Northern Territory

I am writing from underneath the watchful glare of the Holiday Inn receptionist, who knows that I am not staying here and am just using their internet.  At $10/hr, they could be a little nicer.  Yesterday I got thrown out of the town library in some little town back up the road.  "We don't offer internet to travelers."  "Ah," I said, looking at the empty bank of computers.  "You do seem very busy."  He didn't think that was funny.  Take heart, Aussies, I think he was English.

The trip underwent a change of pace back in Broome.  Upon picking up my 4WD rental camper, I had to sign several contracts.  The relocation contract basically said that the company would have my head if I took it on a 4WD trail and something happened to it.  I could have paid $3000 and had free reign.  But I paid $250 and was thus restricted.  The route I was planning was about 600 miles of Outback, which is a bit more than a casual drive.  As I looked around at others who had just finished it, their tricked-out machines covered in red dirt, I figured that it was probably prudent to just take the highway around.  I will admit, however, that I was intensely jealous when I talked with some young German guy in a super-equipped Land Rover (two spares, jerry cans, and a couple of babes in halter tops).  But campervans are the way to go here.  Everyone is cruising around in one, from cheap ones filled with backpackers to big plush ones.

I drove the highway from Broome to Katherine, which is a bit like driving I-80 across Wyoming, then turning around and driving I-80 across Wyoming again.  The scenery was an unending flat scrubby country with the odd termite mound or grass fire.  There were a couple of places to pull off, where I filled the vehicle from the jerry cans I was provided (really handy).  The flies assaulted my head before my foot even got out of the car onto the road, so I did the job as quickly as possible and jumped back in. I mashed the pedal to the floor and watched the fuel gauge go down.

Before I left, I got some music from a French guy at a backpackers in Broome.  He was the first random guy I walked up to with a laptop, and I asked him if he would copy some music onto an SD card.  He asked me if I liked techno.  I said sure, whatever you have.  So I got 8GB of awful French techno music for the trip.  He also included Queen's Greatest Hits.

I arrived in Katherine where there is a famous gorge.  You paddle around in a kayak with the vaguely uncomfortable feeling that there might be a crocodile.  The waters are allegedly surveyed to be crocodile-free, but I didn't take a dip.  The crocs are a big deal in the Northern Territory.  As I was driving away from the gorge, I heard on the radio that a policeman was killed by one the night before.  A drunk lady fell into the river and was hanging onto a log.  The policeman jumped in to save her.  A crocodile joined in on the fun and... it didn't end well.  

I drove north to Litchfield National Park where I parked my camper in a great campground next to a waterfall and swimming area.  It was really idyllic.  I went for a dip in the morning and the evening.  As you cruise around the park in the daytime, looking at the sights, you can pull off at these cool "rockholes" and jump in for a swim to beat the heat.  There are a lot of other families swimming there too so I figure the odds were OK as far as crocs or snakes. 

I retire to the camper and cook up some grub.  Everyone has a campervan around here and it's by far the most popular way to travel.  There are cheap ones rented by a group of backpackers, rugged offroad ones, and big plush ones.  The really great feature is the little fridge.  At night a wallaby came to inspect the campsite.  He was the size of a dog but had a head like a mouse and jumped instead of walking.  The next night the mom came instead.  She was smaller and as I looked closer, there was a little joey's head poking out of her pouch.

There is plentiful wildlife.  A lot of it is of the six-legged flying variety.  The flies bite vigorously, the mosquitoes suck your blood, palm-sized spiders spin webs across trails, and ants are absolutely everywhere.  Other denizens include the largest dragonfly I've ever seen and thumb-sized cicadas.  It's hard to concentrate while sitting on the pot and a bat-sized wasp is flying around with you.  Then you look up and there's a bat-sized bat.

Today I drove up to Kakadu National Park where there is a lot of Aboriginal heritage.  Tomorrow I am going to take a tour, camp another night, then head to Darwin where I return my vehicle.  There seem to be a number of things to do in Darwin but I'm playing it by ear.

The Katherine Gorge

Croc trap in the gorge.  Hopefully it isn't full very often.

Big nightlife in the campground

Falls and swimming hole in the campground.  Notice the guy at the bottom left for scale.

