australian drivers are grumpy, likely because its almost 100 degrees and the air is really water. Perfect conditions for our hike, which was in Ubirr, a huge site for Aboriginal rock art. It was an awesome hike, with tons of amazing paintings, rocks, stories, and views from the top of a plateau. We played the lion king soundtrack and looked over the "pride lands," the Aboriginal lands to the east of Kakadu. 

The art is really incredible, they have paintings of what happens if you live near the Kakadu uranium mines, way before medicine came onto the scene. 

We licked some more ant butts and Andy randomly ate a huge spider. It wasn't even to show us or look manly, he did it really quick and sneaky-like so only a couple of us saw... Our newest game in the bus is who can squish the mosquitos that leave he biggest blood smears. We seem to be turning a little bush. Now it's our last night of camping, and again we're hiding from the mosquitos. We did venture out to the jetty on the billabong to check out some barramundi fishing, and to look for crocs. I made garlic bread to sustain us before dinner, which was lamb chops and all sorts of fancy things. We ate family dinner, a perfect last night in the outback. 

This little guy lived outside our tent.

Day 9- Our time outback [and in Australia] is getting short. We fly to Carins tonight and leave in just over a week. But, there are so many awesome things left! Today we scooted out of camp and over to Gunlom Falls, our last piece of Kakadu. It was about 7 am and we already had a look of steamed broccoli about us, it is so hot and wet. But the falls were incredible! We did a big treacherous  hike up to the top and swam in all the upper pools. They were riddled with rocks full of holes for critters to hide in. We clambered through cracks and slid over boulders and all this stuff. I slid down into a rock and got best blood!

 We climbed over to the waterfall on the enormous cliff, and I got to lie there on the edge, so cool! 

We were way up at the top of the falls to the right!

The drop-off

We waved to Geyer way down in the lower pools, and we could see mountains in the distance. Then we went to the lower pool and had an obnoxious splash fight. Then a couple of us sunned ourselves on rocks like lizards. Also there were crocs in the water, classic Australia. I just sneezed and a little bug came out. On the way to the airport we stopped for some delicious homemade ice cream, and played "Cambodian bowling" in the aisle of the bus with a potato and empty bottles. 

Geyer won with a strike!

Andy showed us the bus on "'roo fuel," where he basically breaks a lot and the bus acts like it has hydraulics. SO FUN. The last thing on the way to the airport was a stop at the Charles Darwin national park to see Andy's favorite sign [Beware biting insects] and to get some pics of the city from a good lookout. But as the sign indicated, the short grassy walk to the lookout was laden with biters, so only Nathan, Ben, and Lucas wanted to get out and tke a look. So we drove away and left them and chilled down the road 20 minutes to make them sweat [and itch]. Oh Andy. Now we're in the Darwin airport about to fly to Carins, survivors of the outback and stoked for the next chunk of our adventure!

No big deal

I suck at games.

Onward to Darwin! [Outback 2]

Day 4- We begin the road to Darwin. 

We're traveling the Stuart Highway, the path through the continent from Adelaide in he south to  Darwin in the North. We're jumping on at roughly half way at Alice Springs. Its different from US highways because theres no need for speed. its just two lanes, one each way, and you can go huge stretches without seeing anyone else. So off we go. We found out yesterday that we all were actually Kate's first solo trip, which is AWESOME she is so cool and tough. But she's being trained on this Darwin trip, so we have another guide to lead this one, Luke. He's really cool, a very cliche down under sort of guy. Our journey is themed by 6 hours of traveling in our 25 seat bus [holding the 16 of us, Luke and Kate, and 5 more we are yet to meet], which about each hour of travel separated by some sort of stop, whether a sight to see, a walk to take, or as Geyer exclusively calls it, a potty stop. Today's first was the Tropic of Capricorn!

This statue marks the line.

 It's the imaginary line that separates the arid zone where Alice Springs lives from the tropics where Darwin lives. This means it'll be getting hotter and wetter every day. The one guy passenger outside out group started running back and forth across the line saying in some European accent "ooh it's too hot here, oh no it's too cold over here!" Which was pretty random but funny and an impressive display of energy for before sunrise. Then we stopped at "the big man," a breakfast and potty stop in the shadow of a giant statue of an aboriginal man. There's also an enormous eagle there who is a pet because he is injured and can't fly. His name is Bozo and he's huge. He has a girlfriend/booty call that visits him too. These eagles are the biggest in Australia and their wingspan is bigger than the front of our bus. Then was a visit to an old telegraph house that was part of this telegraph line that crossed all of Australia and connected it to Asia and the world.

