Advertisement
Published: March 25th 2022
We wake to the news that there’s been another spike in COVID cases back home. The number of new cases had been going down for a few days so we’d hoped the end of lockdown might not be too far off. It seems further away than ever now, so we spend the morning trying to work out our next move. It seems a no-brainer to stay either here or in Darwin where it’s warm and free, but we can’t stay away forever.... or can we says Issy. Hmmm. I wonder who we're going to get to mow the lawn. As usually happens in situations like this we spend several hours poring over Booking.com and flight schedules, and then decide we should wait a few more days before doing anything precipitous. I’m not sure what we think's going to change. I briefly wonder whether life was less stressful when I was still working and we didn’t have this sort of flexibility. Who am I trying to kid…...
We’ve wasted most of the day deciding absolutely nothing, so to prove we are capable of making a decision we decide to lock in a trip to the beach, with a detour to the
chemist along the way. There, that wasn’t so hard. There’s a long wait for our prescriptions, so long that I decide to read the label on the massive multi-litre plastic container of hand sanitiser that I learn you can buy here for $150. It seems that this stuff is both flammable and poisonous, yet none of us seem to have had any qualms about lathering it all over ourselves at every opportunity for the last year and a half. I’m not aware of any large buildings having burnt down because one of their hand sanitiser dispensers caught fire, but then again I’m not sure the authorities would be too keen on something like that coming to light given the current situation. ...and I wonder how many people have died from hand sanitiser poisoning since the pandemic started. Thankfully the prescriptions are ready so I don’t have a chance to contemplate these issues too much further.
We set off for a long hike along Cable Beach. After yesterday’s unfortunate encounter we decide it might be prudent to head in the direction away from the “clothing optional” section. The tide's out, so there’s plenty of beach to contemplate. We discuss whether
crabs are generally happy with their lot in life. We come across a few hermit crabs dragging their shells slowly through the sand. The patterns a lot of them leave behind seem to cross over, and a couple of them seem to have spent the whole of the last tidal cycle going around in circles. I wonder if they realise. And what about the sand crab burrows, which they presumably have to re-dig every time the tide comes in and fills them up. I know a lot of people have repetitive jobs, but this is taking the concept to a whole new level. I think we’d better not stay up here for too much longer. I've heard about people "going troppo" and I think that might shortly include us if our latest topic of conversation is anything to go by.
The sun's going down at an alarming rate so we decide that we should probably start to head back towards the car. We nearly trod on a few jellyfish earlier and they might be a bit hard to see in the dark. Issy asked me if they were the marine stingers we've heard so much about - the ones
where you die of shock from the pain as soon as you touch them. She suggested I pick one up to find out. You'd break your leg if you fell into some of the crab holes we’ve seen, so there’s another hazard to think about as we make our way gingerly along the sand in the looming blackness. None of the this seems however to have dissuaded the large local Latino population from its nightly soccer match. They’re all set up on the sand with portable goals, and traffic cones for corner flags. It’s a serious game, or at least it sounds serious, we can’t actually see anything; it’s too dark. Spain and the South American countries are all pretty good at soccer; I wonder if training in pitch blackness might be part of the secret...
We order the seafood platter “for two” at local institution Zanders, which overlooks the beach. The platter is impossibly big. We struggle our way through about half of it, and agree that that’s more than enough food for the next month. The gent at the next table comes over and says that he and his mates have been watching us. He tells us that they ordered one to share between five of them and scarcely made a dent in it. He says that if we’d managed to finish ours he was going to nominate us for the Guinness Book of Records.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.052s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0322s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
You are "going tropo"
...