Monday

On Monday morning, I got up at the crack of dawn, made myself some tea on the camp stove, and sat around waiting for everyone else to get up. Russell and Ian were up, and Tony and Merrel the Marvelous followed shortly. But everyone else slept in for a while. After we got up and ate, we broke camp and got back in the troopies. We drove for a few minutes before we stopped at an Aboriginal art site, under some tremendously large boulders on a mountainside. This place was also a quinkan place, and he showed up in some of the paintings. There was also one painting of an echidna that I particularly liked... I'll try to post a photo of it eventually.

We made one or two brief stops on the way, but basically we spent most of Monday driving. The paved roads eventually turned into dirt roads, which occasionally became sand roads (really hard to drive through, by the way). But it was sort of like out west, where there would be miles and miles of straight road. We were averaging about 100-110 km per hour (62-68 mph), which seemed a little drastic for dirt roads. But there you are.

Ian is a huge fan of country music, some Australian and some American, and had it on whenever we were in the car. So we got everything from US top 20 country hits (which reminded me of the farm) to Slim Dusty, who's sort of like the Australian version of Hank Williams. And I believe we had some Hanks Williams himself. Giovanne just rolled his eyes, but I though that the music was really rather appropriate for the occasion, and we had a good time on the ride.

We must have driven for about four or five hours all together, although I'm not really sure. But we ended up a couple hundred kilometres into Lakefield National Park, which is really quite remote. You can't even get that far into the park during the Wet Season, because it's all underwater. That being said, you'd have a difficult time backpacking there without pack animals in the dry season, because there's hardly any water for miles and miles at a time. We brought our own water in, and ended up camping near a small, crocodile-infested stream. There was one part of the stream where the water ran over smooth rocks for about thirty feet, and that's where we did our washing and cooling off. Eventually we filtered stream water to drink, and we did all of our dishes and made our tea with the water, but you had to stay away from the edge and haul it up with a bucket (on a long string) to avoid being consumed by crocs.

The campsite was beautiful, and full of eerie, tall, thin termite mounds. Literally hundreds of them, ranging from a few centimetres to maybe two or three metres tall! We did have a "dunny" at this site (although I might rather have done my necessaries outside, if you know what I mean), but that was the only thing that marked it as any different from the surrounding areas.

We unloaded our gear, set up camp, made dinner (I don't remember what we had that night), and had story time again.

The Rainbow Serpent:

The Rainbow Serpent is the protector of the Aboriginal food chain. Aboriginals must hunt only what they can eat, and to do more is to violate the rules of the Rainbow Serpent. In the Dreamtime, there were two young men who went out to catch some fish. Aboriginals sometimes kill fish by putting sap into the water that reacts with oxygen and suffocates the fish. These young men went to a well-populated lake and poisoned all of the fish, many more than they needed. They stood in the water and threw the fish out on the banks. The Rainbow Serpent saw this waste, and was angry, so he sent a very large, juicy fish their way. When the men turned around to get the fish, the Rainbow Serpent ate them!

An older member of the tribe came to the lake, saw the fish, and surmised what had happened. He set off after the Rainbow Serpent, and found that he lived in a tunnel underground. The old man surprised the Rainbow Serpent from above, and the Rainbow Serpent spat the two young men out again, but they were dead. The old man brought them back to life, becoming the first medicine man, and the boys learned to respect the food chain.