Travel Stories from a Big and Diverse World!
When I bought my binoculars with the intention of travelling to the deserts of Central Australia, those deserts didn’t seem so far away.
A few days driving, something like that.
But then the restrictions on travel were ratcheted up – and up – and before I knew it, damn well everything was far away.
One couldn’t go anywhere excepting the supermarket and petrol station.
Stay at home was the idea.
Home? Anya and I had never actually had a home.
In February, I bought a pair of binoculars.
Oh, not just any binoculars: astronomical binoculars.
In other words: binoculars meant for stargazing.
I’d been meaning to do this for some years and never got around to it.
Why did I put it off for so long?
It was on a Saturday night in January 2020, shortly after Anya and I had returned from a month of walking in La Palma. We´d arranged to go to Anya´s niece´s place, who´d invited some friends around for the night.
It was meant to be a pleasant, convivial evening.
But thanks to me, it turned out a bit differently.
It started with flamenco and ended with aboriginal fire stick agriculture.
Quite a distance to travel in a few hours: Spain to Australia.
On the shores of Lake Albert, where we pitched our little dome tent, water birds were in abundance– pelicans, water-hens, ibis, and black swans. Lake Albert was big. Standing on the shore and looking out, it seemed like an inland sea rather than a lake. The flat watery horizon was endless.
It wasn’t always like this.
When drought came, as it always did in this country, Lake Albert, so vast, turned into something more like a pond.
Those luxuriant waters vanished.
It was a land of extremes.
A hard land.
EXCERPTS FROM MY TRAVEL DIARY
May 2005; Adelaide, State Library of South Australia:
An account left to us from a British colonist arriving in my state South Australia early one morning in 1837:
‘ …Before next day’s sunrise, a great change took place in the landscape before us. The watchers on deck beheld a fire on one of the hills which seemed to spread from hill to hill with amazing speed. All on board were now awake and on deck looking at this grand, and yet to those who knew not its cause, fearful conflagration. It seemed as if the whole land was a mass of flame. The whole range was as black as midnight, except where the trees were still burning.’
