My Outback adventure, was literally an adventure. It started out with a day and a half drive towards our initial destination, Trilby Station a massive station where we were supposed to have our Australian "Outback-y" experience. It rained for most of the second day but it did not register in my mind that that would affect our trip in anyway. It wasn't until Ian, our bus driver who I refer to as "The Drover", started making phone calls that I wondered what was going on. The rest of the way to Trilby Station consisted of all red dirt roads that were at the moment getting flooded and turning into ginormous mud pits that would love to trap a charter bus like ours. This is how we got trapped in the little town of Cobar.
Cobar is a tiny Outback town that has it's claim to fame by being a mining town with a small museum. Our estimated time to stop here and look at the mine was fifteen minutes. That would be literally all the time needed to get a good feel of Cobar. Thanks to the rain, our fifteen minutes turned into a day and a half. We had already spent the allocated fifteen minutes looking at the mine from a lookout point and taking all of the cutesy Amerian pictures underneath the big sign that said, "COBAR" so all that was left to do was the musuem. The museum was quaint and had a variety of things that showed life in Cobar from the past (like most museums do). It did, however, have a little mine shaft that we could walk down and take pictures in which was neat. After about thirty minutes or so there we went to our hotel that our wonderful bus driver/ drover found for us. We spent the night there and then the magical Ian pulled through for us and found us a place to go.Now, before I go on I need to elaborate a little bit on Ian. Ian knows EVERYTHING one could possibly know about Australia. Anything he said went totally undisputed. He told us that rain like we experienced had not happened in about 70 years where we were and probably wouldn't happen again for another hundred. Trilby Station turned into an island because the flood waters totally surround it and they use helicopters to rescue the sheep. Therefore, we obviously could not get to Trilby so he arranged another trip. He called a previous ASC Outback trip location called Mount Boorithumble and within thirty minutes we were on our way.
Mount Boorithumble is still in New South Wales and is about a 40,000 acre sheep and cattle station. They also grow wheat and barley. The owners said that they call it a "farm" because around there a station implied land owners who hired workers to do all of the work on their station and did not have that relationship with the land. The Townsend brothers own Mount Boorithumble and their sister is one of the host mom's for us American students. When you look at them they look like they belong to Mount Boorithumble and it is evident that they do have the working relationship with the land.
During our stay at Mount Boorithumble we indeed roughed it, but it was good. We stayed in the Shearing shed where the workers would stay when they're shearing all of the sheep and there was a thick layer of red dust covering everything. They had to pump in water for us to use so we all took a "No Shower Challenge" and the results of which I will leave to your imagination. The second day we were there we got to go on a property tour in "uts" or four-wheel drive utility vehicles. We all kept laughing that this would never be allowed in America because we were standing in the back of these giant pick up trucks and our drivers floored it over the dirt "paths" and by the end of our adventure we were all covered with dust and mud. It was the most fun I have had in a while!! We got to see wild emus, the beautiful Australian landscape which was breathtaking and....kangaroos!!!!!
Please think back to the scene in the recent movie "Australia" when Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman are driving along arguing when she sees a cute kangaroo bounding by and she starts "ooh'ing" and "ahh'ing". She is so excited saying how she's never seen a kangaroo when BAM!!! The men on top of their truck shoot the kangaroo and she screams. I had a similar experience. We were riding along when a kangaroo and it's joey bounded out of the bush onto our path and takes off in front of our truck. Our driver, Murray (one of the farm owners) accelerates and starts chasing down this kangaroo! We are all squeeling in excitement and taking pictures when we're getting so close that we could touch it if we wanted. Murray cornered the kangaroo between our truck and the fence so the kangaroo tried to jump over this wire fence but since we were still going incredibly fast it kept missing and bounced off the fence into the truck! All of us silly Americans start SCREAMING when we realize we literally just ran over a kangaroo. Thankfully the kangaroo got up and bounced away or else I would have been legitimately traumatized! My first real roo sighting ending with the roo's death!!!! Not okay! After our kangaroo near-death experience a couple of us took a walk and got to see the men herding all the sheep in to be tagged the next day. Instead of horses and dogs like in all the movies, they now use motorcyles and dogs! A couple new born lambs couldn't keep up so Ian had picked them up in one of the trucks but stopped when he saw us and let us carry them in! They were so precious and surprisingly very snuggly! They were completely content to let us carry them and some of them snuggled up against us and fell asleep. Ironically for dinner that night we had...lamb. Needless to say, I stuck with the sausages (hot dogs).
On our way home from the Outback we stopped at the Blue Mountains for about thirty minutes and got to see the Three Sisters which was neat. The Blue Mountains was also gorgeous which has just made me decide that Australia is the most beautiful place I have ever been. Australia is officially always going to have my heart.
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