I like Tony and Mike and Jac, especially Tony

In the morning we sat on the outcropping with our muesli and tea and waited for the sun to rise. The eastern sky lightened slowly from pink to pale yellow. A few small birds began to sing in the stillness, and from a ghost gum downslope a single raven gave voice to what sounded like querulous disappointment. The sun broke the horizon in a dip in the Chewings Range, lighting our faces first, before its light slid slowly downhill towards Ormiston Pound.

The path soon descended from the ridge, and we walked a dozen morning kilometers to Ormiston Gorge, maybe the largest canyon on the trail and certainly the most visited. A side road from Namatijira Road brings in tourists, some out for the day from Alice Springs, some staying in nearby Glen Helen, and many camping in small RVs and SUVs. In the bathroom I looked in a mirror for the first time in a week and thought I looked strange.

Chris and Krystal were already at the small visitor center building, going through their food drop box. Chris asked if I wanted a piece of white chocolate, and when I said I did, he said, "Alright, but this is my very favorite treat, and you have to eat it just as I say." He broke off a healthy chunk from a large foil-wrapped bar. "You have to slowly suck it, to get the full flavor," he instructed; "no chewing." He waited for me to show a sign of agreement before handing over the chocolate. The thing with Chris was that he always knew the best way to do something, and even if he was right--and he usually was--I sometimes wanted to resist. I went around a corner to a set of benches on the side of the building and chewed my white chocolate, and it was still pretty good.

When Rachael arrived we retrieved our own food box, the last of the hike, and took it to a nearby covered picnic table. While we ate lunch--crackers with cheese, wasabe peas, boxed fruit juice--a tour group arrived and joined us at the large table. One loud woman said, "It's hot here, but not as hot as back home right now. We're from New England." I found her American accent jarring but pleasing and just a little exotic.

Hikers had a separate campground at Ormiston, with wooden platforms and gas grills; the sites were close together, the dirt pulverized by much traffic into a powdery dust that leapt up with each footfall. Bower birds, drab-colored but with a spot of bright pink on the back of their heads, nervously pecked at the ground, then scattered to the bushes that dotted the sites. Crows lingered on the margins waiting for the main chance. In the afternoon, they got at a few things we'd left out, leaving large beak holes in an orange juice box, and ripping to shreds a bag of dried fruit they'd pulled from an open pocket of Rachael's pack.

I had gone off to walk into the gorge, a deep and twisting canyon a mile or so long, with a shrinking waterhole at its mouth;pale sand surrounded the pool, but beyond the wide bottom of the canyon was filled with boulders and, emerging from the foot of the walls, water-smoothed slabs of stone. At the far end one could continue out into the Pound, but instead I returned to the waterhole and sat down in the shade of a gum tree and read.

Later, I had a shower in the small green shower building near the campground. The hot water lasted only the first minute or so, and yet the experience was still transformative, coming after eleven days on the trail. I emerged back out into the sunlight feeling completely different. Cleanliness can be overrated, but wait long enough and there are few more dramatically pleasurable sensations.

In the afternoon, other hikers arrived at the campground, including Ian and Beatta, a Norwegian couple who had started at the Larapinta's west end. After a couple days, Ian was disappointed with the trail, which he had expected to be more rugged and challenging. "It is like walking on ash-falt to go to McDonald's," he said, straight-faced. We assured him that he would be better pleased as he progressed eastwards. (Once we had walked the part of the trail he had just covered, I decided that his characterization, while colorful, was inaccurate; there were easy stretches, yes, but a couple substantial ascents and descents as well).

Ian and Beatta had been in Australia for just a month or so, and they planned on staying a year. They had bought an SUV and a caravan (trailer), and started in the north. They planned to go everywhere, but they hadn't known about the Larapinta until reaching Alice Springs. Once they learned of the trail, they purchased packs and sleeping bags at the Lone Dingo in Alice; still, some of the equipment in their huge packs was more appropriate to the road than the trail, including a full-sized sauce pan they used to make oatmeal at our grill the next morning. It doesn't sound like much, but to see a backpacker with such an item was startling.

Ian's English was nearly perfect, and only slightly accented. Six or seven years ago he had completed his nurse's training in Adelaide, before returning to Norway to work. At moments, an Australian accent briefly replaced the Scandinavian; for "nice" he said "noice," just like a good Aussie. Beatta had worked as a kindergarten teacher in Norway, and her English wasn't quite as good; she seemed to understand well enough, but occasionally she could speak whole sentences of which I understood not a word (Rachael later backed me up on this). Already, though, she was picking up Australian phrasing, for example sprinkling her conversation with "I reckons," a common sentence starter, and the equivalent of the U.S. "I figure" (as in "I reckon we'll take fifteen days to get to Alice Springs"). Ian was rather serious, maybe a little overbearing; Beatta was shy, but laughed often, with a surprisingly loud and staccato bray.

