End of the season in cattle station and journey through the Red Centre

So a lot has happened since I last wrote (so I apologize in advance for the long post). I should start with ending the season at Kilto station – one of the experiences, that I know that I will always remember, because it was just so extraordinary for me. You don’t even have things like a cattle stations in Europe. Millions of acres of land (there are stations that are bigger than the whole country of Estonia in Australia), where the weather can be anything from desert-like dry to fully flooded. Wild cows and bulls roaming this rough bushland in herds, chasing the place with the best food and water. Then, in the middle of this emptiness, there is some action going on (the cattle stations). Since you are usually in the middle of nowhere, you have to be self-sustainable all the way. So there are generators going on 24/7 giving power to everything around and water is constantly being pumped up by tens of pumps trying to keep up with the water needs - giving water to the 3000 cows that are in the yards, and all the others in the bush and to all the hay that is being grown, for the animals on the huge irrigation pivots, to water the lawns and for people’s living needs. The only 'populated places' that you find inbetween towns in the remote areas are cattle stations and aboriginal communities.

Back to the last couple of months. It was the end of the dry season and „the wet“ was coming. So most days were up to (and over) 40 degrees, even the wind was burning your face, the cows had eaten anything that is eatable (even tree bark and small branches)from anywhere they could (it had been dry for months now) so it was all dusty and steaming hot. And then on some days,suddenly a cold wind came from somewhere and some clouds appeared. In a short while, it was pouring down the heaviest rain that I had ever seen (ok. now I'm lying, I saw similar rains in Kenya, when the wet season started) and the wind was tearing off pieces of roof and you actually got cold for these 30 minutes (or a couple of hours). But then you knew that the next day, all the water from the ground had to evaporate. So the next day, the air was wet and thick, and you didn’t even have to move to be soaking wet from both the sweat and the humidity, from head to toe. In the yards, since all the ground is basically covered in cow shit, all the steam was also a thick steam of ... well, the same thing. After a few big storms that we had, the small pond that we had in the middle of the station, started flooding and flooded all the roads around it. The pens, where the cows were, turned into a thick and sticky substance. In the end, when I was walking through a pen in my gumboots, I sunk into a 20-30cm deep stinky glue (still mostly shit) with every step.

But the whole experience was very cool – in all these circumstances I was chasing 600-800kg bulls (we mostly had big bulls), I got to be in a helicopter while my manager was mustering with it, I learned how to drive all kinds of loaders and stuff, even managed to unload a whole truck full of hay bales (it took me over an hour, because it was my first time using a tractor for these purposes), learned how to repair the cables in the yards, and in doing that learned how to use many tools that I had not used before, mustered cows on a quadbike and so on.

Maybe the most eye-opening thing that I learned was about moving animals. At first I tried to use loud voice and all other things, but by the end of three months I actually had started to 'feel the animals' much more. I learned how to move them only by moving myself. So I did not have to scream or shout, I just had to move just a step or two in the right direction. The hardest part was probably to figure out in which direction you had to move. Because cows are different and situations are different, then sometimes what worked for one cow, ruined the whole situation for the other cow. It was all about giving and releasing pressure from the right direction. I guess it is one skill that I can never directly use again, because it is unlikely that I will ever need to move wild bulls again but I think that in time, I will learn how to apply it in some other situations as well (maybe even dealing with people?)

