Aussie characters as colorful as the landscape

It is sunset (oh, the photographers are happy) when we arrive at the outpost of Marree, which began in the 1870s as a staging area for Afghan camel handlers. We check in to the imposing Marree Hotel, made of cut sandstone like many of the pubs, and the walls inside are hung with antique camel-driving gear. As it happens, one-third of Marree's fourscore residents are descendants of those cameleers, and another third are Aboriginal. It is our twisted luck, however, to eat dinner with Bob Backway.

A retiree with a gray ponytail, Bob is the commodore of the Lake Eyre Yacht Club. It says so on his business card, and that would be impressive if there were, in fact, a Lake Eyre. Bob's enduring passion is to sail his 14-foot catamaran on what he boasts is the world's eleventh largest lake. Yet such sport is possible only when the lake has water, which is next to never. On average, every eight years. And even then, the hundred-mile-long lake is but three feet deep. “You have only a few inches’ clearance,” he confides. “You just don’t” — he demonstrates — “jump up and down.”

At least it's a safe sport, we allow. But Bob says the water’s no good. “It's heavy, like baby oil. There are no waves at all. The salt leaches the oil out of your fingernails, splits your thumbs, gives you onion toes.” While I try to savor my kangaroo steak in plum sauce, he hoists a bare foot to show how his big toe is peeling away.

Commodore Backway says his hero is the explorer Charles Sturt, who first yearned to navigate the inland sea. I try to imagine being Bob — tacking through knee-deep goop in 120-degree heat, with dingoes howling from the brackish shore. I venture, “You must be pretty much alone out there.”

“That's why I like it,” he says. “I hate crowds.”

The Outback: one boundless playground for the random mutations of the undisciplined imagination. In the morning, driving up the Oodnadatta Track to William Creek, we come to another breathtaking intersection of empty space and the artistic impulse. It's somebody's homemade sculpture park, featuring two vintage airplanes standing on their tails in the bare desert with their wings overlapping like brothers in arms. Planehenge, it is labeled: “Conceived and raised by Mutoid Waste Co. & Friends to mark the passing of the Earth Dream Journey.” Beyond Planehenge are a water tank turned into a colossal dog and a bus reborn as, what, a spaceship?

Diane Cook and Len Jenshel When empty, Lake Eyre is a 5,000-square-mile salt pan that's a draw for land-speed record seekers.

We motor on to the phantom shores of Lake Eyre and walk out onto the salt pan: Australia's lowest point. It's blindingly bright and spongy underfoot because of a silky black mud beneath the salt crust. Going Aboriginal, we smear the mud on our arms. Farther down the road, in a hot pool at the emerald oasis of Coward Springs, we get to jump in and wash the mud off. One big interactive playing field.

At day's end, a hundred miles from any other settlement, is William Creek: namely a pub, a store, an outdoor museum, an airfield, another invisible golf course, and nine residents — although a tenth is coming home tomorrow. The local humor is such that the iron-sided William Creek Hotel (1887) has a parking meter out front. The pub is famous for its hectic interior decor, and indeed every inch of wall and ceiling is covered with past drinkers' shirts, shorts, hats, shoes, bras, and underpants, all duly signed by their donors, along with license plates, photos, drawings, tea towels, flags, foreign currency, and police patches. The trusty pool table, too, is all ascribble with signatures, epithets, Web addresses, and knife cuts. Len and Mike and I shoot a game, then ink in our sentiments. A retired cattle dog named Jed patrols the pub, very slowly. His bed in the corner specifies DOG ONLY.

The hotel has just one room available tonight, so Mike and I jump at the chance to sleep outside. Since we'll be taking a scenic flight early in the morning, we ask pilot Trevor Wright at the pub if we can sleep on his runway.

“Sure,” he says. “Sleep wherever you want.”

“This way,” Mike reckons, “we won't miss our flight.”

Trevor nods. “You'd be the first to know.”

Thus we have the privilege of unrolling our swags under a wide-open midnight and, with a runway marker for a pillow, going to sleep under a sky so undimmed by artificial light that the stars fairly kiss the horizon. Every time I open my eyes, the Southern Cross has wheeled farther through the sky, from our last adventure to the one ahead, and when the sun comes up, the Cessna is ready to go.

