shine on

yeah; as I said, a place must be New York to keep me if it's hot AND humid -- thus after cap trib's rainforest, arriving in Alice Springs, a hot baking oven, was pretty magic. Pink-bellied clouds greeted me at the airport, reflecting the red earth *I'm not making this up
also, in this sun I could immediately feel the skin cancer growing. (like every THIRD australian!)true outback..
Yet the land was suprisingly green: apparently there had been half the year's average of rainfall shortly before.
The next day the 3-day Uluru full-out adventure outback tour began - and adventure it was...
First things first: I was going to complain thoroughly about the state of the art in music in this post because up till the trip, I had felt trapped in an 80s time loop of American pop I didn't listen to when it was new. Our guide, Ben, changed this however and presented some seriously good stuff. the sunrise over Uluru accompanied by Pink Floyd's The Wall and Harrison's Here Comes the Sun; some heavy opera after the more daunting aspects of the tour - sudden heavy rainfall, night rain and a puncture on the way back -; Jazz and the ALF jingle ! :)) there was also some ecclectic stuff amongst his compilations, like Australian sketches and a fusion of
"is she worth it" song (don't ask me no names and I tell you no lies)and the "land from down under" thingy (same same). weird. I am definitely not a fan of fusion in music.
The rock: red, brown, banale and sublime, sometimes stunning, mind-blowing, its holes like parts of a brain, scarred and wondrous; sometimes, on accord of the rainfall, the landscape was very different from what I had expected - There were flowers, and a rejoicing of colors: red earth, grey-black burnt bush, yellow dried intermediary and achingly fresh plastic-looking green grass on top. King's Canyon was glittering in silver because of the rain, tropical trees growing beside desert trees in the Garden of Eden: It was beautiful.

The situation: the flies unbearably annoying and I invented a couple of devices of sadistically killing them. I mentioned the sun. The first day was really really hot with 42 degrees and somebody told me they measure the temperature in the shadowy parts which they found somewhere apparently.. that meant suicidal stinky beetles on the toilets and deadly exhaustion.
we got up at 3.45am on the second day to watch the sunrise. only there was no really a lot of sunrise to be seen, as the weather remained fickle and difficult: the god's of the desert didn't heed Ben's - our tour guide - brave make-belief that it probaly wouldn't rain as it shouldn't and so it won't, in all likelihood and so on... - I've never met anyone who talked in such a roundabout way, including myself. Ben's assertion that the swags were waterproof also wasn't really true.

About half the about group consisted of German girls - the annoying kind: just after high school, blonde, alike-looking, narcissistic and dependent, constantly and unfairly complaining small-town girls. one of the girls in particularly bloodless, bored-sounding and monotonously speaking whiteblonde stick of size 4, I would have happily strangled. she wanted to wash her "hardly dirty" dishes in the pot I was just cleaning (when she eats, things don't get dirty, I guess.. transcendent princess..) and was a constant buzz in my ear (they were sitting behind me in the bus) with comments mainly revolving around food: "we eat so mudh here" "shall we eat now and not have dinner, deli?" " I have to get tanned.. nobody will believe me that I was in Australia..." "It's awful I just can't look at myself in the mirror today.." (day 3)
The other half of the group was roughly made up of Japanese girl who were idiots in their own way (but I didn't understand their gossip so they didn't get to me as badly): There were brilliant moments like one girl climbing back in the bus while our guide was trying to jack it up; another one smoking a cigarette next to the petrol statin, and the Japanese guy Ken (no he didn't understand jokes about his name), one of the three token males of the group, smashing about 1500 kg of noodles and water on the grill despite Patient Ben's fourth admonition of "no, I don't want the water ken.. ken, without the water..."... How he managed to dress and feed himself all alone every day ...

anyway, our "sleep in" of 5am on the third day wasn't really enough of a boost. Ben's increasingly bootcamp style of giving orders didn't really help to smooth things and by the end of the second day, the girls were close to mutiny.

The puncture almost tipped things and I stayed close to the British couple and a sole English man, moreover a cineaste, to be rescued with or perish with them if anything happened *desert thoughts...* you know, if you die of too much auditive pollution in your ears, at least you'd be in good company...