In the end, the three musketeers (our three pet cows) turned into four musketeers, because Snowflake, the head of the gang, gave birth to a little red calf with blue eyes. Actually I did not see the blue eyes, because apparently cowboys see colours a bit differently that normal people do. For example, when I call a cow 'white' then they say 'grey', when I say 'beige' they say 'creamy', when I say 'brown' then they say 'red' and so on. So a red calf with blue eyes. A few days after the calf was born, Snowey started needing a lot more attention than before. That meant that all four of them came to the living quarters every evening to chill around there with the people. So the last few evenings at Kilto station were especially nice. For several evening we were just sitting on the grass with four of them, some other members of the cow-gang looking from the distance because they were not so fond of people. Peaches was getting even more scratches than usually, and if you scratched her, she would either lift her head as high as she could, so that you could scratch the skin on her neck better or would put her head on your lap. Even chockflake (she does not really like petting but she occasionally tolerates it to be part of the gang) was quite relaxed, seemed to enjoy her pets and even tried to lick me a couple of times. The Little Red (when we left, she did not have a name yet) was looking at us with eyes so big that it was probably impossible to open them any more and you could see it in her eyes that she was puzzled "Why is my mommy letting these two-legged creatures touch her? Why are we here? What do these creatures want from me?". And then there was Snowey, who wanted to be very close to people. She kept licking everybody, but she tried especially hard to lick my hair straight. She was quite sure, that if she licked enough, then my hair would get smooth again. And it probably would have, if I had let her continue. Have you even been licked by a cow? The tongue is at least 30cm long (and Brahmens, that we mostly had, have blue tongues) and it is rougher than the roughest sandpaper, so it actually works like a comb. Another thing that Snowey did was demanding alcohol - she really loves beer and rum. So one evening, as we were chilling there on the lawn with the cows and having a few beers, Snowey either on a quest to get some booze or to lick someone did not notice my foot (to be fair, it was dark and my foot is quite small). After three months of wearing steel-capped shoes for six days a week, ten hours a day, my foot finally gets stepped on a 700kg cow on one of the last days, and I'm not even working. Fortunately, I just had a big blue hoof-mark on my foot and no broken bones.

We also had our end-of-the-season-slash-Christmas partly. Of course, since everyone was used to waking up at 5 o'clock, the Christmas party also started early - at 10 o'clock in the morning already. The owner of our station has a summer cottage by the sea, so we all went there and waited for the lagoon to fill up with water. The boss had also bought a jetski for that occasion so he was giving us all rides up and down the lagoon on two big tubes, while the others were using various floating devices (the fanciest of them had an ice box for keeping the beers cold) to chill in the water. We managed to lose at least two pairs of sunglasses (being towed by a jetski with your sunnies on is actually not a good idea) but overall it was one of the coolest Christmas parties, I have ever had, with free booze, jetski, sea, some Aussi barbeque, some cowboys and just chilling out in perfect weather (only if you stayed in the water or shade most of the time).


But enough of Kilto (I could write ten more pages about it), much more has happened since that as well. We had an ambitious plan to go from Broome to Darwin and then down to Adelaide through the centre of Australia (the Red Centre) in two weeks. Who is not familiar with the geography of Australia, I recommend you take a map and while you are doing that, also look at the kilometres. It is about 5000km to go from Broome to Darwin to Adelaide (but we did a 1000km detour as well so at least 6000km). In comparison, it is 4500km from Tallinn to the place where Spain meets Marocco at the Strait of Gibraltar. So when we started our journey, I was ready for some unbearable heat and dryness, big deserts with no plants and lack of water, but only some of my expectations were met.
Our first destination was Darwin and on the way there we were warned (multiple times actually) that there is a cyclone risk in Darwin. So when we got there, it was rainy, windy and not very hot. Now when I say rainy, I mean walls of water pouring down at times, the wind was so strong that it made the rain blow almost vertically under any shade you found (even if you were standing 5m away from the edge). But still, as soon as the rain stopped and the sun was shining through the clouds, it got incredibly hot. We stayed in Darwin for two nights - spend the first one in the car and got a room at a backbacker for the other one (this was the only time during the whole journey down that we actually stayed indoors for the night). We had not seen a normal big town for about five months (Broome was great and all, but between Perth and Darwin there actually are no big cities, where you can easily find anything you need and actually have a choice between stores) so we went a bit crazy and got ourselves everything that we had planned to get (like now shoes, a tent and so on) and started heading south. The storms and the winds were moving South with us (we realized that later) so it was constantly changing between cloudy and rainy.

When we were conducting our usual morning oil-water-tyres check, we discovered that we had to add water to the radiator (Location - somewhere between Katherine and Tennant Creek). And then the next morning we had to add even more. We discovered that one of the hoses (the one that takes water from the engine to the heater) was leaking. After accidentally breaking off the hose, spending a few hours trying to get out the piece that had remained between the clamps and ducktaping it all, we moved on. We also discovered that another hose was leaking, but much less, so we did not worry about that so much. Did I already mention the dates? When we got to Tennant Creek on the 23rd of December, the only shop that sells car parts had been closed for the rest of the year so we continued our journey, hoping that Alice Springs (500km down the road, towards the Red empty Centre of Australia) would have some shops open... I'll get back to the car in a bit- that was only the beginning of the problems, but we did other things on the way as well.

