What Do Travellers Do All Day?: #14 - The Snow Globe of the Outback - Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

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1 August 2002

The smell of free daily home-baked apple pie led us to Adelaide City Backpackers, which is owned by an eccentric earthy lady named Pam. Pam's place is a jam-packed attic of bits and bobs collected over the years, cluttered but homely. It's just paradise if you're a particle of dust – so my clothes felt at home there, but I could have used my spine as a slingshot after those bunkbeds!

I was compelled to photograph the notes of disgust she plastered all over the hostel. Above the kitchen sink she wrote, "We provide you with free tea and coffee, continental breakfast, apple pie, put up with pilfering and get really pissed off when you thank us by booking tours through other hostels. [signed] Management.". Or this one, more to the point: "this is a restricted area so PISS OFF!". And if you left a dirty cup anywhere she'd write "Is this the bloody sink? I think not!" She would place the note underneath the cup until it crawled to the kitchen out of shame on its own.

But then she would serve up apple pie and ice cream and invite you to enjoy a good rugby match in her living room with her husband and a badly-dressed random blonde mannequin whilst she shouted insults at the telly and cackled like one of the witches in Macbeth. During the ample and repeat commercial breaks, she imparts great knowledge, like that the aborigines refer to the temperature at night in terms of how many dingoes they needed to snuggle up with to keep warm. When I told her how the three of us had to snuggle up in a tent in the Murray Outback to ward off hypothermia, she laughed and said, "So, it was a three-dog night then?". So they do get the cold in Oz too. Down south they have been between two-and-three-dog nights on average – more than a little chilly in other words.

On the first evening Matt, Gloria and I did the tango of the three-headed monster again – arguing different agendas, wants and needs. We spent the entire evening yanking each other in opposing directions like an elastic band, not agreeing on where to go with the obvious answer of "divide and conquer" bobbing in front of us like the Good Year blimp. But we hung in there until divine intervention – a busy mall – separated us. It is not that we don't laugh, joke and get on fabulously for the most part, but like taking a hike in the heat of a warm summer's day, there's a good possibility that you're going to get chaffed!

Day 2 in Adelaide we found ourselves in the drizzled out beach town of Glenelg looking for shells and writing messages in the sand. Had it been England, we would have found people sunbathing – making the most of the great weather! We tried to do a scenic drive up the coastline but managed only to get quick glimpses up side roads and between houses.

We gave up and headed back into town, making it back just in time for a free guided tour of the Adelaide museum. There are fantastic exhibits of the oldest opalised fossils and the arctic expedition of a famous Australian explorer (whose name escapes me – I'm renown for my eye for detail) who successfully located magnetic south.

Then we poked our way around the Jam Factory, a fascinating museum of modern glass sculptures, followed by free use of the internet at The Womens Support Centre which Matt contemplated going in disguise for – sorry, no men allowed! But there are a few free email facilities in Adelaide, you just have to befriend a long-staying traveller "in-the-know". My informant was a 60-year-old lady who was doing research for a book about her past lives. I don't know about my past lives, but in this one I'm a true skeptic! We spent the evening chatting on the balcony of the hostel, which was reputed to once be a "thriving business" – a house of ill-repute. Magic!

En route to Port Augusta we had big plans of meandering through the famous Barossa Valley wine route, but somehow all three of us managed to miss any significant signage taking us there. So in Port-nothing-to-see-here-Augusta, we found a cool hostel for a record AU$11 a night, the cheapest hostel in Australia I'm willing to bet. At such great prices we hung around for another night after a knackering-yet-rewarding 14.4km hike up to St. Mary's Peak in the Flinder's Ranges.

Falling asleep really early and easily, we were unaware of the troubles that the following day would bring as we travelled in convoy with 4 Czechs up the Stuart Highway towards the old opal mining town of Coober Pedy. Something in the car gave out, and we found ourselves hurtled to the other side of the road.

We pulled over on the side of a long stretch of tar that cuts its way through the flat and barren landscape of the Outback of Southern Australia. With a clear 360-degree view of the horizon, it gives the impression of a huge blue opal that came along and flattened the landscape in the same way as a roadtrain flattens the wildlife out here. I found myself imagining the two huge magnified eyes of God, looking down on us, holding in his hand the equivalent of a snow globe of the outback. One little shake though, and instead of snow, maybe the beginnings of a little dust storm and some tumbleweed, one insignificant little broken-down Pajero and little people with desperation and frustration written all over their little faces – and all the time knowing that the only SOS phone for hundreds of miles around, just 25kms down the road, was broken and had been for 3 months. One day around Christmas 1974, he dropped his snowglobe of tropical Darwin, and Cyclone Tracey flattened everything.


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