Broome

Hello from Western Australia.  I arrived in Broome last night after a rather epic travel day across New Zealand, the Tasman Sea, a continent, and something like 27 time zones.  Australia is big.  Out the plane window there was miles and miles of flattish, red, bushy type country which looked hot.

After filling out the form at the Qantas counter at the airport for my lost bag, I walked down the street to my hostel, which is the cheapest place in town.  It's still not cheap.  There was some sort of techno dance party going on, which I wasn't overly excited about. It's full of young and old, although it seems to be dominated by young attractive tanned types with pedicures.  I think you probably have to have a pedicure if you're in Australia, since you wear sandals all the time.  

I walked into town to buy some sandals and some food.  It is pretty muggy but there is a breeze from the ocean so it's not too bad.  There were a few cafes where tourists sat outside and ate and drank.  There are also lots of Aborigines huddled together in alleys and behind buildings, drinking and/or sniffing gasoline and looking ruined.  It was really sad.  

Today I went on a daylong photography tour run by this English guy named Nigel.  He has a big burly truck and took us out to a few places around town.  There was much camera instruction, and I learned a few things about apertures and ISO and the like.  I was a little bored, though, as Nigel was really interested in things that I found uninteresting, like twigs and sand dunes and abstract bands of color.  I thnk I took away some tricks for the future, but it was a tedious day in the searing heat taking photos of sand patterns.

Nigel is also a real eco-warrior.  Apparently there is a gas company interested in building a drilling facility here and Nigel spent most of the day railing about the injustice of it.  He was full of nuggets of information about ecology which seemed rather dubious or obvious.  "See these vines?  Without these vines here, this sand would just blow away.  It would be gone.  GONE!"  Umm, no shit buddy.  But he was a nice guy and was genuinely interested in our success as photographers.

Tomorrow I pick up a 4WD camper and am going to drive it to Darwin across the wastes on the Gibb River Road.  It's a pretty sweet rig, a Toyota Hilux with a fridge and BBQ and pop-top.  I got a really good deal on the vehicle because it needs to be relocated from one place to another.  The fine print on the contract said that due to the cheap price, you aren't supposed to take it off the pavement.  I figure they have a car wash in Darwin and nobody will know the wiser.  In the morning I will stock up with a week's worth of food and water and also a map or something.  Maybe a pen and paper since my laptop computer keyboard stopped working and they don't have coin-operated computers with sticky keyboards like I'm using right now.

This is a camp of protesters out in the middle of nowhere.  It is hot and there are lots of flies.  Nigel knew them and raised his fist in solidarity.

We spent a lot of the day in the burning sun taking pictures.

In the evening we went to Cable Beach, near Broome.  It was a huge beach, with lots of cars on it, and the locals are out grilling and watching the sunset.  It's a really nice spot to hang out.

Camel tours!  Cue the Lawrence of Arabia theme.

My grocery store thongs still have the tape on them.

I imagine I will have some stories after the next week.  There may or may not be some internet at a roadhouse out there, powered by a kangaroo on a treadmill and run through a satellite dish or something.  If there is, I'll send another update. 

The Arrowsmiths

ski stuff

Be forewarned, mostly this email is about skiing and working on the mountain. I wish I had more to offer, but that's pretty much all I do.  Mostly the working part. I hope it's not too boring, but I figured I haven't written in awhile and I owe an update. 

Last week started off with a wicked storm, our first in months.  This would ordinarily be pleasant news, but I knew that it was likely that I would be stuck on the mountain for the duration.  The road gets snowed in pretty quickly, and due to the gale winds and white-out, there's no travel to or from the mountain during such an event.  They need some groomers up there to keep the drifts in check and the trails passable, so we went up as the angry clouds were rolling in.  Four of us were up for almost four days.  There were also three ski patrollers, two caretakers, and the plow guy.  It's quite an experience, being so isolated in a tempest, but after awhile it gets old.  There's nowhere to sleep (I found a reasonably-clean couch) and you don't go outside.  I did go outside a couple of times (once to shoot off avalanche rockets with the patrollers, which was cool).  Even with my hood pulled so tight that there was just a slit, I still got sandblasted in the eyeballs with flying ice shrapnel.

