Paradise on Mars

In my most recent job interview, my future boss asked me my proudest accomplishment of my entire life. I replied with the following: since I left home on a whim, I’ve been able to maintain a current resume and support myself wherever my journey has taken me. For two and a half years I’ve kept myself stable enough that when when shit hits the fan and life drops the hammer like there’s no tomorrow, I can grit my teeth, power through it, and know that despite everything, it’s going to be all right.

Never has that been so true for me as in the current moment: in the space of two weeks my trust has been broken more times than I can count. A dodgy mechanic did a dodgy job, my car broke down, my computer crashed, I lost my driver’s license, and my travel partner forfeited the (rather large) bond I put on our rental car.

And yet, somehow, I’ve found myself now in the middle of an alien paradise.

I left Melbourne behind, along with the freezing-ass cold Victorian winter, a week after finishing work. My current road trip’s partner in crime, Edu, hails from the Canary Islands and

gives a whole new meaning to the idea of “laid back.” It’s probably a demeanor I would benefit learning from, although it completely throws off the game of systematic efficiency I’ve developed for myself over a year of working with kids in the bush. That being said, when you find someone who orders the exact same coffee, grabs the exact same chocolate from the shelf and shares your opinion that Dominos is poison, it’s bound to be a good trip.

The drive north is fast. We cut out of Melbourne and across Victoria, turning north when we reach Adelaide and leaving the southern winter behind us. Gumtree forests give way to deep shrubbery as we head north. The Flinders Ranges parallel our righthand side, treeless peaks and drainages rising from the plains as a living vertical relief map.

The sea’s salty tang washes through the air as we pass through Port Agusta, continuing onto the Stuart Highway and into the outback. Ubiquitous low sage-green bushes scatter across rust-red earth as far as I can see in every direction. Single trees- those that have somehow managed to survive- stand silhouetted on the horizon miles in the distance.

I’m pretty sure it’s flatter than Iowa.

We drive past flocks of emus.

We stop to let cows cross the road.

We pass car after rusty abandoned car, windshields blown out, hoods crumpled by kangaroos.

And we walk out onto Lake Hart’s endless salty expanses, layer upon layer of white crystals encrusting an occasional errant branch or lonely engine part, in an endless natural graveyard gleaming under a setting sun.

 The full moon rises behind us as we finish our evenings’ drives, casting silver light across the bush, illuminating it to the point where we barely need headlamps. A massive planet hangs high and bright above the horizon.

Road trains blast through the night, dull rumble touching utter silence from miles away and crescendoing to an ear-shattering scream as the monster trucks flood their paths with lights. The trucks– towing up to five monster trailers– are the kings of long-haul in the outback. Entire frame lined with red and amber lights, armed with monster bull bars, they continue north after dark as smaller vehicles cease activity… because when a car gets into a fight at 130 with a kangaroo (or a camel, or a cow), the roo will ALWAYS win.

Further north, toward the outback mining town of Coober Pedy, the earth gleams a deep, dark metallic silver in the sun’s glare. Everything except low, sparse grass and scrub has disappeared.

Next to the road, kangaroo skins lie desiccated over bones rather than rotting, and monster eagles feast without fear on those carcasses not yet claimed by the heat. The air is so dry that flies seek moisture in the corners of our eyes. Conical piles of white earth dot the landscape in every direction as we near Coober Pedy, passing through what might otherwise be Mars on Earth.

The town itself, covered in dust of various shades of red and white, is the center of opal mining in Australia. Nothing here appears to be new, not even the bikes the locals race down the streets, popping wheelies down the main tourist drag. Dark, rusted machinery rises halfhazardly through town. Shops keep doors shut tight against the sun, even in winter. Half the buildings have even been built underground, for the sole purpose of escaping the 45 degree summer sun.

North of Coober Pedy, the landscape changes. Red earth dotted with golden grass stretches before us, brightened by the occasional gold burst of a wattle plant. Closer to the Northern Territory mesas rise from the land, flat tops and sheer red walls swooping to meet the plains.

