A present to two Mums

I just had one of these magic moments. I was planning to post about the 30km walk we did this weekend (next post) and entered Oxfam’s website. I came across Oxfam unwrapped (https://www.oxfamunwrapped.com.au), this great program through which you can send a friend a birthday / wedding / Christmas card, while sending a specific help to somebody that needs – from fishing nets to maternal healthcare, passing through books and lawyers.

While reading and seeing the pictures, the song “We are the world” started playing and I was sure I had found my Mum’s mothers’ day present: an entrepreneurial course to another Mum to start her business and support her children with instruction and love. I hope she likes it!

Getting ready for the challenge

Have you walked a lot already? How much? How long?

Less than a month ago I decided to stretch my limits and enroll in the Oxfam Trailwalk Challenge Australia. What does it mean? Check it out:

“We're taking part in Oxfam Trailwalker, a 100km endurance walk or run from Sydney Harbour to the Hawkesbury, overnight, in teams of four, through the Australian bush.
We're doing all this as a personal challenge and more importantly to raise money for Oxfam Australia, who work to fight poverty and injustice in 26 countries around the world, including Indigenous Australia.”

If you want to donate to our team, feel free. Just click http://www2.oxfam.org.au/trailwalker/Sydney/team/211 and make your donation on line.

Well, to be able to do 100km in less than 48 hours and without dying, your friend here needs a little bit of training. So we started last weekend, doing 30km. It was beautiful and – I need to confess – easier than I thought. Let’s see how I behave in August, when the 100km come all at once.

And the drinking game winner is…

I know it’s hard to believe. And I’m not sure if I’m proud of this or not. But fact is I did win the vodka drinking game in Sveta’s red housewarming party. And there are proofs. Check it out!

Special Visit

Last weekend I have a very special visitor coming down from beautiful Brisbane to spend a pleasant weekend in Sydney ;o)

Trip stories

Where to start?

In the second day of the trip, in Woomera’s campsite:
"While cooking dinner, we met in the kitchen a couple with a dog. They had a camper van and were driving from Adelaide to Alice, Darwin, Perth and back.
Gabi: Wow, that’s a great trip! How long is it gonna take?
Man: Who cares? Maybe 2 months....."

Last day, in an amazing pub in William Creek, where people from everywhere hang at the walls old IDs, flags, hats, bras…
“Gabi: This is a really cool place. How long has it been here for?
Lady from the pub: 30 years now.
Gabi: Awesome. And how many people live in William Creek?
Lady from the pub: Here? 10.”

In between:
- Opal world capital, which has 50% of its constructions underground and probably the same percentage of the flies of the planet;
- 8 km track in the middle of gorges and unexpected waterholes (it has rained 2 weeks before we arrived, what is absolutely uncommon), which took us the whole day to complete as the track got much harder and we would stop, meditate and swim;
- Car breaking down 500 km far from the closest town;
- Ride with a Rottary high school students’ excursion + food (berosidade!) + camel riding for free!
- Walks in Lord of the Rings type of scenarios;
- Alternative dirt road, which permitted us to met the founder of a village and see the most amazing sunset of my life!

More about aboriginal culture

The aboriginal culture is fascinating and, although it’s 40.000 years old, it many times represents some of the most progressive thoughts we hear nowadays.

To start with, before the European colonisation started, the population was fairly distributed across the whole the territory, and not 95% concentrated in the cost as it is now.

All their social and legal rules were based on an extensive number of stories from the Dreamtime, which essentially transmitted that nature is sacred and all beings are equally important, as well as the idea that the Dreamtime / Creation / Paradise is now (differently from us, they were more attached to places than to time).

Reflecting those stories in their social organisation, some of the beliefs and expressions were:
- Kids are independent, choose their mothers and are raised by the community
- Complex kinship system, guaranteeing stability, independence and constant interaction with other tribes
- No commerce, no exchange of goods, but presents in various situations and responsibility towards the well being of some of the community members
- Arranged marriage + sweethearts (extra marital relations), which would bring social stability without losing the individual pleasure
- Clear gender roles to be played: women's role is conserve, love, look for harmony; men's role is to destroy and create, understand nature's cycles and avoid super population, aggressiveness

I know the readers of Thoureau, Huxley and Quinn are exhilarated now ;o)

However, the very sad side of it from what I read, heard and noticed is that currently most aboriginals don't live essential aspects of their culture anymore (sharing, dependence on nature and self independence), neither benefit from modernity comforts. They often receive government support, are not nomads anymore, maintain very few ceremonies and are quite marginalized, without having a unique space in their own land.

Presents from nature

We were certainly more sensitive and appreciative during the trip. But nature really did its part, rewarding us with amazing blue skies, birds announced sunrises, colourful sunsets and uncountable stars.

Here, you can use one of your senses and your imagination to feel a little bit of that magic. Enjoy!

Sacred landscape

"After leaving Adelaide, seeing some white terrain with bushes, passing through some green bushes and stopping for lunch in Port Augusta - where Salma said G`day to the gas station attendant ;o) - something cool happened: I slept for almost 40 min and feel that I woke up in the desert. Landscape has turned redder, air drier and there's a big isolation feeling. Trip has just started!"
Gabi, trip journal, 1st of April



Throughout the whole trip, nature was absolutely breathtaking. And how much have I learnt!
We’ve seen that the desert can have an exuberant chain of life, in an absolute delicate balance, dynamically changing.

The area where the current desert is located used to be a big sea 200 million years ago (nowadays a good part of it continue being below the sea level) and, although it’s extremely dry at the surface, it hosts an underground water reserve that covers 22% of the Australian territory.

Therefore, we could find palm trees growing from rocks in an area called Palm Valley (!!!), which is still reminiscent of the times where the ocean was in that area (just to emphasize, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of years), as well as frogs who “hibernate” when the weather is too dry, maintaining the water in their bodies and coming back to live when it rains.

We’ve also seen live many sorts of gum trees and animals like kangaroos, camels, lizards, emus, many different kind of birds and dingos.

But I think what touched me the most is the landscape itself. The mixture between flat terrains and impressive rock formations, with gorges, canyons, cliffs and waterholes – result of millions of years of meteors falling, tectonic movements and erosion – transmits an energy that the same time fills us with a fantastic spirit and shows us how small and recent we are. No wonder the aboriginal people considered most of those places sacred.

Outback trip - introducing the team

Hello everyone,

Sorry for not posting about the Outback trip until now, but it’s a very hard job to select a few moments, stories and pictures.

Marina, Salma, Jhow, Lucy and I had one of the most remarkable experiences of our lives, where we drove almost 7.000 km, visited some of the oldest geological formations on Earth, saw the beauty and the life of the desert, got to know a little more about the aboriginal way of seeing the world, faced some physical and mechanical challenges and especially reconnected profoundly with nature and ourselves.

This is the team:

Together we:
- watched the stars;
- had a collective massage session;
- played sleepy (cards game, great to re-hydrate and provoke some visits to the toilet during the night, right Salma?)
- shared our gifts in a talent night;
- had public speaking classes ;o)
- transmitted strong energies to one another in Mac Donnell’s Ranges;
- walked a lot!
- danced in the middle of the Oonadatta track, where no cars passed for 3 hours / more than 200 km;
- had a lot of fun!