2 Texans Down Under

We came into contact with fewer people on the hiking trails of “the red center” of Australia last week than we expected to meet and yet we had more conversations than we expected to have.

Even though we were walking the National Park trails during the last week before the start of “high season,” we thought the more popular locations would be far busier than they were.  Sometimes we hiked for as much as two hours without seeing anyone else.  Only on the shorter and most accessible trails did we see more than a half dozen or so other hikers.

A high percentage of those we did see, though, were friendly and engaging.

For example, as Kristi said in our “Brisbane Chronicles” email newsletter that we send to family and friends, we got into an extended conversation one day with a man and wife, probably in their 60s, who were travelling in a 4-wheel drive vehicle and camping out for a month or more.

Soon they were telling us about having just been stranded at a campsite in the wetter part of the Northern Territories.  A rain flooded the countryside around where they were camping.  They couldn’t drive out and nobody else could drive in.  They had obeyed the rules of the off-road road, though, and packed a two week supply of food, so they just enjoyed the peace and quiet of being totally marooned for six days.  No worries.

Two couples hiking together in the Olgas taught us to find true north using our wrist watches.  We also discussed with them birds, binoculars, and ways in which climate change is affecting Melbourne.

Three young women traveling together, wild-animal biologists all, filled us in on the difficulties of getting funding for the kind of research they do.  If you want grants, they said, it’s a lot better to study cows than bandicoots.

Two birders helped us put a name to a bird we hadn’t confidently identified.  We spotted a dingo (wild dog) only because a stranger called our attention to him, moving in the brush.

We learned from one talkative man about an emergency alert systems 4-wheel-drive explorers take with them now to notify authorities, via the first satellite passing invisibly overhead, when a life-threatening situation has developed.  He told of some guys who used it because of a dead car battery when they could have hiked out to get one on their own.  The result?  They owed a several-thousand-dollar bill for the cost of the search and rescue operation they’d set into motion when life was not at stake.

A woman at a car park told us of a terrible road-train and camel herd collision that caused a lot of mayhem.  Apparently wild camels, on chilly winter nights, sometimes bed down on the bitumen (asphalt) of paved roads because it has retained the heat of the previous day’s sunshine.

And there were several other stories told to us by strangers.  Nearly everyone we met exchanged greetings with us and seemed ready for, as Aussies say, “a bit of a yarn.”

Is it because people are more relaxed on vacation?  Maybe.  Is it because the vast emptiness of arid areas such as we were in makes people aware of the need for other people?  Maybe.

Regardless of the reason, the friendliness of the people we met in the outback was noticeably warmer than the already laudable friendliness of folks we see here in Brisbane.

We like the luxury of getting to hike in wild country, of getting to see mountains and birds and rock art and animals, but friendly human interaction, this vacation reminded me, is always and everywhere the frosting on the cake.