I went for a run around the cafeteria in my work boots, and hung out reading or watching TV with the rest of the inmates.  I didn't watch that much TV because the slightly (more than slightly) deranged caretaker was always in there boiling a gruesome fish stew and watching dog racing.  I also talked shop with the patrollers over dinner.  They were talking about trying to go for some ski runs when the weather broke.  I said this was a fine idea and I'd be happy to shuttle them up in my 'cat, but I said I'd like to take some runs too.  They looked sidelong at each other and I got the idea that they were sure I'd slow them down.  Patrollers... always with a chip on their shoulder.  At home, we call them "alpine heroes".  I'm pretty certain that I would keep up with these guys OK.

Finally the storm broke and we could get out.  I went home and showered and slept like the dead.  I had the next few days off, and I was more than ready to get out of town.  A dispute with my boss about being paid during my incarceration didn't help my mood.  So I went up skiing at Temple Basin, a "club field" a couple hours' drive away.  

These "club fields" are a remarkable experience.  It is literally a club, with members doing the maintenance work in exchange for reduced rates on skiing and lodging.  Everything is so back-to-basics, it's unbelievable.  Even getting there is a challenge.  This particular field required an hour to hike up to the lodge. The trail was pretty steep and icy for awhile, and I thought it was a pretty good workout.  It got steeper and steeper and then just it went straight into a wall.  There was a rope dangling down.  A rope?  I stared uncomprehendingly.  It became apparent that this was indeed the right trail, and I proceeded to haul myself up pitch after pitch of ice and snow.  This is just to get to the lodge!  At Beaver Creek they have escalators and a lady handing out cookies.  Here, you could quite easily end up a broken heap just getting there.

When I finally arrived, I sat down on a bench where there were five or six other skiers shooting the breeze.  I introduced myself, and was immediately welcomed.  Nobody was in any hurry to do anything, everyone was just enjoying the view and the sunshine.  Eventually they invited me along with their group and we went exploring.  It was bliss.  Later we all went for a communal lunch, which was a big cauldron of ham and pea soup.  You could have seconds if there was enough, and everyone does their own dishes.  And the skiing was utterly phenomenal.  If you felt like it, you could hike to any of a vast selection of crazy pinnacles and ski the kind of stuff that you see in movies.  You could do whatever you want, and there's no hurry, because there were only about 40 people in the whole place and 20 of them are drinking beer on the deck and working on their tans.

Contrast this with Colorado, where there is often a lot more aggression and attitude.  There is a mountain in southern Colorado, Silverton Mountain, which is renowned for its comparably extreme terrain.  I've been there a few times and while it is indeed amazing, it's a totally different scene.  There, you show up, and immediately people look you up and down to see what kind of gear you have.  The staff starts yelling at you from the get-go, telling you that THIS IS SERIOUS and that you need to LISTEN UP! and IF YOU CAN'T KEEP UP, YOU'D BETTER NOT SLOW EVERYONE ELSE DOWN and DID YOU SIGN YOUR RELEASE FORM?  Not so at this little club field in miles-from-nowhere New Zealand.  Some old-timer in a 1970s one-piece ski suit might sit down and tell you a yarn about how things used to be when he was a wee lad, and you'll kick your heels up and listen because it's a nice day and a sublime setting and there's no hurry to do anything at all.                     

Anyway, thumbs up to that sort of thing.  

Often at Mt. Hutt we are "above the cloud", which is nice.  It's gray and dreary down on the plains, then you drive up and up and up the mountain road and suddenly emerge into clear blue skies.  It's always a bit of an emotional lift when that happens.

One of my coworkers navigating his way up the mountain.  Hopefully this illustrates how dodgy it is around here.  When I arrived I was shocked and terrified for awhile, but you get used to it.

Coaches from the Swedish and Canadian ski teams, trying out our homemade slope watering device.  This perforated pipe got attached to my blade, and a water hose is attached to one end of it.  The idea is to spray water onto the snow while I drive around, so the racers have a nice icy surface when it freezes.  The whole activity was an utter failure ("a shitshow", to quote the Canadian coach), with the pipe freezing solid and the water hose exploding all over the run.  Luckily I just sat in the warm machine while everyone else was miserable.

After the big storm.  This isn't fluffy snow, it's packed wind slab.  Every shovelful weighs about 20 pounds, and since they built the lifts with absolutely zero clearance for a snowcat, it all must be dug by hand.  The fish-soup caretaker really enjoys shoveling and attacks it with maniacal enthusiasm.  I think it quiets the demons in his head.