Planet Australia. From 500 feet up, I look for William Creek, but it has vanished into the leopard-spotted bush.

Once more the rains come down at night to slicken the clay pans, flood the washes, and close the roads. We almost get stranded again, in Oodnadatta, before making it out to the pavement at Coober Pedy. But this larger town, thank God, offers no respite from the prevailing weirdness. Its better homes and tourist rooms are burrowed into hillside caves to escape the heat. I recline in my pricey cocoon, contemplating walls and ceilings massively toothmarked by tunneling machines yet fantastically swirled with the molten browns and golds of inner earth. Coober Pedy: a fitting name. It's Aboriginal for White Man in a Hole.

Most of the world's opals are dug up here. The town is surrounded by myriad slag heaps poking up from make-or-break mining claims like so many prairie dog mounds. The miners are mainly immigrants, in 49 different flavors (make that 48; the Inuit just left). Look at the names in the cemetery: Szabo, Vekic, Stojan, Dracopoulos, Giacomelli, Kazikoff. Karl Bratz's headstone is a beer keg inscribed HAVE A DRINK ON ME. Crocodile Harry's bones are marked with three bottles of Coopers.

Steven Eger, who came over from Hungary in the 1960s, shows us his opal jewelry for sale and his mining rig — a seat dangling from a winch over a hole 70 feet deep. I peer in: “Do you find much down there?” He bristles. “You from the KGB?” Around his yard are scrap sculptures he has fashioned from computer monitors, mannequins, vacuum cleaner hoses, and wheelchairs. He points out a donation box: “Don't put in anything I can hear hit the bottom.”

The miners have their social clubs — the Italian Club, the Serbian Club, the Croatian Club — but after a day of digging they all come together, brothers in exile, at the Opal Inn's pub. Here, standing at the bar, I am approached by a stout man in a cardigan, Milan by name, who reveals a case holding three low-quality aquamarine opals.

“Twenty dollars for all,” he offers, Slavically.

“Where are you from?” I ask.

“Slovenia!” he proclaims. Then he shouts it for everyone to hear: “DEMOCRATIC SLOVENIA!”

I show the opals to the two Italians and two Croats down the bar. Adriano, a Venetian with a mustache twirled up in circles, appraises them: “Good! Color everywhere!”

I buy the opals from Milan and get Adriano a beer, and he tells me how it was when he first came to Coober Pedy, 30 years ago. “Plenty of opal. Plenty of drinking. Money. Love. Everything!”

I hazard to ask, “How is it now?”

“I don't do any good,” Adriano admits, “but I still try.” He rhapsodizes, “Your America, it is a free country. Frank Sinatra, he sing, ‘I did it my way.’ For me, it is just the same. I have no such luck,” he assures me, “but I did it my way!”

That could be the theme song for everyone we’ve met.

We drive the final leg north to the Outback's capital of Alice Springs. Rainwater has pooled in the roadside gullies but still nothing you could ever hope to sail a boat on.

“Oh, Mama, can this really be the end ...?”

On the outskirts of Alice we run into traffic. Rush hour in the Outback. For the first time in a week we have stoplights to obey. We gawk at a KFC, a Subway, a three-story parking lot — wonders we'd forgotten all about.

Our plan is to celebrate our return by living it up at the Alice Springs Resort, with its palm-fringed pool and swim-up bar. I score a deluxe room, and it's unnecessarily spacious, with a party-size balcony overlooking the Todd River. I even have a television that lets me change channels. So why aren't we celebrating yet? Is it just that the weather's too cool to go swimming?

Our guide, Mike, isn't one to dally in posh hotels. That underdog mentality, I guess. Len and Diane and I say good-bye to him. Then, suddenly feeling incomplete, we walk Alice's downtown mall, past the many shops selling Aboriginal art, didgeridoos, adventure wear, and Outback tours. At a smart bush-tucker restaurant, we dine on camel porterhouse and smoked emu sausage. Is it just the indifferent service and disappointing food, or what?

We'll have to be patient. Until we get reacclimated, until we get re-homogenized and rebooted, this fancier world can't measure up to being stuck in Tibooburra.

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