We also saw Devil's Marbles - amazing big balls made out of stone that are shattered around one particular place and decided to spend the night there (it was only 3.30 for camping... it was the second and last time we paid for sleeping on this trip). We also visited the UFO centre of Australia - apparently people see aliens around there very often and even the aboriginals talk about seeing 'strange people' around Devil's Marbles so maybe it is a UFO centre, after all we were getting closer to Uluru (Ayers rock) , which is sometimes thought to be an old space ship. And there are some thermal springs on the way, that have Flying Foxes living around them. We thought about taking a couple of beers to the thermal pools, at the springs. We almost did not do that, because there were big signs up how 'alcohol is not permitted anywhere in the park' (we decided to take one can then... as a compromise). Of course, when we got there, there were three groups of Aussies there with piles of full and empty cans. There is a strange thing that I have noticed about Australians - there are some rules that everybody ignores and noone even thinks about it. And then there are some rules that everybody follows (even though sometimes they might be silly, pointless rules). So one big part of learning to live here is to find out, which rules (the written and the unwritten ones) are worth following and which ones are not.


Anyways, we got to Alice Springs and luckily discovered that the SuperCheap Auto (the best and the biggest shop for anything connected to cars) was open. The guy at the SuperCheap found us a hose (not the one made specifically for our car, but a general one, that would work as well) and we tried to get the other hose as well, but since we were not very good at explaining what hose it was (it had some strange connector in the end), the guy came to the car to take a look. Long story short: the hose that takes fuel to the engine was leaking (probably had been leaking for a while, because we noticed that the car had some trouble starting already at Kilto, so a few thousand kilometres back) on the heater hose and probably that had caused the heater hose to break. At that point we also discovered that the water had started leaking into the car again, one of the headlights needed a new lightbulb and the windscreen wipers were past their useful period of life. So we got some goo to put in the connector of the fuel hose and a new heater hose (decided to ignore the other problems for the moment), did our food shopping for the next couple of days and started driving towards the McDonnell ranges national park (the plan was to go to Uluru with a little d-tour to see the Kings Canyon and other stuff on the way) to find the first place to stop and camp and have our Christmas dinner. For those who are not Estonians - in Estonia, the evening on the 24th is usually the most important day of Christmas. For example in my family, we usually have a big Christmas dinner and gathering and Santa comes with the presents and everyone has to sing or read poems to Santa for each present.


So it was raining a bit on our Christmas Eve (unfortunately not the whole time), we were fixing our car and making kangaroo meat, sauerkraut and potatoes on the fire somewhere in the bush, out of Alice Springs. The next day, our car seemed to be fixed and we spent a day looking at all the waterfalls, gorges and meteor-holes on the way. On our way to Kings Canyon was a 160km stretch of road (the Mereene Loop) that needed a permit to drive on, since it was going through Aboriginal lands (in the northern part of West Aus, the North Aus and the norther part of South Aus, there are big stretches of land that the white man is forbidden to enter, unless you have a special permit. The roads in the heart of these areas are unmarked and wild and unknown). So we hopped into one of the homesteads that was supposed to give out permits and got one. We also enquired about the possibilities of stopping for the night on the Mereene Loop road (as it was late afternoon and we would not have made through it before the dark). The young fella who talked to us said that there should be places for stopping but they will not have any facilities and he also warned us that the roads may be a bit slippery, because it had been raining for the last couple of days. So we were driving on the road (gravel of course) and tried to find the place, but there was nothing there. It was getting darker and darker and we needed a place to stay. So we found a place with some trees and bushes and drove into the bush a bit (it was maximum 100m, but we did not want to stay on plain sight on aboriginal lands). The ground was a bit wet, but it was not a lower area or a floodway, by the looks of it.

