The Willandra Lakes region in the south-western corner of New South Wales was a destination along my 2500 km, week-long roadtrip this September. The road up from Mildura, the closest town, is a dirt road running through 120 kilometres of the dessicated bed of Lake Arumpo. Driving along the access road, tackling stretches of it at speed, is an experience in itself. I have a tight grip on the steering wheel and the music on my ipod turned right up as I turn onto the Arumpo Road to Mungo. I see kilometres of ochre-toned road stretched out in front of me, cutting across a sea of yellow-green scrub and I step on the accelerator. The X-Trail bounces along, with me, ensconced securely in the cockpit, insulated from the elements by the soft-tuned suspension. The gentle cadences of my ride are only broken by the sharp rise of cattle grids, sprinkled periodically along the road. A grid gets me airborne temporarily, and for a moment, my heart is in my mouth. Then, I'm safely on the road again. This is fun.
The Walls of China loom up over the dried bed of Lake Mungo
That experience has taught me the lesson of carrying a spare torch. I am extra cautious this time, since I'm travelling alone. I have a GPS unit, a compass and a 1:100,000 topographic map of the area. I walk along the lunette for about half an hour, and the sun is already beginning to set. I see a silver moon rise up in the clear desert sky. I have timed my visit with the full moon, and the Walls of China, bathed orange, contrasted against a backdrop of a full moon in a cloudless sky, sets up some spectacular shots. By the time I feel satisfied with my complement of photos, the sun has set and the landscape glows ghostly white by moonlight. The wind howls around me, but otherwise there is complete silence. Only the citadels on the Walls of China bear mute testimony to my passage. I descend from the lunette, and am walking the last couple of kilometres along the saltbush of the Lake Bed, when I notice specks of white gleaming in the sand. On closer inspection, they turn out to be bone fragments. Also closeby, are fire-blackened lumps of clay and larger bones littered around a central depression, all suggestive of a prehistoric aboriginal fireplace. I pause for a few minutes, and reflect. I am standing by the remains of a fire lit, possibly as early as 60,000 years ago, by the earliest ancestors of modern human beings. I walk back to the car, soaking myself in the long history of the place.
Mungo has two campsites, the main one near the rangers' offices and information centre, and the other one, the Belah site (named after the trees found around the campsite) on the east side of the Walls of China. I decided to camp, like the previous time I was here, at the more secluded Belah campsite. Even here, in this remote, outback New South Wales, the Walls of China attracts a fair number of visitors. The 20 km drive to the Belah site from where I've parked my car is enchanting. The full moon is high up in the sky and the dusty road ahead is so well illuminated by its light that I hardly need my headlights. It is 8 pm, and this normally deserted area is a hive of activity. Rabbits criss-cross the road in front of me, and kangaroos gallop by. A female roo and her joey stop right in front of the vehicle and stare long and hard at this intrusion into their territory. I crawl along, at no more than 20 km/hr. I'm tranfixed by the almost hypnotic undulations of the kangaroo sprint. A camel ride, years ago, in the Indian Thar desert comes to mind. The road narrows to single-vehicle width, bounded on either side by mulga, and the surface is all loose sand. Even at this speed, the X-Trail finds it hard to gain purchase from the surface and she slip-slides from one side to the other, bouncing off the harder, compacted sand at the sides of the road.
It is 9 pm when I finally reach campsite, and I'm glad to find only a couple of other vehicles there. I pick my spot, far away from the two other campers, and spend the next hour setting up tent and cooking dinner. I fish out a half-boiled spider swimming around with the rice in the pot; I don't have the luxury of being squeamish about it as both water and stove fuel are in limited supply. After dinner, I sit down on my director's chair to bask in the light of the moon. Various thoughts fly through my mind, like how much I enjoy being by myself, doing what I want, going whererever I please. My troubles are washed away by the overwhelming beauty of the surroundings, and I recall the final scene in the film American Beauty where the camera closes in on a Kevin Spacey finally at peace with himself, a large smile breaking out on his prone face lying in a pool of blood, his life flashing before his eyes as he muses over an old family photograph.
I lose traction negotiating gentle turns along sections of the road draped in loose sand and after a few slides around corners, I activate the 4-wheel drive. I don't want a roll-over in this remote territory. A trail of dust on the horizon announces the arrival of a car going the other way, which is about once every 15 minutes or so. Drivers in these parts have the endearing habit of waving at you, and after a while, I catch on. The afternoon sky is a clear blue and on either side of the road, stretching all the way to the horizon, is the flat lake bed, covered with bluebush and Mallee eucalyptus trees, most dead, their branches lying bare, and dismembered, on the ground.
The Willandra region comprises of a number of interconnected lakes: Arumpo, Mungo and Leaghur, once full, but dry for the past 18,000 years. Around the edges of these flat lake beds, are buff-coloured sand and clay deposits. These deposits, called "lunettes", because of their crescent-shaped arrangement around the downwind section of the lakes, were formed from sand and clay blow-off from the lakes after they dried up. The 33 km long lunette, called the Walls of China, around the edges of Lake Mungo is the main tourist destination.
