Checklist Travel and Thoughts on Leaving Alice Springs
As you may have noticed, there were a lot of emotions in Alice Springs. A great upwelling of hope, that push at your sternum like the rumblings of first love, a deep despair too, perhaps from the loss of music, song, and history, and a fresh aliveness in the masses of stars, the orange-white layers of ancient seabed, and the sense that all these things are connected in some fundamental way.
Maybe it is that we are all one tablespoon of that stardust; or maybe it is that the witchety grub created the West MacDonnells in some ancient dreamtime. That grub gave way to a clan of people and those people walk amongst their ancestor to this day. Some know it, and some do not.
I do not know any of this. I’ve read The Songlines, and I listen to my guide tell me stories that are not his. I wonder if I should know them. I find the song map of Australia a beautiful, mythic creature I want to comprehend.
Practically-speaking, some of the emotion is from feeling like there is too much for this short amount of time. I have never gone on a tour before, and while I liked this one more than I disliked it, I can’t help but lament the lack of space to simply explore.
Does that waterhole strike you? Stay awhile. Care to sing out at the cavern? Please do.
Tours are by nature tightly scheduled go-go-gos, which is not how I travel or want to travel. It’s not a checkbox kind of situation for me. I could have spent two weeks floating around the West Macs and Uluru.
I still love the tour; I just wish for more. We would gather firewood every day from the burnt mulgas and gums by the side of the road. We would strap it onto the trailer and cart it off to our next campsite. Cast iron ovens were our kitchen, and our beds were simple swags – a padding inside a canvas cover. You lay your sleeping bag inside the swag and zip it up to protect you from the dew and from fire ash. Our blanket, as Adam, our guide, liked to say, “was a blanket of stars.”
How I could imagine doing this for weeks, like I imagined and dreamt of a campervan when I was reading by citronella candle light in Kakadu.
The tour gave me a taste of the possible, and when combined with the rest of the northern travels, planted a bug, a sickness for the great and empty outback. There are more deadly creatures in Australia than anywhere else on the planet, and yet I felt incredibly safe.
Many people travel as if by checklist. For instance, the couchsurfers I was with at the beginning of the week, have been on their around-the-world trip. They’ve done it soulfully, for sure. But as they near the end, they were trying to figure out how they would spend ten days in California and Nevada. They fly into LA and need to fly out of Las Vegas ten days later.
“Well, by the time we get to the States,” explained John, “I think I’ll just want to be checking things off my list. Like, Hollywood, done that. San Francisco, yeah.”
This verb “to do” in reference to a city, always strikes me harshly. How does one “do San Francisco” or “do Sydney”? It is as if it is a woman to be mated with. It is a by-product of the checklist traveler.
I felt a bit like that on this Uluru tour. We rushed around the rock just to say we walked the whole thing, and yet, I hardly had a second to stop and really breathe in its history and its energy.
We saw sunset over the rock and we saw sunrise over it and Kata Tjuta. We did all the things we were supposed to do, but the tour really became right in the last two days, when we sized down the group and we slowed down. We started sleeping through the dawn and we camped on riverbeds with no toilets or showers.
These two plants smelled like coconut oil and like tropical punch bubble gum. You can see our tour guide, Adam, using them as perfume. We hadn’t, after all, bathed in four days.
It may seem absurd that I paid money to go “rough it,” but I let that go a long time ago. The beauty of the landscape, the sense of place and being, was strong, and that is what sticks with me, no matter how I got there.
I would come back, if only to do the same thing without the checklist approach. To stick around Uluru as long as it felt right, to hike all over Kata Tjuta, and to meander back through the West Macs for a long bit of time.