 It was pretty historic, and there was a tale of how Aboriginal people killed two men working there, probably because they cut off the aboriginal people from the only water source around. Let me pause this journal entry to say OH MY GOODNESS THE FLIES. There is just an incomprehensible number of flies here. And not normal flies, very brave flies that sit right on your nose or fly into your eyes like birds into clean windows. They're unreal. Then we stopped at the UFO capital of Australia! 

It was pretty weird, they were really milking the alien angle. There was even an advert for an alien conference in March. Don't wanna miss that. Then we stopped at Wauchope [walk-up] for more barbie! And a lie in the grass. It was weird, the front of the bar looked crazy dodgy, but inside led to this little fenced in oasis with a pool, grass, palm trees, and the bar was nice with a little restaurant. There was a large shouty Australian man in tiny shorts with one foot up on a chair like a captain, he was funny. So before and after lunch we just lied in the grass and let the flies take us. 

Next was... Bum bum bum...the Devil's Marbles! Which are...rocks. I could not exaggerate how many significant rocks we have seen here. Because, let's be honest, there's not much else on this continent. But the devils marbles are AWESOME. Enormous piles of rusting round rocks, they were once the site of a volcano, cracks formed in the raised earth formed because of the cold air and the hot earth. The rocks eroded at the cracks and formed boulders! And they're all still connected even though they look like someone plopped them here in the middle of nowhere. So that's he "marbles" part of the name. The "devils" part has a story: so farmers would need to cross Australia south to north with their cattle. They'd get to this chunk of the waste and see the close, low, surrounding mountains and said "hey, we should let our cattle loose here since they can't get over the mountains, and we'll watch from the rocks and sleep and whatnot." And they'd wake up in the morning and half of their herd would be dead. So they'd GTFO with all the cattle left. The place got a reputation but farmers kept trying to use it, and cows kept dying. WOAH. It turns out that there's a plant here called Wallflower Poison Bush, that has extremely sharp leaves. Cows would eat it and it would cut them inside and they'd bleed to death internally. Australia, you just keep outdoing yourself. There are also little things here that the plants drop called "teddy bear ass holes." Not my choice of language, I'm just being authentic. 

So we clambered all over the devil's marbles! Becca definitely got best blood, she slipped climbing up the rust covered boulders.

 We have a fun condition on this leg of Wayoutback that whoever gets to the bus last has to eat a spoonful of Vegemite. None of us are okay with that, so we're quite a prompt bunch. Not many stops after Devils Marbles, just more driving to the best camp ever. Really in the middle of no where, it's called Banka Banka. There's a hill you can climb if you navigate a ton of rough grass and brush, where we watched the sunset and could see that there is just wasteland surrounding this tiny place. It's a space to park campers, community kitchen pavilion thing, a tiny bar, and then camp space. We had the best evening, running around, chopping veggies for an awesome dinner [yes, on the barbie], and gazing at the stars. Which are the best yet tonight. And man, was the Tropic of Capricorn right. It's hot now. It was roasting at the devils marbles, only 4 hours drive from chilly Alice Springs. So camping is awesome without battling for warm sleeping bags. We're all sprawled beneath the spangly sky. I met some of our new travelers! I ate dinner with them but I didn't catch all the names. Philipe is Belgian and awesome, he's 19 like me! He's been in Sydney for 5 months and will go home in July to start uni. He learned to surf and is now a total surfer dude and a goofball. He's also got a Kevin Cashman type afro going on which is comforting. Then there's Anna from some island near Madagascar. She speaks French with Phil and is so nice. She's just finished studying osteopathy in Melbourne and is moving to Brisbane. There's Charlotte who is British and looks just like Rebecca C with really long hair! She is taking one month to see Australia after just starting her PhD in atmospheric chemistry back in England. Then there's a German lady who might be named Judith? She's a young middle school teacher there on holiday but she's really intense and a little scary. But quite friendly. Then one more super nice English girl whose name is Carla I believe, who told interesting stories about people getting drugged in clubs. So they're really cool!  After dinner and running about was didgeridoo time! 

