Today I came close to my first bout of road rage. I was driving into an intersection (without traffic lights), wanting to turn right and there was (a) a Rav4 (grrr!) coming the opposite direction that wanted to turn left but was just staying put for some mysterious reason and (b) a sedan in front of me that equivocated about turning right once the Rav4 had gone, then started weaving slowly between lanes, before finally deciding to set itself on the straight and narrow and go left at the next roundabout. (We're not in Melbourne here; there's no need for weaving). I was really tempted to give the second car a blast of my horn and a piece of my mind but then I saw the hire car sticker on its rear. They were probably both hire cars, probably both unfamiliar with the streets of Alice and possibly, in the case of the sedan, looking for a park. So no need for ire, I'd probably be just as bad in an unknown town (tho I would have thought that Alice was pretty easy to negotiate).
Last night (or maybe the night before) I caught a bit of that drivetime program, y'know 'Wombats of Australia talk back to Sandy McHutcheon.' Can't say I really like fusty old Sandy, but he was talking cars and road safety (there seemed to be a lot of whining about the callibrations on speedos being to close together) when someone rang up full of outrage about the fact that on most Territorian roads, you can drive at whatever speed you like and the Territory thus has one of the highest road tolls in the developed world. Not only that, but you can drive at whatever speed you like on single carriageway roads.
Oh, yeah, that's right, I thought mild-manneredly. I was initially quite freaked by this phenomenon, and by some people's refusal to adhere to the ad hoc courtesy code that functions on these roads, but...it's funny how you get used to burning around on patchy old roads at 140 kmh. Actually, it's not supposed to be the speed that claims so many lives in the Territory but the amount of people who fall asleep at the wheel.
I burned out to Standley Chasm today at about 120 kmh because I still haven't got any decent photos of this giant orange rift in the rocks. My mother said that at about noon when the sun's directly overhead, the chasm turns totally orange. (She did the tourist trail here years ago with my father.) I made it out by 1 pm, so it was ok...better than past performances of light I've seen here. I'm fiddling around with my father's old SLR at the moment...it's amazing how much I've forgotten about SLR photography in the four years since my own camera was stolen. The other thing is, I reckon you have to get a feel for how individual cameras handle certain circumstances.
Anyway, as I was driving out there, I was thinking about how you get a feel for certain drivers -- the tourists, the Aboriginal families in their Ford Falcons going at about 50kmh, the speedsters in their king-of-the-road 4WDs. When I got there, I thought, of course, the place is going to be crawling with tourists at midday (grrrr) and then, even more uncharitably, they're all going to be walking through my photo in the motley clothes that they wear (and that I myself wear too). But things weren't too bad when I got to the Chasm -- it was splendidly orange. The tourists hung back and waited for their cue to walk through the Chasm from other photographers. I got a tall, thin Paltrow-esque Scandinavian type in the bottom of one of my photos, but I didn't mind so much because she was relatively picturesque. One thing that I really like about the Chasm (and other rock faces) at present is that there are clusters of flannel flowers growing out of some of the rock ledges. It reminds me of window-boxes on terraces in some of those narrow streets you get in Spain and Italy.
When I drove back into town, I went into the Woolies carpark, and was almost overwhelmed for some reason by the amount of hilux 4WDs there. Sometimes one's acclimatisation to certain things in Alice lapses for a moment. I guess it's a weekend, so everyone's stocking up. And maybe there'd be just many 4WDs in a Sydney or Melbourne carpark these days, if last week's Good Weekend is anything to go by. That article find of shocked me: what, these people never take their 4WDs off-road? And they sell these SUVs to Mosman mums on the basis of how many cupholders they have?
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