My early morning arrival in Darwin was greeted with a cheery woman selling me a bus ticket into town for 12 dollars.  I learned, quickly, that as it is winter in the rest of Australia, Darwin is in the throes of its peak tourist season.  The city centre is choked with traffic from sun tanning Europeans doing their best to meet up and hook up with one another.  It made what could be a pleasant enough coastal town into an empty and somewhat vapid exercise in my patience.  Needless to say, I was happy to take off for a week to start WWOOFing, my work volunteering down here on organic farms in exchange for food and a place to sleep.

Rod, my host, described his 80 acres an hour and a half south of Darwin was being ‘very bush’.  This was no exaggeration.  The three Taiwanese folks who were along for the WWOOFing experience seemed a bit put out by this, no doubt a by product of being raised in cities on a crowded island.  But they took to it gamely, as did I, and I found I did not miss the internet, telephones, and general conveniences of the modern world.  The one main exception to this was artificial light, which would have been wonderful in the nights for reading.

Otherwise we were all tasked different jobs.  Rod, a displaced Yank whose been down under for 3 decades, set myself and Brian, one of the Taiwanese, the task of constructing metal frame cubes to lend stability to a future shadehouse for the property.  I tried quickly to learn the tools while managing Brian, who freely admitted and fully seemed to have never had any experience working in such a way.  Knowing how my students in China do nothing but study or play computer games, it was easy to imagine such a case being true.

Ultimately we finished the pair of metal cubes before I left off for the south, and I was happy all in all with the job that we had done.  Every morning and in the evenings around dusk the fields near the edge of the rainforest would come to life with the busy hopping of wallabies and the occasional kangaroo, getting all us tourists excited to rush out with our cameras.  On Sunday Rod left me off at ‘the Track’, the sole highway running north-south through central Australia. 

I stood there as his van disappeared, holding my bag and a newly minted cardboard sign proclaiming ‘south’ in bold blue paint.  Within an hour I was riding comfortably in the shotgun seat with an Aussie Army vet named Peter who was headed a few hours south to Katherine.  This early success hitchhiking had encouraged me and after parting in Katherine, I waited out the hot afternoon sun with sign in hand.  Alas my luck failed me here and I my impatience exceeded my tolerance.  I settled for a long distance bus the rest of the way and with the breaking of the sun over the eastern outback I rode into Alice Springs, the center of Australia.