We cross broad, bare drainages washed with chalky white as we approach Alice Springs, and river beds cut deep beneath shallow bridges. Mountains begin to rise in black silhouettes on the horizon, and the vegetation returns to the land once more, creating a red and gold and green expanse.

In Alice Springs we swap our rentals, taking a campervan four hours’ drive southeast into an area best known as the “Red Center.”

We drive into magic.

The land here bursts with color: last year’s exorbitant amount of rain has turned this winter green and vibrant. Golden grass rises in clusters from intense rust-red earth. Slender, whispy trees rise like clouds from the red land in Australia’s incarnation of truffula trees. Flowers have begun to bloom as winter approaches: tiny purple-blue peas accent low shrubs and soft hairs shield pale pink blossoms. Crimson berries, pale violet and bright, airy white blossoms all add color to the land. Bright yellow (poisonous) paddymelons scatter the side of the road.

 

We glimpse Uluru just after the sun dips below the horizon, and as we approach our campsite the rock begins to glow deep maroon and purple against the sky’s pale lavender wash.

The next day we watch the sun rise from the rust-red dunes which nestle our little bush camp, bathing Uluru in deep rosy light, before heading into the park.

Uluru is a little over six miles in circumference. The rock is so huge that, up close, it’s impossible for my brain to comprehend just how freaking tall it is. Deep orange walls swoop upward from the ground in undulating tracks and troughs, forming a living history in stone. Black algae marks thousands of years of waters’ path, plunging from bowl to bowl before plummeting to meet the red earth. Gorges sweep together to form deep, striated valleys. Crusted flakes blanket the rock, giving infinitely more depth to a formation that appeared so smooth on approach. In places, the rock curls in onto itself in long, slender, shallow caves- sometimes filled to brimming in art, sometimes with just a corner or column painted. In one place, a tall, slender column rises rom the ground, entirely separated from the main formation itself.

 

For the traditional owners, every crack– every crevice– every pile of boulders– tells a history and has significance. That they elect to share some of their stories with us is an honor, and the brisk wind curling around the rock somehow adds to the depth of meaning held here in the land.

In the evening, the sun emerges from clouds above the horizon to turn the entire rock into a deep, blazing orange.

__________

The Olgas, in the same park as Uluru, are so entirely different in character and physicality: a compacted conglomerate of stones of mixed orange and red and black, baked together and worn by wind since they’ve been uplifted. The rock glows from the shadows with such an intensity you could easily believe it holds a molten core. The labyrinth of rock curls into gorges and canyons where deep pocketed walls rise out of sight above me. The rocks lining my path shine with smooth, gleaming surfaces, as though they’ve been through an oven, for thousands of years, baked on the earth’s surface day after day, summer and winter and summer and winter and over again.

Where rock meets land, deep green waves of vegetation rise to drink moisture as it pours down from the domes, waters’ path betrayed by black algae streaking the firey rock. In one specific canyon between formations, intense green vegetation crowds the canyon floor in a telltale sign of exactly where water runs. Either vegetation exists or it doesn’t…. in this case, there’s no such thing as a spectrum.

I feel like I’ve stepped into some mashup between Mars and Star wars.

On our last day, we drive north to King’s Canyon, where sandstone rises in a sheer geological oracle of millions of years past, layer upon layer of changing wind cemented into thousands upon thousands of angled lines.

Morning light catches the sandstone and turns it the deep color of rusted blood as we hike to the canyon’s rim. On the plains atop the canyon, honeycomb domes of layered rock rise in an ordered labyrinth, the product of titanic cracks worn down by wind and water. “The Lost City,” they’re called. Inside side gorges and valleys vegetation rises in waves, giving telltale sign to shaded south-facing and sunny north-facing walls. In places the sea’s ripples have been preserved in the sandstone, telling stories of a time of bountiful water and little life. From the top, we look south over the Northern Territory’s expanse of blazing plains.

The canyon itself opens into a sheer, yawning V. Steep walls drop deep into gorges, shadow stark next to sun, bottoms crowded with effervescent green and piled with monster boulders. Shining white eucalypts rise from dry rocky stream beds, marking the water’s path in time of flood.

