Colours of Australia ( part 2 )

Colours of Australia ( part 2 )

Posted on 21 Oct, 2008 4 comments

After just 20 minutes to stretch your legs, dropping off and taking passengers, we once more walk over the tarmac, 35C and hot windy conditions, to climb the stairs of our small Boeing 717 plane. It takes 115 passengers, but is by no means a slow little plane.
Once more Ayers Rock can be seen as we circle around it to climb into the sky. We are still looking down on the Northern Territory, but heading towards Mount Isa in Queensland, in N.E. direction.
Soon the red turns to black, hills everywhere. Why black? No idea, but it looks barren, dry and hostile. Mount Isa has an iron ore plant and perhaps the black soil contains iron. Flying over Queensland now and you can see dry river beds, big ribbons meander through the soil in Easterly direction. Once there must have been water there, now the ground turned into dust. The sun is getting lower and the colours are changing, black turns into grey and even patches of green are visible now. Here and there someone is living, isolated on a “dirt” road. Where they get their water from is a mystery. Mount Isa is a place I have been to when we drove our car from Darwin to Cairns, you can’t help it, the only road goes through that place. From the air it looks hot and dry with very few bits of green. There are plenty of houses and I know for a fact that real estate is expensive. A train runs from Mount Isa to Cairns, but I could not see the track from so high. Perhaps it was on the other side of the plane.
Gradually a mist develops, the colours fading. Clouds are coming. I can see water and some green. You can see where the rivers run, as trees are along its banks, making for a dark green snake slithering over the brown soil. We are now heading for North Queensland and because the clouds are few we can still see some blue skies, although getting darker. The nose of the plane points to the night, and as I want to say goodbye to the sun behind me, I get rewarded with a most spectecular sight: the setting sun. The horizon in my sight is as high as the plane, but the sun is lower than my horizon. I hope you can follow that. It is the only way I can explain it. The sun is cut in half by a cloudband, more mist than cloud, it shines against the white cumulus clouds on the side of the plane in the distance and of course that colour turns into orange. The bits of blue sky are light blue now, and here and there even turquoise. It is hard to describe what beauty I saw, but it was and looked ” out of this world ”, well it was above this world. The sun was setting underneath the cloudband and it took its time. I nearly had a sore neck looking back and I wanted hubby to see it too, but he couldn’t stretch that far. Plane windows are narrow. I was lucky once again. The last glow of sunlight was pinky and then lilacy and then there was nothing, just black sky with the flickering of the wing light.
Soon we were descending again and we were going straight through the clouds, gathering water on the wings and windows. It was pouring!
Landing in Cairns was no joy. I had hoped to see Holloway’s beach, as we were approaching from the North, but due to all the clouds I couldn’t. We always walk on that beach and look up to the planes flying over, but this time I would have liked to have seen it from the other side.
At least we were home, but had to climb down the stairs on the sopping wet tarmac, once there were handed an umbrella, but I was wet already. Sloshing through the puddles I knew my holiday in the sunny West was over.

More blog posts by Marguerite