I had the opportunity to travel down under the year I graduated from high school. I was there for six weeks, splitting my time half with a host family in a little town called Woomby in Queensland--about an hour's plane ride from Brisbane--and half traveling around the country. My favorite place by far was deep in the middle of the Northern Territory--the very red desert.
You could travel all day on this two lane road through the Red Centre without encountering another car. On two nights, we simply pulled over at night and camped on the side of the road. We dragged out our tents, pitched them, made camp.
The sky in the Southern hemisphere is more brilliant that anything, but out there--with no urbanization for many hundreds of miles--it's especially incredible. It literally looked as if the sky was 2 inches above my head and appeared as if it was descending on me. The magnitude of aliveness I felt was incredible: being far out in the desert, with a quiet breeze, seeing tracks in the shadows of the flashlight, there was nothing to separate me from the Universe. Above me there was a clear and giant expanse of the heavens which seemed to surround me like a blanket and include me with an ancient feeling of connectness.
11 comments:
wow... sounds beautiful - i want to go to australia! do you have any pictures??
I felt the same way when I visited New Mexico
Your dscription reads as though it's one of your arresting photos transformed into words.
Sounds like the deserts of Mars, as Ray Bradbury described them. Lovely skies.
must have been a memorable trip! I recall a trip to central New York once in the summer. The nighttime sky was dark and the stars were dazzling. There were just dozens of shooting stars. I've never seen anything like it since.
Sounds like quite the trip.
I remember the mountain cabin we had when I was a kid. Mogollon Rim, Arizona. Star soup. A navy blue pot of endless spectacle.
Nothing like the enormity of the universe bearing down on you.
Your words make me want to go for a visit one day. :) Lucky you! :) Have fun today!
Wow, very cool.
You took me back to many night in the country stargazing. Nothing quite like being out in the middle of nowhere with a clear sky filled with those bright and twinkling lights.The night sky is one of the best things about getting away from the city for a few day, of course, nature, and lack of traffic are two more!
"The Dingo ate her baby"
It sure is a big sky overhead, up here. Incidentally, here at the National Gallery of Australia, thousands of people are flooding into the Van Gogh exhibition to see his famous painting 'Starry Night': they are probably hoping for that feeling you had camped under the bigass skiy.
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