A water hole nestled in a deep, orange striated bowl, sacred to the traditional owners, waits for us in a place referred to as the “Garden of Eden.” A cool breeze ruffles the water. Olive green songbirds flit amongst white eucalypts and clustered palms. Branches clack against the rock overhead, but somehow they don’t break the place’s deep, penetrating peace.

Water is Life, they say here.

I hold that feeling of peace as we walk back to the car, and on the drive home the next day… And as I move forward, I know that everything is going to be ok.

One With the Fish

I’ve left mainland Australia behind for aquamarine water, a rocking boat, and real-life Finding Nemo, stepping between worlds into an endless technicolor aquarium. It’s like someone’s gone and mashed up Avatar and Candyland, then transported the entire end result underwater. If the Beatles had been aquatically-minded when they wrote Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, I imagine the end result would have been something like the Great Barrier Reef.

I spend a grand total of three days and four nights on the boat. I team up with a pair of brothers from the UK– on a side trip from yet another brother’s wedding– to explore, diving and surfacing and diving and surfacing, watching the sun rise over aqua water and send blazing rays through torrential black banded storms as it sets. Far out on the horizon, a little island called Australia waits for us.

I watch three-meter moray eels dart into cover and wrap themselves all the way around massive coral trees. I weave my way around the stem of a coral three times as tall as myself affectionately referred to as the “Magic Mushroom,” having reached its current height through a growth rate of a single centimeter each year.

Fluorescent underwater castles rise in fans and shelves and trees and brain corals and spiney things. We explore systems big enough to swim through arches and lose ourselves in. Clownfish hide in pink anemonies sprawling over a meter wide. Orange and white fish ring fluorescent blue coral like halos. Orange boulder coral rises in systems as large as houses, and blue Christmas tree worms retreat in haste as our fingers flutter near them in the current. Nearby, white coral sprawls like a halfhazard bramble groundcover beneath thousands of shimmering blue fish. Orange trumpet fish flutter amongst vine-like systems. A turtle gnaws happily at algae just below the water’s surface, its golden shell’s intricate patterns glowing in the afternoon sun.

Sometimes, I look around I realize I can’t see a single patch of rock or sand as the coral spreads before me in an organized, yet chaotic masterpiece of an ancient, abstract garden.

Bommies– coral-covered formations–– rise from the sea floor complete with walls and nooks and crannies full of life. Schools of parrot fish the size of small humans glom their laid-back way through the water like they’re high out of their minds. Sea turtles sleeping in rocky pockets wake to follow us out and around the reef before tucking back into bed. Schools of thousands of fish dart through the coral, flicking shimmering bodies into shadows to claim refuge.

On occasion we drop to muted blue depths where the surface disappears from above us. Near the bottom of a sheet wall we find an odd, crusty rusty-colored shell of coral rising 10 meters from the sandy sea floor, having grown over and killed its host as the ocean’s eerie version of a strangler fig.

Despite close proximity, sandy expanses between reefs and walls hold an entirely different ecosystem. Stingrays glide across the ocean floor. Sea cucumbers as long as myself sprawl without apparent pattern, coiled waste marking their path across the sand. Lonely clams over 200 years old sit solo in broad patches, neon green spots accenting deep purple flesh inside monster shells. As we kneel beside them, we look all the way through to find stripy blue fish claiming shelter amongst the clams’ milky white insides.

Bramble-like coral forms low spikey, forests glowing even in the daylight as if backlit from within, brightening the sea floor in powder blue, cotton-candy pink and an eerie sea-green tinted with the barest yellow accent. In too many places, though, these utopias have turned to dull white, bleaching causing them to lose their color as they’ve expelled the algae living amongst them in a symbiotic relationship. When we ghost over these areas, somehow I feel like I’ve been tossed into the Lion King’s hyena graveyard.

By morning, lone barracuda and white-tipped reef sharks patrol the water.

By night, the world turns alien. We attach glow sticks to our tanks for night dives, identifying our buddies by fluorescent pink and blue floating along in the darkness above our backs. Giant red bass, kings of the reef by night, flick in and out of our headlamps en masse. (Our dive supervisor jokes that if we’re really desperate to play god, we can point the bass toward a snack by shining our lights on little fish hiding in the coral. Then again, we can also move our lights at the very last moment and watch the bass crash head-first in the ground.)