It started raining again at some point at night. When Erik went outside for a moment he said 'there is water everywhere'. I just said sleepily 'put my shoes inside' (as I later found out, they were floating around in front of the tent). In the morning, when we woke up (it was raining slightly), there were a few small puddles of water (so I thought that Erik had been exaggerating at night) and everything we had left outside were muddy and wet. So we packed everything up, wet and muddy as everything was, did not even have breakfast, sat in the car and... did not move anywhere. The car was about 15cm in the mud. So we got our little shovel (almost a meter long and very fragile, not the best tool in the world), gathered some branches and were out of the mud in 15min. The rain got stronger. We started driving towards the road and... got stuck again. The rain got even stronger, we were soaking wet, muddy, digging and getting branches. All that was heppening was that the car was digging itself deeper and deeper until finally the bottom touched the ground. Our car is quite high, it is even made higher after buying it, but we were still on our bottom, so imagine the depth of the holes. So there we were, the puddles of water were getting bigger and bigger and kept joining each other until there was only water all around us, no dry ground to be seen, we were cold and wet and shivering in the car. In was raining and raining and it seemed that it would never stop. I started accepting the fact that we would probably be there for days and started calculating how much food and water we have, how long we could last. There were no cars driving on that road anyway (actually we saw 4-5 during the whole day) but even if we stopped one car, there was nothing they could do as they would get just as stuck before they even reached us.

So I'll leave these two miserable creatures sitting in the mudd there to jump forward for a moment and give you some information about the situation that we did not know about at that very moment. Firstly, it was forbidden to spend a night on the Mereene Loop, it was 50,000 dollars fine for doing that (but that was the fault of the guy who have us the permit that we did not know that) and secondly the Mereene Loop road was closed because of the rains - so no cars were allowed to come on that road because there was too much water. So our chances of being rescued by someone else were even thinner than we knew it at that moment. And well... these were aboriginal lands, but we already knew that.

So while I was depressed to the bone and thought that this may be where we will stay, Erik decided that we will not get out if we do not do anything. So he got out in the rain, got us both dry, rainproof clothes, put them on and headed outside to assess the situation. The rain got also weaker (and even stopped for some periods of time) and since Erik was being busy, I had to do something as well. So Erik was digging drenches to get the water out from under our car (as soon as the rain got weaker, the water started slowly-slowly disappearing as well but the ground was all very soft), to build put branches under the wheels etc. I started putting branches over the softer parts of ground where we would need to cross. We even took some of the heavier things, like spare fuel and water out of the car to make it lighter. But no matter what we did, we still needed to get the car out of the hole first so we decided to try the bushmechanics method. Out of our four wheels, one front wheel had traction - all the other three were going around in the air. We took a rope and a strap, connected them to each other, tied one end to a tree and the other end to the front wheel that was going around. The idea was to use the wheel as a winch. The first attempt was unsuccessful - the strap snapped almost immediately. The second time, we doubled up the strap and... it worked!! So the car got out of the mud-holes and... got stuck about 5m later. But now we were smarter - we started taking down the branches and digging right away (we were about 70m away from the road but it was all soft mud) and got out... and got stuck again... We were muddy and wet and tired; all of our stuff was lying beside the mudholes and branch-roads that we had left behind. So when we got stuck for the sixth time, I built a more proper road than the previous ones - over 5 metres of branch road, that would actually help to hold the car. And it helped - the short stretch of branch 'road' was enough to build up the speed and get through the last 60m of mud.

So we gathered up all of our things that were spread out in the bush (all covered in red mud) and continued our journey, after 6 hours of building and digging. The rest of Mereene loop was... wet, to say the least. We had small lakes on our way that we had to go through  and we just tried to keep to the centre and hope that the water had not taken a part of the road away (luckily it had not)and jokingly said to each other 'I think this road might be closed'. We got to Kings Canyon resort (and the sealed road started again, went to the bar, got ourselves a pizza and a beer and were happy that we were moving again. I asked the barman, where the actual Kings Canyon was. He told me that the road was closed. We were kind of relieved about that because we were not in a mood for any more adventures on that day anyway. So we started driving away from Kings Canyon when... there were signs on the road 'No access'. So I jumped into the local reception to find out, if there was any way that we could use for leaving. And that was when I found out about Mereene Loop being closed, about the 50,000 fine and also that the main road was under water and closed. We were trapped. We drove back on our unsealed road for about 20km and stayed in a free rest area. Over there we got our last big rains and suddenly the sun came out. It was minutes (even seconds) from the strongest rains to bright, clear blue skies. As we later found out, the same rains continued their way down south (they got ahead of us while we were stuck) and caused floods, panic and evacuations in South Australia (we heard about them in the news).

