Can We Run With You, Grandfather? Seven Continents: Seven Decades by Doug Richard

Author:Doug Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Red sand and sunsets

I was in an aisle seat for the three-hour flight out to Ayers Rock so couldn’t get a clear view of the ground below as we made our final approach to the nearby Connellan Airport. For a brief moment, the left wing dipped as we made a turn and I got my very first clear sighting of the unmistakeable monolith below. We continued to descend over the red, parched soil, bracing ourselves for that moment of impact when the landing gear makes contact with the ground, when there was a sudden surge of acceleration from the engines and we roared skywards again. The pilot was soon on the public address to reassure us that all was well but that he had had to abort the landing because the aircraft was heavy and had met unexpectedly strong side winds. We would be going round again. At the second attempt, we were safely on the ground in the Australian Outback.

As arranged in our earlier email exchanges, I first met up with my room-mate, Frank, in the departure lounge at Sydney Airport. We got on famously from the very beginning. As I mentioned previously, Frank was a doctor in Denmark, maybe 25 years my junior, although a little disillusioned with the way doctors were treated in his home country. The medical link in our professional lives helped to smooth the early introductions. Modest, and very unassuming, Frank seemed almost embarrassed to talk about his victory in the Big Five Marathon just a few weeks earlier and was surprised when I told him of our elephant escapade, as he didn’t recall seeing any. Perhaps he was moving too fast.

We had both booked our trips through the American company, Marathon Tours, who I had previously travelled with, and been impressed by, on my visit to Rio, and found ourselves seated together on the plane so that we could continue our ‘getting to know you’ conversations on the flight inland. Although Marathon Tours had made all the travel arrangements for us, they were not sending a representative to the race itself, which was organised by an Australian adventure travel agency, Travelling Fit, who, once again, turned out to be superb organisers.

* * * * *

As the airport at Ayers Rock was small, we were soon reunited with our luggage and directed on to coaches that would take us on the short journey to our destination hotel in the nearby resort town of Yulara. Let me pause for a minute here to give a little bit of context to some of the place names I will be using in the coming pages, as this part of the Northern Territory is very much a vast empty space. Indeed, as one of our tour guides informed us, we were actually closer to the International Space Station overhead than we were to the nearest large town of Alice Springs.

In what was an otherwise very flat landscape, there were two major rock formations, separated by a distance of around 16 miles.

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