We leave the boat’s lights behind to find that full moon shines overhead, providing a rippling sheen on the water’s surface. We kick forward and follow our compasses blindly around bommies through the dark until we find a broad, low cave beneath the coral. Inside the cave we find Brian, a 140-year-old green sea turtle the size of my kitchen table, snoozing his way through the night. Soon enough his girlfriend, Brianna, descends out of the dark behind to shuffle and flip sand onto her two-meter shell before we return to the boat. 

__________

Josh and I head north from Cairns in the last two days of my week off, after a somewhat self-vindicating argument in which I stand my own against a car rental agent who seems to firmly believe in my inability to speak Vehicle due to my status as a 5’2” American girl.

Our route twists along the coast beneath the area’s highlands, passing rocky points piled with thousands of cairns atop jagged rocks where they jut upwards from the shore over the sea.

The air hangs thick with humidity in the Daintree, one of the world’s most complex and primitive rainforests. As we drive our van onto the ferry to cross the Daintree River, I remember a funny conversation I overheard on the boat: "If you try to swim across this river, you will not make it out alive. The crocodiles will eat you. Also there are hundreds of bull sharks. Also this is where the irukandji spawn."

Once we enter the national park proper, our road winds through the jungle to overlooks from which we peer over mountains cloaked in jungle as they swoop down to meet curling white beaches at the sea. Cassowaries with neon-blue heads pick their way through litter and trees beside the road on our way to the fruit farm where we’ve booked in for the night.

In the evening we wander hundreds of mangosteen trees in the dimming light and return to our cabana just in time to beat a furious, deafening downpour. The trees and leaves here are so thick that it’s impossible to tell when the rain has stopped. For an hour after, as we barbeque kebabs and capsicum and onion and eggplant, water still patters to the forest floor from tree to leaf to vine to soft ground.

In the morning, Josh and I find our way through the farm’s jungle creek to a waterhole sheltered by a monster buttressed tree before picking our way through a mile of tangled vines and palms.  

Warnings en masse await us as we duck into a beach before beginning our trip home, announcing stingers and crocodiles and… pretty much everything feisty in the world, actually. The beach itself, however, sweeps in a broad white arc to end in dense mangrove forests, where tree trunks and roots form a sturdy lattice atop the soft sand. Sun streams down through the canopy of the surrounding jungle to catch bright yellow blossoms hanging from trees, and a single crimson trunk stands out amongst the shadows…

We take one more look around before leaving the beach behind, returning to the land of return plane flights and work.

Burly, Beautiful, and a Little Bittersweet

The trees of Styx Valley are not as tall as coast redwoods. They’re not as wide as sequoias. At 350-400 years old, they’re younger than many trees I walk amongst at home.

Their majesty lies in their experience: weathered by storms; standing tall, proud and defiant; leafy branches reaching high to enshroud broken, weathered, dying crowns in leafy halos. Bark hangs and twists in deep red strips, striped and shorn through age to leave silver wood gleaming from the trees’ upper reaches.

Swamp gums, the planet’s tallest flowering plants, rise from damp ground cushioned by soft red matter. An understory lush with tree ferns so aged that woody bark blanketed in moss hangs in stiff spikes, oddly evoking a stegosaurus flipped bottom-up. Once again, for the space of a couple hours, I feel like I’ve stepped into prehistory.

By afternoon, I’ve driven from the Styx into Southwest National Park and set myself a six-kilometer stairmaster in disguise in the middle of nowhere. Somehow, the views totally and indisputably justify the journey. Crimson Christmas bells rise like rubies from the heath as I climb. Rays of sun stream down through clouds, turning Lake Pedder’s dark gray water to gleaming silver, ringing islands like a halo beneath me.

My hut, looking over Southwest National Park to the west, is also home to a friendly bush rat who does his damndest to find his way around the wires and plastic bottles protecting our food.

He fails.

