Word: outbacker
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dinner to serious re-creations of the desert treks of the past. They're on menus and in museums, and camel racing draws large crowds to tiny towns whose individual populations usually struggle to reach three digits. There's no better way to get close to the outback than on camelback...
...getting to my camel camp of choice run by Explore the Outback (www.austcamel.com.au/explore.htm) turned out to be a trek in itself. I hitched a ride on the twice-weekly mail truck from the South Australian opal-mining town of Coober Pedy to Warriner, a long-abandoned railway depot in the middle of nowhere. "You'll be all right with Phil," the cheerful driver assured me. "He's a bit of a bushie." It wasn't a reference to his foot-long beard. Wearing a check shirt and a tall, rabbit-felt hat, trek leader Phil Gee looked the part...
...when "adventure" and "exploration" make for common tourist-brochure copy, he offers the real thing. Carrying a mental list of abandoned miners' huts and trails waiting to be discovered, Gee takes a Sherlock Holmes approach to exploring this remote corner of the outback, hunting for traces of human passage. Each group of about 12 tourists accompanies him on a slightly different trek?ensuring that his clients get a unique trip, and he a chance to fill in the blank spaces on the map. Gee's guests ride through some of Australia's most austere terrain, participating in the full desert...
...away from a tantalizing buffet of acacias, the animals responded to our well rehearsed commands of "Hoosh down," dropping suddenly to their front knees and clumsily concertinaing their back legs under their bellies. Once saddled up we plodded off into the vast, silent emptiness in search of clues to outback history, startling kangaroos and emus accustomed to having the arid landscape to themselves. Was that faint track across a low, stony hill merely made by wild goats? No, over the rise was a roofless, drystone miners' hut, still surrounded by a litter of schnapps bottles as undisturbed...
...Delay has long been a hallmark of the Ghan legend, which was named for the "Afghan" cameleers whose strings of camels carted goods to and from the train depots. The railroad on which it runs is often subjected to the intense weather of the Australian outback. Flash floods and sand drifts would sometimes block the line for days. Once, a train was stranded in the middle of the outback for two weeks; the driver shot wild goats to feed the passengers. Even construction of the rest of the line?originally intended to link the South Australian capital of Adelaide...