At dusk Rachael and I walked down to the pool in the gorge, and watched a couple rock wallabies come down out of the canyon's rugged cliffsides. A German couple appeared too, and took about five thousand photographs of one of the wallabies as it sat nicely posed on a low slab of rock. Someone on a canyonside trail a couple hundred feet above the pool threw down a stone, which just missed a white-necked heron standing on the shore.

Back at camp Rachael made a fire in the communal fire pit near our site. Ian joined her, offering advice about how to arrange the wood, and clearly wanting to do it himself; but Rachael politely if firmly retained control. However, for the first time on the trip, her fire-making did not result in immediate success, and Ian took advantage of this opening to sidle in and take charge.

Rachael had invited to the fire others at the campground, including three men who had shown up late in the day. Also, Laura, one of the chocolate-less women we had met on the trail a four or five days before. She had left her companions for some reason and hitchhiked back alone, and was now camped in the dry riverbed nearby; Rachael had talked to her earlier, and Laura had said she planned to take mushrooms that night, so she'd probably stay at her own camp. Which apparently she did; we didn't see her at the fire. Chris and Krystal were absent too, having hitched a ride to nearby Glen Helen to eat steaks.

The three men, though, did soon join us, Mike and Tony, both in their fifties, and Jac, Tony's twenty-two-year-old son. I had noted earlier that they all carried massive packs, and each had his own tent, though Tony's appeared large enough to accommodate all three. They too were traveling west; they had left Alice Springs two days after us.

Tony and Jac were from Brisbane, but Tony's accent was more British, and both spoke in what Rachael identified as the posh and confident tones of the public-school educated (public meaning what Americans call private). Jac mentioned that his younger sister was currently at a boarding school in Geelong.

Tony had grown up in Ethiopia and Malaysia, where his father was a planter. He had ended up in Hong Kong, where he had raised his own family until the British handed the city over to the Chinese in the mid-1990s; then they had moved to Brisbane. He was a tall and ruggedly handsome man, with striking blue-gray eyes and a friendly and appealing demeanor. When the talk turned to deserts, he mentioned golfing in Palm Springs, and he wore a cap advertising Whistler (a ski resort in British Columbia)—both of which confirmed my sense that he was well-off and long had been.

Jac had been at uni for a couple years, studying commerce, when he'd become bored and bolted for Europe, somewhat to his parents' dismay. Eventually he had landed in Edinburgh, where for the last two years he had managed a pub. Just this summer his parents had talked him into returning to Australia, and he would soon be starting back at school. Though also tall and fit, he must've taken more after his mother, since he was darker than his father, with a much smaller face and a somewhat beetled brow; he had a couple weeks' beard, while the two older men had shaved earlier in the shower building. He occasionally took small pulls from a silver flask

Mike was a search-and-rescue helicoptor pilot, and he lived in Newcastle. Of the three the he was designated raconteur; often one of the other two would start an anecdote but then hand it off to him. He and Tony had been close friends since their young days in the Royal Navy together (and Tony's other son had just finished his training with the Royal Commandos, or some such group). Mike told a joking but painful story about his new boots, which had both fallen apart on the trail and carved serious wounds in his feet. He was deprecating and cheerful about his hike—in the breezy, affable style of the Anglo adventurer—but he must've suffered terribly, judging from the numerous bandages on his feet, which he showed us.

Jac's own stories were all about drinking, and though I might have been projecting, it seemed to me that Tony listened with a rather forced smile. In one story, set in Brisbane, Jac was out drinking at a club, met some people, went back to their apartment to continue the festivities, then came out onto the street at dawn; still half-drunk, he discovered he had no idea where he was. Much emphasis was put on this confusion, the point of the story really, the ridiculous fact that he could get lost in his own home city, that's how drunk he had been. He had ended up calling his mother for help, while he stumbled down the early morning street. She had been initially flustered, not understanding how he could be so lost; but eventually she told him to go to the nearest corner and name the cross-streets, which she looked up online and then directed him home.

In the midst of the talk, Rachael made hot chocolate, then poured in each mug a dollop of brandy (a food box treat). Jac declined a mug, holding up his flask to show that he was all set. Ian put more wood on the fire, and Tony turned the conversation away from Jac's drinking exploits by asking Beatta and Ian about their plans. I wanted, though, to hear more about Tony, who I felt particularly drawn to. But soon after he and Mike and Jac excused themselves and went off to their tents.