Transcending Borders With Seeds in Our Hands

I woke up this morning and the first thing I thought was I need to go and look to see if the weather had cleared. I popped my contacts in and went to look out over the ocean and it had cleared. This was important because today was the day that I was going to get to take a helicopter ride over the Twelve Apostles. At the helicopter place we checked in (those of us who made the splurge to do the $70 ten minute ride–don’t worry, I got it for free!) and we were weighed. I was pretty sure I’ve gained a little weight from eating out constantly over here but luckily my weight was given to me in kilos so I had no clue what it actually was. Joel (the rowdy, out-of-control Australian I mentioned in the last post) made fun of the other American guy, Kevin, because he weighed the most even though he was the shortest. He called him Heavy Kev-y for almost the rest of the trip. He had no shame.

I had to put on this special flotation device and learn how to use it in the unlikely event of an emergency. Then the helicopter flew up and landed a few feet away and we got in, feeling like celebrities all the way. In a matter of seconds we were lifting off the ground and zooming out towards the coast. The view of the apostles from the air was incredible. You could see and appreciate how far they extended where as from the ground lookout you could only marvel at their impressive size. The pilot told us a bit about the rock formations and the history of the park’s name. We made a steeeeep turn and like that we were making our way back and touching down. It was such a surreal experience I’m still trying to process it. It went so fast and the view was just breathtaking.

We loaded into the Groovy Grape bus and took off towards the Grampians, a really old mountain range in South Australia territory. We climbed Mount Hollow and the view of the surrounding land yielded such nice details from the orange color of the rocks to the yellow blooms of the canola fields. There were several caves and hidden gorges that a few of us went off to explore. We had to cross and 3-foot wide crevice to get to one of the caves. Normally I wouldn’t have thought twice about it but it was a sheer drop-off. I looked down and could not see the bottom. Diana, one of the Canadian girls had already jumped over and was encouraging me to just jump. I handed her my camera, feeling a bit like I was filming a scene in a movie, to render both my hands free in case I needed to grab hold for dear life. I did a one-two-three and jumped. The caves were worth it. They had a bunch of stalactites and neat little grottoes. Of course, my camera started acting up and wouldn’t turn on, so I have no pictures of the caves but they actually ended up being my favorite part of the Mt. Hollow hike.

We drove towards Adelaide with a little more fervor as we had to cover something like 600 km in this day. We stopped in a little town called Frances to have lunch. It was home to just 35 people. We doubled the population that day as we at our leftover kangaroo steak on sandwiches. After a few hours we reached Adelaide and as we neared the city Fleur told us a bit of history and suggested a whole ton of things to do in the city. It is too bad I won’t get to spend much time here since I have to head into the Outback tomorrow. Maybe next time. Maybe next time.

Tags: 1

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 9:56 am and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.