Clothed Termite Mound, Northern Territory
I’ve noticed that the further northwest I travel in Queensland, the more kangaroos there seem to be. I’ve also noticed a marked decrease in Wi-Fi. (This seems to be a direct inverse relationship.) There have also been a bunch of termite mounds, many of which are clothed – yeah, t-shirts, hats, dresses, you name it. It seems to be a trend for people to go out and put human clothing on these piles of dirt, which can be rather comical, or unnerving, as sometimes it looks like there is actually someone standing by the highway!
With the plethora of kangaroos, driving at night is unwise if not nearly impossible. Traveling down the highway is like mixing a scene from The Walking Dead with that old Sega Atari game Frogger. Instead of crossing the stream, you’re trying to navigate down the road, and zombie boxing kangaroos keep jumping out at you! As you pass, they lift their heads from grazing to stare at you, like deer in the headlights, who just might decide to hop directly into your path at any moment, ready for a fight.
Kangaroo Warning!
If only one comes at a time, you have a decent chance of dodging it. There are rarely any other cars on the road out there, so it’s usually safe to swerve a little. But if the kangaroos decide to come at you in a drove, you can be relatively sure you won’t miss them all.
In fact, there are so few cars out on the road in the outback, that it is possible to drive for an hour or more without passing another vehicle. I drove once for nearly an hour and a half without seeing a single sign of civilization – a building or light or anything other than the road and street signs – which is more than the distance from Fort Collins to Denver! The idea of driving that far without encountering a single building kind of blew my mind when I thought about it like that.
The best part about being that far from cities and people – especially at night – is the stars. When I stopped at a roadside pull-off, I realized I could barely see the constellations for the stars! There were so many, filling up the spaces, even where I normally would see only darkness between the individual stars in recognizable constellation patterns. But what truly amazed me was that the stars came all the way down to the horizon.
In cities, when we look at the night sky, we are so accustomed to the light pollution that we don’t even imagine that stars would begin until at least 15 or 30 degrees above the horizon. The city lights get in the way. But out in the Outback, the stars nearly touched the ground. It was breathtaking.
Apparently, there are car-eating cows on the loose! Beware!
This should be a nice road trip I’ll be taking, albeit a long one. I’ll be heading from Brisbane up to Darwin at the top of the country first, where I’ll go to Kakadu National Park. Then, I’ll travel directly south, passing Uluru (Ayer’s Rock) right in the middle of the country. After reaching the southern coast, and heading back along the Great Ocean Road once more, I’ll leave via Melbourne for Tasmania, where I’m planning to spend a couple of weeks before heading back up the east coast on my way back to Brisbane before my visa here in Australia actually runs out. It’s a lot of driving. Hopefully Mel (my car) will make it. It’ll be a lot to see, and I’m looking forward to it. Sadly, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it out to Western Australia (ironic, since that’s the state where Mel’s is actually registered). I guess I’ll have to get out there to that half of Australia next time I make it down here! And there will have to be a next time – I do love it here.