At the "Back O' Bourke"

From Saturday the 8th to Sunday the 16th we were in the outback. We drove almost 1000 km from Brisbane to the small town Bourke. It's really in the middle of nowhere! 2800 people live in a town that's hundreds of kilometres away from other towns. If you'd want to go shopping for new clothes in a shopping mall (there's only one clothing store in Bourke) you'd have to travel for more than three hours. In Australian language people say "back o' Bourke" when they talk about the Australian outback, because Bourke is the typical example for it.

This is how the buildings look like:

Darling river, the third longest in Australia:

Heaps of dead kangaroos along the roads. Trucks don't stop for them:

We stayed with local host families to get to know their way of living out there. Karoline and I stayed with a great family with a cool two year old kid. I want a kid like that! The husband was interested in animals and hunting (with a bow and arrow!), so he took us for a kangaroo safari after dark. The first hour wasn't very succesful, so we got outside the car to watch the stars instead. I've never seen the milky way as clear and bright as that! Tried to find the "Karlsvogna", but couldn't find it. Either because there were too many stars this night, or because we don't see the same stars as we do at home. I don't know. On our way back we saw a few kangaroos jumping across the road, so we were satisfied with our safari in the end. The wife in our host family is originally Dutch, but moved to Bourke after she had two months of teacher training in the high school there, where she met the love of her life. Can you imagine how it is to move so far away from home? My mum is Dutch too, but she didn't move to the other side of the globe, she "only" moved to Norway. I'm happy I have a Norwegian boyfriend, because Norway is still my favourite country.

In my host family's big backyard with a Dutch book about Australia and typical Australian beer:

Another pic for my boyfriend:

What we basically did in Bourke was getting to know the culture, what people do for a living, seeing the landscape and such. So we went to a cotton gin, lime and lemon fields, sheep farm (as if I haven't seen sheep before...), guided tour in a national park, camping in a house with mosquito net walls, paddle boat cruise on the Darling River +++. Some things were cool, like picking my own lemons from a tree, and since I'm a teacher, visiting the high school was quite interesting too. But I got so fed up with travelling by bus on bumpy roads several hours a day, that I wasn't as excited about the program as I should've been. I wasn't bored, it's just that my mood could've been better. Still a bit jet-lagged and missing my boyfriend didn't help much on that. But I'm very happy I had the chance to see how Australia looks like outside the big cities. And the very best thing about these nine days in the outback was getting to know my classmates a lot better :D

Like these guys here:

Kristina juggling with limes and lemons:

Cotton seeds:

The Australian and Aboriginal flag:

Gundabooka National Park:

 

Redbank camp, with walls of mosquito net:

Socializing:

Good morning, girls:

Putting strings around tails and balls to make them fall off in a few weeks, auch:

 

  

The criminal story of a guy I'd never seen before who grabbed my boob on purpose and gave me 10 dollars (60 NOK) for it!! Of course I kept the money. He was being rude:

That was all from the outback, see ya!