A sweet guide from another tour came over and played for a few of us, and let us try. Lucas was the bomb, he got it pretty quick. Then I tried for quite a while. You have to kind of blow a raspberry, like make your lips flap really fast in the front. And do that into the mouthpiece, but it takes a bit to get the hang of it. But I did! It was so neat to make that low tone, and he taught me how to do a  dingo call with it, since playing the didgeridoo is telling a story. He can do kangaroos hopping and boomerangs flying. Then he told me I was pregnant, which was a little concerning. Then he told an aboriginal story to clear things up nicely: [this story is not appropriate for all audiences] there was once a tribe with a boy named Bilk Bilk [the spelling is dodgy, I'm interpreting an Aussie accent here]. Bilk Bilk was huge, by the time he was 5 or 6, he was the size of a full grown man. When he was around 13, Bilk Bilk started taking an interest in the ladies around in the tribes. But Aboriginal law,  Tjkurupta states that males can only marry girls from certain other tribes. The elders of the tribe saw this would be troublesome with Bilk Bilk so they decided to boot him out of the tribe totally. So he left, but soon girls from a few near by tribes were disappearing. Some tribes men went looking for them one night and came across a giant mans footprint, so they knew what was up. To catch him, they made a big campfire, but set a bunch of pitfalls in the surrounding earth to catch him. They had the finest girls dance around the fire to lure Bilk Bilk in. He saw the fine girls and decided he wanted to snatch all of them, so he ran over but fell in a pitfall. But he didn't fall in totally. You see, Bilk Bilk was a little excited upon seeing these girls, and his...excitement caught on the pitfall and held him up a bit. The tribes men popped out of the bushes and speared him, but Bilk Bilk really didn't want to be caught. So he pulled out his weapon, chopped off his penis, and ran away screaming "you'll never catch me!" So the didgeridoo was made and dedicated to telling his story. It's also a big piece of wood, but I don't know if that's culturally purposeful and significant or if the guides were just saying dirty jokes. So only men are supposed to play the didgeridoo, and if a woman does she's supposed to be impregnated by the spirit of Bilk Bilk. That'd be the ultimate souvenir to bring home, child of an Australian spirit. Anyways, there's a generator here making a racket all night, so I'm listing to "Pirates and Mermaids" by Francois-Paul Aiche gazing up at an incredibly starry sky. If you haven't heard the songs, it's really good, you should look them up and try to imagine what I'm seeing right now. Nighty night!

Day 5- Outback trek to Darwin continues. It's quite quite hot now, no more kidding around with this Australian winter crap. But this is much better. We packed up camp and hit the road for quite a while. Something cool about the outback [aka the bush] is that a "town" can really be just a gas station, but that gas station is a bar type thing with the coolest stuff ever. Our stop this morning was a little shack, but that shack had a bunch of snakes in tanks of varying tempers and venoms. We got to hold the friendliest little guy. Then we had out big stop for the day, an awesome caravan stop town called Daly Waters, famous for having the oldest pub in the Northern Territory. Population, 23. There is one street, with the pub on one side and a tin hut across the road titled the "Daly Waters Soovynear and woodthingstation" owned by a sweet lady and her husband, the most outback, BA man the world has ever known, Chili. He sells kangaroo paw knick-knacks, wooden signs with terrible spelling by a lot of humor, and leather whips that he can crack in the dirt road like a boss. 

Nathan got pretty good at it too. His wife sells hand made "jewellrey" and is just too sweet. Chili is the man. We did some bowling in the street, but since the street is a collection of red dust and rocks, the bowling ball chips a little every time you toss it, and a perfectly aimed throw can veer off to the side randomly a d put you to shame. The pub itself is something to behold: the thing to do is leave a piece of yourself behind. Popular items are bras, panties, t shirts, ID cards, pants, flip flops, flags, kettles, guitars, military and police badges, drink cozies, hats, and money, but there's also a piano, a stuffed dog, a bathtub filled with rubber duckies, hand tools, and more. And they're all stuck to the walls and ceiling and rafters. It is insane. 

