The True Life

I love camping. I love being in tune with nature. We called it the true life. We were pretty much all in agreement about that.
I loved sleeping in swags. A swag is basically a mattress in a canvas bag and you get in to it with your sleeping bag. Except it was mostly too hot to be wrapped up in the swag so I was usually just in my silk sleeping liner on top of the swag, out in the open with the stars and the moon becoming fuller and brighter as the week went on. The nights we were able to have a campfire I would sleep near it. It totally added to the ambience. The desert at night is silent. It was eerie at first but I soon got used to the beauty of it. And one evening we heard dingoes howling off in the distance as we were setting up camp. The night where it had cooled down very nicely and the wind had picked up was particularly lovely.




The desert is beautiful. It’s very hot but it’s beautiful. Some areas are very barren and incomprehensible as to how anything lives there but much of the desert is also very vibrant. The colours are gorgeous, the different browns, oranges, yellows, reds and even greens are particularly beautiful against the blue sky. In William Creek (population of 6) some of us took a little plane ride over the painted hills. The patterns of the landscape look much like the ones that appear in aboriginal art. It was a little 6 seater plane that Trevor with the big hole in his shorts took us up in.




We mostly saw kangaroos. They’re fascinating, very curious creatures. They would stop and watch us kind of like we were watching them. It’s neat to observe how their tails help keep them balanced when they’re standing and feeding. When they jump off they look quite comical. You can almost hear the “boing boing” sound it should make. Near the beginning of the tour we also saw many emus. We didn’t come across any snakes except for a dead one by the side of the road. And I was fine with that. After we crossed over the dingo fence we were in dingo country (wild dogs) but they too seem to stay away from people. We heard a group howling one night and we saw one at sunrise the morning we went out to the Painted Desert. It was beautiful with the rising sun in the background. The flies were our constant companions. Thousands of them, millions of them. How did they even know we were there? Wherever we went they were there too. It was impossible to sleep any time after sunrise, firstly because it just became too light but actually more so because the flies would start buzzing around your face and then you would just have to get up. We had fly nets to cover our faces when it got really annoying but sometimes that just made one more aware of the flies everywhere else on one’s body. Many would just sit on our backs and get a piggy ride to wherever it was we might have been going. Strangely enough we were getting more and more used to them and on the last day we noticed that there was no longer anyone wearing their fly net.



We all got into a rhythm. It didn’t matter what time it was or how clean we were. There was nothing to worry about. We actually came up with our own method of time telling. Reiner’s watch always beeped at 25 to the hour. So we were always aware when it was 25 to. But it didn’t matter to what hour and as long as we heard the beep beeps everything was alright and made sense.



Something I discovered throughout the course of the journey was how great escape is. Don’t ask me what I have to escape from but I recalled times at home when things get stressful etc and I’ve sometimes had the feeling that I just want to go somewhere where nobody knows who I am. Well, here I was, far, far away in the middle of nowhere, where no one knew me. It seemed that nobody had baggage for that time. We were all just there being and experiencing each moment. It felt very good.