European settlers set up a pastoral community here in the 1880s, and hundreds of Chinese immigrants, who gave the Walls their name, were employed to build the Mungo woolshed. Most of the Cypress pines, which kept the lunnette soil tightly bound, were cut down from the area to build the woolshed and surrounding buildings. Bereft of the binding pines, and exposed to the fierce winds of the region, the soil on the Lunette began to erode. Ever since, the action of wind and water has been peeling away the covers of history, and started revealing the much older, Aboriginal heritage of the area. In 1969, Mungo woman, the 30,000 year-old skeletal remains of a homo-sapien female was uncovered from the Walls of China. 5 years later, Mungo man, an even older skeleton, and the oldest specimen to have been given a ritual burial was discovered.
The Mungo Apostles, Walls of China
After an hour and a half of engaging driving, as I turn into the last section of road, I see the Walls of China loom up in front of me, stretched out in an arc, with the ends disappearing into a shimmering mirage in the distance. They look like the ramparts of some ancient civilization and I half expect to see soldiers poking their heads out of their port-holed towers. A feeling of joy wells up in my heart at this first sight of the Walls. I was here exactly a year earlier, with a friend, after a gruelling slog to get a joint research paper done on time for a conference. To be here in this magical place, after the completion of a paper for this year's edition of the same conference, fills me with great satisfaction. I park the car, get my backpack out and the first thing I do is mark the spot on my GPS unit.
The last time I came out here, on our way back to the car from a walk on the Walls of China, my friend and I almost got lost. We'd been walking along the lunette for a few hours, taking pictures of the setting sun, when my torch bulb blew out, still about half an hour from the car. By this time, it was almost complete darkness. The Maglite is equipped with a replacement bulb in the back, but the bulb itself is ant-sized, with two filament-like electrodes poking out of it, that need to fit into microscopic apertures on a black disk. It is hard enough to replace in daylight, and in the fast-disappearing Mungo twilight, it was near-impossible. After about 20 minutes of fiddling around with it, our hands shaking from the cold of the impending desert night, we decided to give up, and use the stars of the Southern Cross to head in the approximate direction of the car. We were lucky on that occasion, and after half an hour of stumbling around in the prickly bush of the lake bed, found the car.
A full moon rises over the Mungo landscape
That experience has taught me the lesson of carrying a spare torch. I am extra cautious this time, since I'm travelling alone. I have a GPS unit, a compass and a 1:100,000 topographic map of the area. I walk along the lunette for about half an hour, and the sun is already beginning to set. I see a silver moon rise up in the clear desert sky. I have timed my visit with the full moon, and the Walls of China, bathed orange, contrasted against a backdrop of a full moon in a cloudless sky, sets up some spectacular shots. By the time I feel satisfied with my complement of photos, the sun has set and the landscape glows ghostly white by moonlight. The wind howls around me, but otherwise there is complete silence. Only the citadels on the Walls of China bear mute testimony to my passage. I descend from the lunette, and am walking the last couple of kilometres along the saltbush of the Lake Bed, when I notice specks of white gleaming in the sand. On closer inspection, they turn out to be bone fragments. Also closeby, are fire-blackened lumps of clay and larger bones littered around a central depression, all suggestive of a prehistoric aboriginal fireplace. I pause for a few minutes, and reflect. I am standing by the remains of a fire lit, possibly as early as 60,000 years ago, by the earliest ancestors of modern human beings. I walk back to the car, soaking myself in the long history of the place.
Roo skull in the sand
Mungo has two campsites, the main one near the rangers' offices and information centre, and the other one, the Belah site (named after the trees found around the campsite) on the east side of the Walls of China. I decided to camp, like the previous time I was here, at the more secluded Belah campsite. Even here, in this remote, outback New South Wales, the Walls of China attracts a fair number of visitors. The 20 km drive to the Belah site from where I've parked my car is enchanting. The full moon is high up in the sky and the dusty road ahead is so well illuminated by its light that I hardly need my headlights. It is 8 pm, and this normally deserted area is a hive of activity. Rabbits criss-cross the road in front of me, and kangaroos gallop by. A female roo and her joey stop right in front of the vehicle and stare long and hard at this intrusion into their territory. I crawl along, at no more than 20 km/hr. I'm tranfixed by the almost hypnotic undulations of the kangaroo sprint. A camel ride, years ago, in the Indian Thar desert comes to mind. The road narrows to single-vehicle width, bounded on either side by mulga, and the surface is all loose sand. Even at this speed, the X-Trail finds it hard to gain purchase from the surface and she slip-slides from one side to the other, bouncing off the harder, compacted sand at the sides of the road.
Belah campsite by moonlight
Shooting star, Belah campsite
It is 9 pm when I finally reach campsite, and I'm glad to find only a couple of other vehicles there. I pick my spot, far away from the two other campers, and spend the next hour setting up tent and cooking dinner. I fish out a half-boiled spider swimming around with the rice in the pot; I don't have the luxury of being squeamish about it as both water and stove fuel are in limited supply. After dinner, I sit down on my director's chair to bask in the light of the moon. Various thoughts fly through my mind, like how much I enjoy being by myself, doing what I want, going whererever I please. My troubles are washed away by the overwhelming beauty of the surroundings, and I recall the final scene in the film American Beauty where the camera closes in on a Kevin Spacey finally at peace with himself, a large smile breaking out on his prone face lying in a pool of blood, his life flashing before his eyes as he muses over an old family photograph.
