A Lumpy ride through the Northern Territory

A Lumpy ride through the Northern Territory


It was a stupid idea to go to the Northern Territory in November, everyone kept telling us it would be hotter than hell. It was also stupid to book ourselves on to a budget bus tour when the one thing I fear the most is backpackers and their crazy ‘alternative’ hedonism and love of Irish bars. My prejudices aside however, we needed to celebrate Matt’s 30th in full Aussie style and a trip to outback was well overdue. Crazy pommes that we are, we thought ‘Hey, how hot can it be? We live in Brisbane’ and surely the best way to get over my backpacker ‘thing’ is to go and live amongst them….’ Using this logic, we managed to persuade our Aussie mates, Bek and Kellie to join us on a 6 day backpacker fun bus tour to Alice Springs and Uluru – woo hoo!

We flew into Darwin at 1am, it was really hot. We got up at 5am the next morning to get our bus and it was still hot. So we sat in the air conditioned foyer and waited to be picked up by the ‘adventure tours’ bus. Our fun bus didn’t turn up until 6.30am by which time we’d phoned the company twice to complain – luckily the breakfast buffet had opened and the fun size packets of coco pops, together with bacon and egg toasted sandwiches, had absorbed most of our fighting spirit.

It was lucky, because as the fun bus pulled up and the driver got out all the complaints that still lingered through the sweet taste of chocolaty milk disappeared. Lumpy, our tour guide had a distinctive look – somewhere between Mad Max and Hell’s Angels with a spot of Captain Pugwash thrown in for good measure. His head was shaved and his long beard flowed freely. He wore enormous army boots, tiny khaki shorts and a tight black vest top revealing more of his tattoos than was necessary.


Lumpy with his Knife

Lumpy growled and we all murmured a frightened g’day and jumped onto the fun bus to find that the only remaining seats were directly underneath a large piece of cardboard covering the scene of a recent ‘bus bricking incident’. The rest of the seats were filled with a mix of people, many of whom were very young, obviously still drunk from the night before and pretending to be Irish.

Now this was a low point for me. I was facing my demons all too soon. I was surrounded by crazy ‘Irish’ people, tired, grumpy and being driven by Lumpy. We stopped briefly at the booking office in Darwin and had a crisis meeting – everyone agreed that it looked bad, but we should press on – at least Lumpy was probably better than some overenthusiastic twenty year old telling us that the only rule on the bus was to have fun – we thought.

The first leg of the trip took us down the Stuart Highway from Darwin to Alice Springs. The trip took two days, with over 7 hours per day driving. During this time most of the crazy funsters slept (Backpackers have an amazing ability to sleep – some of these guys were managing 16 – 18 hours a day…) Most of this time we spent watching the Northern Territory swish by and the passing scenery change quickly from lush tropical coastal vegetation, spotted with huge termite hills to drier spindly acacias and eucalypts and finally to spinifex; the proper outback stuff. We also spent time wondering when the cardboard, and later bubble wrap, window was going to cave in on our heads and if Lumpy’s mental state would hold until we reached Alice.

Adventure Matt!

In the evenings we would first make a stop to pick up Lumpy’s medicinal rum and then stop at a permanent camp site where Lumpy would drink rum whilst the more enterprising tourists would cook dinner. Being an Australian male, Lumpy was only able to ‘cook’ when it involved meat, a paint stripper and a Barbie – all other forms of cooking, were seemingly in danger of bringing his sexuality in disrepute … Speaking of which, Lumpy’s sexuality was in no way ambiguous. The Queen fans on the bus were bitterly disappointed by his strict ‘non-gay music policy’. This slightly harsh rule made it very clear to everyone exactly how non-gay Lumpy was.

We shouldn’t really be too harsh about Lumpy’s cooking abilities as he didn’t really eat; Eating apparently could be seen as being a bit gay. Meat’s ok, but vegetables were definitely a sign of batting for the other team. Rum and red bull provided Lumpy with most of his nutritional requirements for the 2000km trip. The single boys on our trip were beginning to realise where they had been going wrong.

We slept in swags, which are big comfy sleeping bags with a mattress built in and are amazingly comfy, cool and masculine. Sleeping out under the huge starry outback sky listening to the sounds of nothingness (apart from a few randy wild donkeys in the distance) was amazing.



When Lumpy did stop the bus during the days we packed a lot in. We spent a fun afternoon kayaking up Katherine Gorge, well briefly kayaking before we had to stop to jump into the gorge because it was just too hot. Lumpy lost most or our group for a good ten minutes because he hadn’t told us where to meet, which provoked colourful language and some impressive stomping. The Devil’s Marbles were also pretty impressive rock formations. Although that was quite stressful too as Lumpy didn’t really tell us exactly where to go or when to get there, he just told us ‘don’t get lost like the last ‘a*sholes’. When 3 members of our party didn’t manage to guide themselves to the right place and time, he stomped and swore more in a very manly way.

Enjoying the Devils’ Marbles

We also visited a bar with the buffalo from ‘Crocodile Dundee’ stuffed and on top of the bar and Daly Waters, which has one pub, a couple of houses and is the only place apart from Cape Canaveral with a long enough runway for the space shuttle to land.


