I’ve been speechless for the past two weeks. I haven’t been able to write because I haven’t known how to capture a single moment of what I’ve been experiencing. Sometimes, words can paint a picture – they can freeze a moment in time: enhancing images, filling in the details, invoking a visceral type of comprehension. Other times, they can dull a fantasy and blur the edges of a crisp, gut feeling. The latter is how I’ve felt for the past couple of weeks. To me, writing about the Northern Territory while I was there was akin to making plans to go out to the bars in hurried whispers as you’re scurrying to communion from the back pews of a church. Denigrating.

We can pick up where I left off: just having arrived in Alice Springs, rushing to the internet café, rushing back to the youth hostel (Annie’s Place) to take the official “Town Tour.” What’s there to see in Alice Springs? Yeah, that’s what I was wondering. Not far along the tour, however, I was intrigued by the history of this little outback town and its European settlers. We visited the grave of Albert Namatjira, a famous Aboriginal painter who was mistreated by Europeans and whose paintings are worth a fortune now. We learned about the Royal Flying Doctors service, which John Flynn started – it operates on donations and provides prompt medical care to people in remote areas of the outback. Think snake bite and 20 minutes to respond. What a fantastic service. It all started in Alice Springs. We took a trip up Anzac Hill and I got to experience my first desert sunset. Why has the sky never caught my attention at home? Am I unaware, or is it just unremarkable? In the outback, the sun set slowly...muted oranges and reds slowly seeping up from the horizon on one side; yellows and blues sinking behind my back. As soon as the sun dipped from view, the air wept with a bitter chill. How could it go from so hot during the day to so cold at night?

We got back to the youth hostel and I had some camel lasagne. Camel tastes a lot like beef, but stronger, more pungent. It didn’t matter because I was starving. On the tour I had met two guys: Zsolt from Canada, and Maarten from Holland. They had met each other almost a year ago, working in the kitchen of a restaurant in Melbourne. They both had one-year working holiday visas and had some real stories about shit jobs they had taken: helping out on fishing boats near Tasmania and nearly freezing to death, cleaning up dog poop in the parks, washing silverware in disgusting restaurants, making popcorn in outdoor movie venues. Well, seven months ago, sick of their crap jobs, Zsolt bought a car, and with his new friend Maarten, decided to begin a road trip around Australia. Seven months, a million stories, minus one liver between the two of them later (or so they claimed), they were in the outback in a race to get back to Melbourne before their flights departed: Zsolt back to Canada, Maarten onto China and Thailand.

We went to a honky-tonk cowboy bar called Bojangles Saloon and met up with other people from the hostel: three English nurses, an Aussie guy named Aaron, and an English guy named Jonathan. What a laugh! You think the mullet is indigenous to America and Jerry Springer? Ha! Think again. I saw the worst one ever in Alice Springs, Australia. The DJ was obviously on coke or speed, and there was an Elvis impersonator. The “rules” of Alice Springs were even more strange: I was carded heavily (where else besides the USA does this happen?), couldn’t sit down and smoke cigarettes until after 10pm (you have to STAND), had to be SEATED, not STANDING, if I was outside of a bar, and I could’t take drinks or cigarettes onto the dance floor – not even bottled water! Alright, I reasoned, so the police of Alice Springs really want to be on COPS, busting up some drug lord in L.A. I understand. I mean, I live in Rochester, where the sirens are wailing every three minutes but the same ratios of fires and crimes have yet to be reported.

In all, it was a fantastic night because of how free and random it was. Dancing to J-Lo and Justin Timberlake in a tacky outback bar with people from all over the world, as a man with a mullet laughs at an Elvis impersonator? Who DOES that? Hadn’t I been hanging out with transvestites in a Phuket bar with my uncle only the week before? For sure, serious therapy would be in order when I got home.

~Hope