We seemed to have developed a bad habit of booking red-eye flights for these trips and then staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning the night before when we have to leave for the airport at 5. We did it on the way to Cairns in June and we did it a few days ago to get to Alice Springs. Our excuse was that D had a conference at the University of Sydney on Saturday the 3rd, and they had a conference dinner downtown on Saturday night. The New Rhetoric and the Plain English crowd from the conference seemed pretty cool, so we joined them all for a Greek dinner and stayed out to 11pm or so... and then had to come home and pack everything for the trip.
The conference, for what it's worth, went very well-- rhetoric is a particularly compelling side interest in D's research, and no one else at this conference had much experience with the performance studies side of things. It was one of those really nice and sort of rare opportunities that D got to talk about what and how she teaches in the normal course of things and have it be new and professionally interesting to a crowd of colleagues. And, after the stress of the last few weeks, D took the chance to relax and have a little bit of fun with her conference paper, asking a room full of senior academics in suits to stand up and do one of her first-day-of-class acting exercises.1
With D's last conference of the year behind her and our long-awaited trip to the "Red Centre" of Australia ahead of us, we stole whatever small amount of sleep we could and then stumbled our way through three airports2 and finally came into the bright sun on the tarmac at Alice Springs. Alice Springs, affectionately known by Aussies as "the Alice" or just "Alice," is the largest town between Darwin (the capital of the Northern Territory, in the center of the northern tropical coast) and Adelaide (the captial of South Australia on the southern coast), and Alice lies more than 1200 kilometres from either one.3 The hugely significant metropolis of Alice Springs is home to approximately 29,000 residents.
Our excuse for coming here, how, was to see the performance of the BodyWeather dance company that D had observed a few weeks ago rehearsing in Sydney. Tired as we were, we wandered around the town a bit in our rented 4WD vehicle (a free upgrade from the micro mini 2WD hatchback we'd originally booked), getting our bearings and killing time until the 6pm performance. The show took place in the Todd Riverbed, the central river in Alice Springs which usually runs underground, leaving a shallow, dry, coursely sandy riverbed running through the middle of town.
So, we followed the BodyWeather dancers along the dried out Todd Riverbed, paid our respects to the few of D's colleagues from Sydney who were also there, and then set out to find our tired and grumpy selves some dinner and a bed. As it happened, most everything was closed on a Sunday evening in Alice... except, as we turned a corner in our frustration, Jesus led us to the Pizza Hut takeaway counter, and it was good. There's a reason Alice Springs is the population centre of central Australia!
Yesterday we spent touring the sights of Alice, checking out the old telegraph station around which the town first sprung up, admiring the spectacular MacDonnell Ranges, and learning about the desert ecosystems at the Alice Springs Desert Park. This morning we got up very early and "took a camel to breakfast," both of us riding on one single-humped dromedary camel for an hour along the Todd Riverbed and ultimately enjoying a BBQ bush breakfast at the camel farm. Camels, we learned, are quite common in central Australia, having been brought here in the 1800s as pack animals better suited than horses to the desert climate. They also have two knees on each leg.
After brekkie, we packed up our little 4WD and set off south to see the big red rock they call Uluru.4 Since we'd been given the free upgrade, we decided to take a 150km detour along gravel roads to see the Henbury Meteorite Craters and, well... okay, we took it because we could. We pulled into the Curtin Springs Roadhouse at about 4:45pm, checked in to our relatively inexpensive little room, and then quickly calculated that we had the time to drive the next hour to Uluru to catch the sunset. All those famous photographs of this rock that are bright bright red-- they are mostly taken at sunset, with the actual setting sun at the back of the photographer, so that the light is cast on the rock itself. The sky tonight was cloudy, so we didn't get the full effect... but it is still pretty amazing to see this thing in person. In three dimensions, in the context of the landscape around it-- the photographs don't even begin to do it justice.
;)
- D
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NOTES
1This went over particularly well, although the fact that it was the last of six talks in a row and right before the late lunch break might have contributed to its popularity.
2Flew out of Sydney, connected through Adelaide, landed in Alice Springs.
3Think the city of St. Louis between Minneapolis and New Orleans, but then remove the Mississippi River and 98% of the towns, townships, suburbs, homes, farms, gas stations, motels, and people that you would find on that route in the US. And throw in a couple of low mountain ranges just north and south of St. Louis.
4Pronounced, as best as we can approximate it, with a slight emphasis on the first syllable, and just a little bit of an "uh" instead of "oo" in that first syllable, too. Somewhere between "UH-luh-roo" and "OO-luh-roo".
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