So anyways... the weather was nice again, we did go to see the Canyon for a bit on the next day but we were not really in the right mood because of what we had to go through to get there. So we decided to go straight to Uluru instead. I had really low expectations, going to Uluru. People are saying that it is just a big rock. So when we saw it on the horizon, 50km away from it, I still did not think much of it. But actually it left a great impression. Yes it is a big rock. But it is a f***ing big rock. It is of a bright red colour which changes the red or orange depending on the time of day and the light. It is very important to the aboriginal people, because it gathers water and gives shade. We read the stories about the rock and went around it - and I can say it is so much more than what you can see from the picture. The pictures are all taken from one and the same side. Actually it has amazing shapes and waterfalls, and images and shapes on it (the blackfellas have stories and myths for all of the shapes), some areas look like illuminators of a spaceship (I really think it is a possibility that it was a spaceship), others look like there are people trapped inside the stone, trying to get out; it has caves and holes and amazing shapes and patterns on it.

So that evening we had a sleeping spot on a sand-dune, where we could see the magical Uluru straight from our camp. Our magical evening was ruined a bit my the millions of flying termites who come after the rains. We finally had to hide in the tent. We didn't even have to put out our candle outside because it was so full of insects after a while that the light went out. So there we were, in the red centre; in a place that sometimes does not see rain for years and we were there at the time of the worst floods. But at least the nature was happy - the insects were going crazy and everything was green.

I'll skip the next one thousand kilometres (and a couple of days of driving) because there was nothing there, literally. As soon as South Australia started, it was back to low bush... and there was only one town on the way - Coober Pedy where half of the houses are under ground and where they dig for opals. So we finally got to Adelaide to meet some of the friends that we had met on our Gibb River Road trip (I think I did mention them). We spent the days around the New Years in a farm, 10km out of a town called Mannum. We found out that South Australia is the weed capital of Australia, as far as I have seen. It is cheap around there and people are very relaxed about it as well. So when we were out at Mannum on New Year's (we were the only backbackers that we saw during these days, everyone else were Aussies) and the days around it as well, almost every person, from teenagers to older people (for example our hosts, who were 50-year-old farmer-motorcyclists) were quite openly consuming cannabis (although is is still illegal there as well). We actually spent most of our New Year's across the river from Mannum (there was a free ferry going 24/7), made some sašlõkk (marinated meat, the Estonian way. I wanted to make yoghurt marinade and accidentally bought the wrong kind. So we had mixed berry yoghurt sašlõkk), chilled and camped. Followed by a day of lying down in a big bus, set up net to our friend's house, that was rocking like a boat the whole day that we were watching movies and doing absolutely nothing.

We spent almost a week going from Adelaide to Melbourne on the Great Ocean Road. The closer we got to Melbourne the more tourists we saw. We went to see the 12 apostles (formerly 12, now about 5,5 big rock formations in the sea) and were shocked - the parking lot was bigger than a big shopping centre and it was all full of people. But The Great Ocean Road was cool - winding up and down in the forests and mountains or cut into rock by the sea, with steep rock going up on one side and steep rock going down to the sea on the other side.

We ended our journey in a house full of Estonians. So far we have spent most of our time in Australia with Australians (the cattle station life and chilling out near Adelaide for example) and had only seen a few Estonians in the six months that we have spent here. And now we lived with eight of them. Well... actually the house was full, which meant that we put our huge tent (a big 4-person tent - some beetles had eaten holes in the small one that we previously had, so we had to get a new one in Darwin and the 4-person tent had the best price-quality relation) in the back yard, which was tiny and paved. But that did not really matter - we had a lemon tree growing in the garden, access to shower, toilet and kitchen, and lived in Melbourne, so everything was perfect. Anyways, our friends from Estonia, Jaanika and Karl, were coming to Australia for the very first time and we wanted to help them get started with their travels here (get a bank account, TFN, phone number, car etc) and that was the main reason for being in Melbourne when we were there.

So after a week of urban camping we moved up to the mountains to Kinglake (a bit over an hour out of Melbourne). Erik got a job here that actually has something to do with his studies, which is a good thing (I can't imagine even getting one myself because noone wants a teacher for just a few months) and I decided to find a job somewhere around here as well. Have not been so lucky yet, but I have had some promising replies from the local bars-cafès. So now we have our own caravan, a view over the mountains and quite good facilities. The small farm that we live in also has sheep, horses, dogs, rabbits and chicken (free eggs!). We are planning to stay here for a while so I will probably have time to write again a bit sooner. Probably when I actually get a job and we find out what our daily life here will look like.