Im sippin some pear tea under a palm tree. There's also a sweet tree-climbing cat. This place is the bomb. Marry me Chili. There's also this sign

Once a little boy who was born and lived here was told he had leukemia, and only 3 months to live. So Make-a-Wish Australia asked him what he'd like, and his number one wish was to eat a McDonalds cheeseburger. So McDonalds sent a bunch of ingredients and some staff and Chili's store became a McDonald's to make him as many cheeseburgers as he wanted. So beautiful. Next stop was Bitter Springs! Natural thermal springs in a forest of palm trees, just a short drive from Stuart highway. 

It was awesome! It has a current that pushes people lightly from one algae lined pool, around many bends, to another, where it disappears into thick  grass. We passed under huge canopies of spiderwebs less than a meter over our heads, laden with golden orb spiders the size of my hand [plus all the dragonflies they snared].  We swam with the current to the end, then a few of us braved it back up, which was physically challenging and pushed a lot of algae and bits into or faces. Sometimes tree trunks lurked under the water, and once I ran aground on the end of one and it stabbed me in the chest. Good reminder I'm in Australia. Then we all got weird when we tried and failed not to change  in front of each other. Along the journey we played some trivia, but shouting out was punishable by a spoon of Vegemite, and poor Nathan fell victim first! He was just too excited about trivia. But he did it, bookended by desperate gulps of orange juice. We thought he'd barf. He's my hero. Camping was awesome, Luke and Kate made pasta carbonara, so good. We set up some hammocks and I got to sit in the top one and watch everybody in the hut enjoy each others company. What a good team. Now we have been sitting together for such a long time laughing really hard. Emily drew a picture of Scrott Dregory Goroski, and I like it more than any other work of art ever. 

Day 6- I licked an ant's bum! This one!

It was awesome. Aboriginal people squeezed their butts over food to make it taste like lemon. Today we finish our trek to Darwin! This outback stuff is basically in three segments: around Alice Springs for 3 days [Uluru Kata Tjuta national park], up to Darwin for 3 days which is ending today, and 3 days in/around Kakadoo national park. So today we did Katherine Gorge, a series of 13 or some gorges running through Nitmiluk national park. We were originally going to canoe in the river, but the water level is too high so there are probably salt water crocs in it, a no go for swimming and canoeing.  They're the largest crocodiles in the world, some get to 8 meters, about 24 feet long. Insanity. They have freshwater crocs here too but they don't have as much bite pressure so they're not as dangerous. They're smaller and are the fastest crocs in the world. They gallop like horses and can climb out on tree branches. So most of the group did a river cruise on a ferry in 2 of the gorges, but Lucas and myself, plus the 5 new people and our guides Kate and Luke went for a hike up above one of the gorges and out in the bush on top. 

We saw so many things! Licked ant butts, ate a yellow flower that tastes like butter, ate billy goat plums and got as much vitamin C as 50 oranges, saw a ton of huge bats, sniffed a bunch of plants, and fed an ant to this creature that builds Star Wars episode 6 type sand pit traps, where the ant can't get out and falls to the bottom, and the pincers just get him. We've grown brutal in the outback, we lick ants and feed them to sand monsters. Now it's just expressway to Darwin. But we had lunch and I licked more ant butts and got some other people to do it. Poor ants. We hammockd a bit and I ate a ton of cucumber. This past week our diet has been principally cucumber, tomato, lettuce, and apples, with meat and bread thrown in sometimes. I've had 3 apples [and their stems] just today and its one pm. After lunch we just scooted on to Darwin, with a stop at the Didggie Hut, this awesome shack by Stuart highway where this aboriginal guy makes amazing didgeridoos and sells boomerangs and paintings by aboriginal artists in his community and all that stuff. Plus he had a ton of dogs and parrots for us to frolic around with! The best is that all the money he makes goes to his people. It's an awesome place. Then we got to Darwin, which as far as I can tell is just a bananas city. Our hostel is also a night club/cabana/pool type thing, so it was bumpin all night. The entire street we were on was basically a night club. We had dinner at this restaurant/club called Monsoons, which was fun, especially when the live guitar guy came over and sang "Get Back" and Dr. Geyer started getting down with his bad self. I shared a room at the hostel with Ashley, Sarah, and Scott, which was funny because as soon as he came in he said "oh this is gonna get weird." But it didn't, we all just passed out. I tried to use the feeble Internet to post this blog so it isn't a week long, but I failed. Back to the bush tomorrow!

Woah bats!