Posts from — January 2009

Getting off the plane in Alice Springs was like stepping back in time.  There was no jetway. We descended a set of stairs pulled close to the rear door of the plane, as in the early days of air travel.

We walked across a hot windy tarmac towards the terminal building.  Inside, I tried not to look too obvious as I searched faces for my childhood friend, Kara. She spotted me first and in a moment we were embracing.

Years and years, almost forty of them, melted away.  My first friend, my neighbor, my walking-to-school mate was here in the middle of Australia and at the airport to meet us.

At her home in town Kara and I took turns dusting off memories for comparison.  It’s strange how, for both of us, different moments have stuck and others have faded away.

She remembered that on the French Club bus ride to Montreal she accidentally gave me a black eye.  I remembered the trip and the bus – but not the injury.

We both remembered her sno-cone machine and the maple syrup that we’d pour over the top of the crushed ice, the first cold delicious bites giving way quickly to too much sweetness.

When we were teenagers, we’d used different maps to make our way through the emotional maze of high school. Now, as adults, we found ourselves in places that literally could not be further apart.

But the years and miles between us collapsed easily as we sat in the same room again piecing the memories together.

In hours of conversation, I was reminded how elusive memories can be.  The life we remember living can look very different from another’s perspective.

Sometimes, if you are lucky, a good friend who knew you well can bring clarity, perspective – and even forgiveness – to your life.

In the center of a far-off continent with Kara, laughing over shared times from the 1960s and 70s: It was a trip I’ll never forget.

We caught our first fleeting glimpse of Uluru through sand dunes from a distance of about 30 kilometers.  Even at this distance, the world’s largest monolith is an arresting site.

But here’s the thing about Uluru:  The closer you get, the more amazing it becomes.

People familiar with the geologic formation once known as Ayers Rock have seen iconic photos of an enormous, smooth, half-dome red rock rising from the desert.

But come closer and you soon see that Uluru is not smooth at all.  It is weathered, worn, pock-marked – a series of boulders with grooves, cracks and crevices that alternately catch and deflect the light.

Most amazing of all are the two water features found at the base of the rock, features that figure prominently in the Dreamtime Stories about Uluru.

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Other travelers had told me about the strange force at work at Uluru, a mystical, magical power.

Who am I to argue?

On our first evening at the Ayers Rock Resort, we hiked a short distance to an observation platform to see “The Rock” at sunset.

Instead, we were treated to a fantastical light show, the likes of which I had never seen.

In front of us, Uluru turned shades of purple as the sun set to the west.

Behind us, a near full moon rose in the evening sky.

To our right, the sun dipped below the horizon while the clouds took on a magical form and color.

To our left, a distant lightening storm raged.

And how to explain this cloud, apparently lit from above, though the sun was below the horizon in the west?

Alice Springs is one of the most far away, hard to get to places on earth.  It’s a place I’ve dreamed about visiting since first reading Bruce Chatwin’s book The Songlines twenty years ago.

When Dani and I started planning this trip she reminded me her childhood friend Kara now lived in Alice.  It became one of the “absolutely must visit” places on our itinerary.

Conor was sitting in the window seat on our flight into Alice from Melbourne.  As the plane descended through the clouds, he shouted: “Dad, look down there – everything’s red!”  And so it was.

Kara and her husband Rob picked us up at the airport.  We had arrived in time to attend Kara’s company Christmas party on a cattle station two hours from Alice in the central Australian Outback.

We made our way through the other-worldly landscape, putting Rob’s new four-wheel drive Toyota through its paces.

Once at Tilmouth Well, Roy and Janet, our hosts for the evening, welcomed us like family.

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Paul Theroux, the notoriously cranky travel writer, offers this observation in his new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star:

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing time.

Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude on other people’s privacy — being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders.

The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological.”