When I scramble to the mountain’s top the next morning, rugged ranges ring the lake in a shining, shadowed, 360 degree panorama.

I continue on with a weathered gentleman across a rolling, boggy plateau, scramble over a couple of haphazard boulder fields and cling tenuously to a few meters of cloud-dampened, slopey dolerite as we navigate our way around Mt. Anne’s top columned tiers, stepping around an exposed airy arête far above a sheer ravine to gain her summit.

When we summit, she’s cloaked in cloud. She makes her own weather, mist materializing as wind rises swiftly, swirling and twisting and turning over her summit. We sit for an hour, waiting. Twenty seconds after we start our descent, the sky begins to clear. We look down through clouds to ridges, spires, tarns, lakes, shelves and valleys in every direction, cut by a single, lonely tan gravel road. Federation Peak’s distinctive spire spears into the air from the Arthurs’ jagged ridgeline to the south; Frenchman’s Cap rears white from the northwest. In a region of Tasmania famed for dastardly weather, the Southwest has gifted me with a glorious, hot sunny day.

In a region famed for dastardly weather, though, those circumstances are also more than happy to change on a dime.

_____

The land surrounding Frenchman’s Cap is wild. Swirling masses of white quartzite and dark rock rise from plains and valleys and ridges to jagged, unruly peaks, somehow both fluid and rough in their rugged beauty.

Wind brings driving rain the night before I begin my walk, preceded by a quilt of deep gray cloud laid low and smooth over mountaintops, undulating as it passed over peaks; thickening and thinning; darkening and glowing in whorls throughout the sky.

I spend two days hiking through boggy plateau and climbing rocks and roots up narrow passes. My trail passes puddles filled with purple carnivorous plants and skirts mountain lakes as they reflect the day’s first light, clear blue playing against deep golden ochre. It cuts upward through thigh-high steps hewn into gnarled, rough roots worn smooth and glistening white quartzite blocks. It ducks between formidable black mountain gateways shrouded in cloud and dances along knife-edge ridges over ravines filled with eucalypts crowned in bright blossoms, so spectacularly deep and vibrant I have to stop to stare to keep from tripping over my own feet.

I leave my pack at a small hut nestled in the thick brush around Lake Tahune– a small, deep, circular pool nestled in the sheer cradle far beneath the Cap’s white face. I follow a kilometer and a half of elusive cairns as I scramble up soaking rock, contouring the back of the mountain’s dome toward the summit. Even up here, in an isolated, windswept, barren rocky expanse, wild irises thrive. Deep, muted purple and pale yellow-green blossoms open from slender stems, extending from crevices wherever some slight shelter from the wind can be found.

My summer's last summit proves burly, beautiful and a little bittersweet, welcoming me in classic Tasmanian fashion: it’s completely socked in. Wind tears over the edge and I look out into a world of white.

I wait a day and a half at lake Tahune, warmed by a rickety old coal stove as mist hangs in the trees over the lake around my hut, hoping for another weather window for a clear summit. It never appears.

I descend from the soft clouds engulfing Frenchman’s Cap on the morning of my fourth day, and my thoughts turn to the last six weeks. Rarely have I been so entranced by a place in so short a time. The summer has been a rush of rugged wilds and waters, beaches and communities, new friends and old, all of whom have fully embraced me on this portion of my ragtag journey. My summer has been filled with challenge and joy, has taught me and allowed me more self-discovery than I ever expected.

The sky clears to a flawless azure after I’ve left the major passes behind, half way along my 22-kilometer journey back to the car park. I turn back from the trail’s last crest to watch serpentine cloud flow over the mountain, covering and clearing as it wraps and parts and blankets the rock in its path. My chest tightens and that hole opens inside me as I leave part of my heart and soul in the mountains, as always I do.

Mountains, more than anywhere else, are where I experience joy and beauty, disappointment and despair, and sheer unmatched wildness. Mountains are where loneliness can turn to aloneness– not necessarily the hollow sort.

Mountains, I’ve long known, are where I truly belong. By whatever roundabout way my path takes me, eventually I’ll find my way back to higher elevation.

The mountains are where I find myself.