Temple Basin ski area.  It's all yours for the taking.

Found a mirror in the unlikeliest of spots up there.

no winter yet

It's been a tough ski season here at Mt. Hutt.  We've just had no snow.  Hopefully it comes eventually.  I've been through a couple of seasons at Vail where it was bad for awhile but eventually it came.  Everyone has their fingers crossed.  Businesses in town are losing money, and so is the mountain.  I think I'll even miss my chance to watch (ogle) Julia Mancuso, the tiara-wearing US Ski Team downhiller/lingerie model.  They train in New Zealand in the summer but I think they went down to Queenstown where the snow is better.  

We could almost keep the mountain in pretty good shape if it wasn't for the wind.  With the ferocious wind and freeze/thaw cycle, the mountain is in a constant state of disintegration.  Rocks are showered onto the ski runs all the time, and as we groom the slopes we churn it into a slurry of snow and gravel.  A lot of skis are being destroyed.  There have been a lot of jokes made about getting loads of white spray paint to make the place more presentable.  The management (I'm not kidding about this) have already had a company-wide exercise where everyone walks down the hill and picks up rocks and puts them in bags.  They're planning to do it again soon.  Luckily, I am excluded since I work at night.

The snowmaking crew has been working nonstop to try to help conditions.  However, the product is pretty terrible.  The temperatures are not very cold, so the snow guns usually blow a sort of snot/water mixture.  The wind (and their questionable skills) means that they always blow the snow in the wrong spot (i.e. on the chairlift, on the side of a building, or onto their own equipment).  

Work in these conditions is mostly drudgery, since you can't be very proud of your product.  Lately the best entertainment has come from someone who has managed to get on the mountain radio frequency and interrupts radio conversations with... sheep noises.  It's been going on for weeks now. 

"15-8 Lifts, got a copy?"
"BAAAAAAAAA!"

"10-9, could you repeat?"

"I asked if you had the keys to the blue van."

"Oh, right.  I think Ross has them."
"10-4. Ross, you got a copy?"
"BAAAAAAAAA!"  "BAAAAAAAAaaaAAA!"

".....blue van?"

"10-9 bro?  I thought I heard a sheep."

Congrats to Luke and Monica for their new son.  And Patrick and Veronika for their new daughter!

People still manage to fly off the road even when it's completely dry.

Ben the under-employed avalanche dog

The view of the mountain from Methven

My cover-up-the-rocks machine

Breezy night at Mt Hutt

First nor'wester of the season at Mt Hutt.

fjordland

Once again, nothing too crazy in this email.  Just some ridiculous scenery.  That's the thing about New Zealand.  Once you think you've seen the most mind-boggling lanscape in the world, then around the corner there's something that resets the bar.  I had to really pick and choose from my 75 photos per day.

I've been staying in backpacker hostels, which is totally the way to go.  I avoid staying in the dorms, but there are usually private rooms available so you can still hang out in the common areas but not have to deal with snorers and door-slammers.  Being a solo traveler, it's absolutely impossible not to meet people unless you lock yourself in a room.  So, I've hung out with the following people:

A Quebecoise girl whom I met on the trail (about Montreal, university studies, and career paths)

A Malaysian Chinese girl (about Malaysian and Singapore politics)

A French guy (about skiing, and also Lance Armstrong!)

A Dutch guy (about American gun laws)

An Irish guy (about the color of one's stool after drinking Guinness for several days)

...among others

I received word that I need to return to work in a couple of days, so I'll be making my way back north tomorrow.

Arriving in Te Anau. The next day I hiked up the mountain off my right hand.  It took about eight hours.  I left before daybreak and returned at dusk.  It was absolutely amazing but howling winds and rain meant that I couldn't take many pictures.

Top of the hike.  I was wet and cold.  That's a fjord behind me but the sun is so low and the land is so steep that everything is always in shadow.

The lakefront in the town of Te Anau.  It's a nice little town.  A few T-shirt shops, a big statue of a bird, and lots of wilderness next door.

On the road to Milford Sound

Riddle me this:

You've heard the saying "the photos don't do it justice".  Well, this time it's true.