The bore at the Juno Horse Farm

Lumpy would also spend time on the buses’ microphone imparting his wisdom upon us. We learnt that Joanne Lees killed Peter Falconio and then framed that poor Bradley Murdoch for it – his evidence for this was that he ‘Can see it in her eyes, she’s as guilty as that Lindy Chamberlain’. We also heard about how his marriage bizarrely broke down even though he had been the model husband. His wife hadn’t realised how lucky she had been to have a husband who decided that she spent too much time when they shopped together so he went grocery shopping first thing on Saturday mornings to give him more time for drinking beer with his mates and riding his motorbike – women are such fickle beings.


Spinifex

We arrived into Alice Springs on the evening of the second day and thanked our lucky outback stars that Lumpy had gone the distance to deliver us safely, fuelled only by alcohol, caffeine and raging masculinity. We had a night out eating camel pie in Alice with our new chums together with Lumpy, who bizarrely was wearing possibly the most gay Hawaiian shirt I’ve seen.

In the morning we ventured out of the motel and waited to be picked up by our new guide for the next part or our trip – Kings Canyon and Uluru. We were obviously nervous. It was going to be difficult for any guide to fill Lumpy’s shoes and provide the quality of outback experience that we had become used to.

Michelle arrived in the standard edition knackered old bus and we straight away knew something was different; She was smiling and offering helpful instructions. We hopped on the bus and after leaving Alice to the Star Wars theme tune, Michelle told us exactly where we were going, when we would get there and what we would see when we got there. She also managed to speak for a whole ten minutes on the microphone without being offensive in any way – we were stunned.

The next few days were fantastic, although a small gag did backfire when we were asked to introduce ourselves over the microphone. We decided that rather than tell truth we’d make something up to entertain our fellow guests so we all confidently lied about our air guitar band called ‘Goat’. The nuance of our blatant lie and our comedic genius didn’t get picked up by our fellow Japanese, Danish and German passengers and we had to spend the next few days fielding questions about our rock stardom and explaining that actually we weren’t in a band, it had all been a lie and we were just trying to be funny.

Our first stop was a camel farm, something I’d been particularly looking forward to – we had a quick and bumpy ride on a grumpy looking camel called ‘Blackie’ and a quick bacon sandwich, the camel burgers didn’t look quite so appetising from the perspective of a hump.

Camel’s aside, the highlight of the trip was the walk around Kings Canyon. It was 42 degrees in the shade at 4.30pm when we set off along the steep track up the canyon (and an average of 10 degrees hotter on the top), but the crazy heat soon paled into insignificance when the thunder clouds started gathering and the bronze evening sunlight set the red rocks alight. When the lightening started to fill the sky the whole place became almost unreal and eerie, it all felt alive.


‘Goat’ in Priscilla’s crack at King’s Canyon



That night we ate chicken casserole cooked, by Michelle with the help of us tourists, on the camp oven – it was great. We slept happily again in our swags that night - only in a less manly way.

In the morning it was Matt’s birthday and we ate birthday breakfast around the burning embers of the campfire and then set off for a birthday helicopter ride over the canyon. We’d never been in a helicopter before, so were a bit nervous, but the experience was amazing, very smooth and even the dipping around the canyon was fun.


Matt’s feet at a thousand feet

After the ride was a quick trip to the Olgas and then the long drive round to Uluru to watch the sunset.

The Olgas

We unfortunately paid for the amazing light at Kings Canyon the night before as the sky was heavily overcast making the spectacular sunset a damp squib. The zillion European and Japanese tourists lined up around table after table of fancy linen and champagne flutes were not happy bunnies. We consoled ourselves with a couple of comedy photos and then headed back to our camp in a convoy of tourist buses to cook a delicious birthday meal, drink a few birthday beers and crash in our birthday swags.


Us at the rock


Mr T at the rock

In the morning we were up at 4am to join a slow moving traffic jam back into the National Park to watch the sunrise - which showed initial promise but gave a disappointing finale. We spent the rest of the morning walking around the base of the rock and reading the highly amusing ‘sorry book’ at the visitor centre which compiles all the letters the traditional owners of the area have received from people apologising for taking home pieces of the rock and climbing the rock. The apologies ranged from – ‘really sorry, my son didn’t realise that your rock is so sacred and brought some home , please accept this rock back and our apologies’ to ‘ I took some of your rock three years ago and since then my dog died and I got thyroid cancer, please take it back’ – how touching….

The 5 hour trip back to Alice was made infinitely more enjoyable by the dodgy air conditioning which couldn’t compete with the 50 degree temperatures and meant that we slowly cooked. Michelle had a plan however and we had a quiz that kept us entertained and our mind off the sweat running down the back of our legs.

That night we booked into a swanky hotel and the members of ‘Goat’ had a last celebratory meal at a posh restaurant. Afterwards we joined Michelle for a big night out in Alice and danced like coconuts until 3.30am when we were kicked out of the bar. We wandered back to our fancy hotel congratulating ourselves that although we were now all over thirty we could still give the backpackers a run for their money when it came to partying.