Into the Outback

On Saturday we arrived in Brisbane after spending about two weeks traveling by bus through the Outback. Following our rendezvous in Adelaide after our week of independent travel, we all boarded a bus and drove for about 7 hours up to the mining town of Broken Hill. The town had absolutely nothing in it, we stayed on the main street in a hotel called the Palace (you might know this hotel if you have seen Pricilla Queen of the Desert because it is the hotel that was featured in the movie). While in Broken Hill we visited the Royal Flying Doctors Service, which is the only way that people that live in remote parts of the dessert get any medical care. When there is an emergency, the doctors fly out into the outback where an ambulance could never get. We also went to The School of the Air, which is a similar principle, but for school. It is basically a grade school that is through satellite connection on the computer. Each grade has a class every day on the computer where they have a web cam so that they can see their teachers giving the lesson at the home base in Broken Hill. We sat in on a kindergarten class and listened to the kids cute Aussie accents.

After a couple days in Broken Hill we drove a ways to Kinchega National park, which sits on the Minindee lakes. These lakes are part of the Darling River and are the water source for Broken Hill. Because of the drought, the Minindee lake was completely dried up until just 2 months ago. It is very interesting to be traveling in Australia right now because just a few months ago the landscape looked completely different. Australia has been in drought for the last 10 years but recently due to all the rain, everything is different. There is once again green plants growing and the whole Murray Darling river system (which is what we came here to learn about) actually has water flowing through it. To get an idea for how strange this was, during the drought years the whole interior of Australia never got more than one inch of rain in a single year...

In Kinchega National park we stayed in small bunk houses and spent two days in the field doing biology experiments of the flora and fauna. I spent a good 4 hours one day watching ants run around a large ant hill to try to understand how they ANTeract with each other. It was surprisingly interesting!

Following our stay at the national park we drove another 5 hours to a sheep station in the middle of nowhere, then again, everywhere that we went was in the middle of nowhere... This sheep station was 325,000 acres, which is bigger than some US States. People can have land this big because the center of the country is just desert, no one wants to live there. 95% of Australia’s population lives on the coast near the water. The unique environment makes the wildlife here magnificent. We saw heaps of wild kangaroos, lizards, pelicans and emus but thankfully no snakes. The other day while I was sitting outside of the cabin writing a Goanna (which is a huge lizard/reptile that is about 5 or 6 feet long) walked right in front of me across the road. The sheep station was interesting because of the large size and unique wildlife however, we did not actually see any sheep while we were there...Hmmm

After the sheep station, we drove all the way to the coast to a small beach town called Port Elliot. I was so happy to see ocean again and be out of the outback, at our accommodation the beach was our backyard. In Port Elliot we went on a boat tour of the mouth of the Murray River. We saw the place where the whole Murray-Darling river system opens up into the ocean. It was kind of breath taking to see all of the water that had come through the whole country flowing into the open ocean.

Finally after Port Elliot we drove back to Adelaide to catch a flight to Brisbane. For the next month in Brisbane, I am staying with one other girl from the trip in a home stay. We are living in a small town house with a young couple in their mid 20's. It is a nice house but they do not have Internet, which is going to be hard to adjust to, especially for doing research. It is very nice to be stationary in one place for a while with my own room. For classes every day I will take a bus into the city to the GED office where we will have lectures.

I am glad to be here but also getting back to the city means that I once again have a lot of school work to do so, I should probably stop writing and get to work!