For Midsemester Break, one of my classes went to Boulia until Thursday. (I was going to spend the weekend doing exciting things around Townsville, but I had a paper due in the only class I'm worried about passing. It was not a fun return weekend.) Boulia, however, was AMAZING and is thus-far my favorite of the trips I've been on.
AlbumBoulia is on the edge of the Simpson Desert, about 15 hours drive from Townsville. It's also home to the rare and wondrous Waddi Tree, which is only found in two other places, both on the edge of the desert. The class I'm in goes on a fieldtrip there once a year to take measurements on the trees, which in theory will eventually become a published paper.
So our class piled into a van and we drove into bush country. We stopped by the AU version of the continental divide,
We stopped in some very small, flat towns for pitstops:
(This town is bigger than Boulia, by the way).
With interesting tourist attractions:
(The area we were in used to be a giant inland sea... so it produces a lot of dinosaur skeletons.)
We passed some beautiful mesas,
But mostly it's just flat and dry. (Well, actually, this year was wetter than normal, so there was still water and green things.)
It rained in various places around us while we were there, and you could see the storms in the distance. Also rainbows.
It's a two-day trip to Boulia, so we stayed in a camper park in Winton on the way there, which was full of Gray Nomads, an AU phenomenon of retirees who buy campers and tour around the country around this time of year. (One of our profs very generously made excuses for why we couldn't go to their "bush poetry" recital and ushered us safely away).
The first day was after I'd spent all night working on a paper, so I was pretty out of it... but once I'd gotten some sleep, everything was much better.
The only thing between Winton and Boulia is "Middleton"
This is Middleton, in its entirety:
A group picture outside the famous Hilton at Middleton ("No A/C, No Cable, No Pool, No Charge")
We were in a camper park in Boulia, too, but it was less populated. For food, someone In Charge of This Sort of Thing had taken our field trip fees and given us several giant tupperware containers of food and supplies, so we got to cook for ourselves. I was put in charge of one of the cooking groups (apparently because I look the most alert during morning classes), and we made Spaghetti + Meat Sauce according to some rather-vague instructions. The motto for cooking on the trip turned into "Chuck it in," because that was our default answer for when we found something odd in the bottom of the bins. (This was probably even more so the case for the group who made Tuesday's dinner, coconut curry, because their recipe read "add all the sauces in the bin". I am not making this up. Curry came out ok, though.)
We spent our three days in Boulia driving to different Waddi Tree sights, counting seedlings, measuring diameter, all that science-y stuff. I enjoyed it immensely... ergo my major. The people measuring Waddi diameters were less enthused. Waddi trees are prickly, nasty, half-cactus, half-devil trees, apparently. (Being a little OCD and a little bossy, I naturally end up the recorder who doesn't get her hands dirty whenever I do group projects. This may be why I am not popular.)
Also there are usually flies everywhere in Boulia... not this year, but we were provided with these very chic nets:
On Wednesday afternoon, most of the class left to join up with another fieldtrip, and suddenly there were 7 of us and I was the only American. So we grilled some steaks and sausages and onions using stainless-steel pan lids... after marinating the steaks in random sauces that we threw together. It was both delicious and fun.
Afterwards we went to the Boulia pub. We also saw the illustrious Red Stump, which is what came up when Mom googled Boulia for me. I got someone to take a picture. (And this was even before I'd been to the pub!) It's up on his facebook with the caption "Cecilia's Mum would be proud":
Next morning us Hard-Core Waddi hunters hit up the tourist spots of Boulia, which consists of a gift-shop with info on "The Min-Min Lights", which are apparently ghostly lights that people occasionally see at night. We also stopped at this old Waddi tree that theoretically had some kind of significance to the Aboriginal population. The sign was a bit vague.
You'll notice that Marissa's scarf is in this picture. The Scarf visists Boulia!
The return trip was good. I sat up front with the prof 'cause I'm that kind of sad nerd. (It was a lot of fun, though. The prof's a cool guy) We listened to my extensive Beatles collection because I was the only who brought CDs. They owe me.
We stopped at Middleton again, and I bought a rock with opal in it and a piece of petrified wood for $2. Spent the night in Winton again, this time with a pub run. Then back home... we divied up the unused food, so I ended up with a bottle of hoisin sauce, some vegetable boullion cubes, all-purpose seasoning, a jar of honey, and a jar of instant coffee, which proved Very Useful Indeed when it came time to write that report.
Some misc. things:
The stars are beautiful out there. I've never been able to see the Milky Way before this. Also saw the Southren Cross, but not the North Star. That's a North Hemisphere thing.
We saw some kangaroo herds and some emu herds, and, once, a couple of feral camels. You heard me. FERAL CAMELS. Australia has the weirdest introduced species... Apparently there was some talk of introducing rhinos there to make up for the extinct megafauna. How awesome and ill-advised but still awesome is that?!
No kangaroon, emu, or camel pictures, but the album contains some cows and a few of the lizards we came across in the middle of the road. Note especially Sammy the Suicidal Snake. To get out there with the equipment, we had a truck, a van, and a 12-person van. The truck and the first van ran over Sammy, but fortunately didn't kill him. So our driver stopped the van and the class piled out for pictures. Sammy sat there, playing dead. We tried to get him out of the road, so we poked him with a stick... he didn't move. Someone picked up his tail... he slithered under the van wheel. They tried to poke him onto the side of the road, away from us, and he kept going straight under the wheel.
My theory is that poor Sammy had lost his will to live and had decided to end it all, but that road isn't well traveled and he'd been waiting days for someone to hit him.
So, enjoy the pictures of various views on the way out, some pretty plants, rainbows, lizards, cows, spiders (they have black widows here! Apparently because AU can't stand that we have a poisonous spider of our own.), parakeets, the van after we drove it through muddy roads, and us doing Things In the Name Of Science.
