From Kununurra - A Travelogue of Sorts

Oceania
January 11th 2011

Published: March 16th 2011

The Following is a travelogue of our road trip from Melbourne to Kununurra, written from Kununurra in September 2010. I have decided to post it in its entirety as that is how it is intended to be read, as oppose in separate blogs and locations.

From Kununurra – A Travelogue of Sorts

Coconuts in Kununurra

The tall palms are swaying gently in the breeze, framed in the bright blue sky, and from my reclined sun lounger I can see they are laden with coconuts. They look so good up there in bountiful bunches, but completely out of reach. Everyday I walk by the trees and have a quick scan over the grass to see if one has fallen, but not yet. I would love one to fall, it would be a good prize. I've mentioned this to Laura and I was about to remark on it again when I noticed the bunch hanging precariously from a palm leaning directly over my sun-lounger, so I kept quiet as not to tempt fate. I remember hearing a statistic that you are far likelier to be killed by a falling coconut than a plane crash (or was it shark attack?). Anyway, probably a more reassuring statistic if you live somewhere where palm trees are not in abundance. These palms are ten metres tall, so if my skull were to break the fall of a plummeting coconut I wouldn't know much about it. I can't decide if the menace is real enough for me to actually drag my lounger out of the potential impact zone though.

I left my bar job in Melbourne a month or so ago and have since been driving in a clockwise direction round Australia with my companions Laura, Phil and Martial in our white 1996 Ford Falcon, Rula. We have stuck to coastal roads where possible with the odd deviation inland to places of interest, or to avoid places of non-interest like Port Hedland. If we were to do a full circuit (Melbourne to Melbourne), our current location of Kununurra would be about halfway round. Kununurra is a town of 6000 on the eastern edge of the Kimberley ranges in Western Australia, and importantly for us it's the centre for a large agricultural area, created by the damming of the Ord River which provides irrigation to what is a dry region most of the year. This should mean harvest work and an opportunity to replenish our emptying pools of cash.

I can justify starting a travelogue at this halfway point in our journey as I now have time to sit around the pool and reflect on the last few weeks as we wait for the mango harvest to begin. Also, at halfway I at least have some anecdotes that might be worth telling, as oppose a journal entry along the lines of –
'It is our second day on the road and this morning we fried eggs for breakfast'
– which I probably would have written before I got too bored to write any more. Not that the fried eggs we cooked on the second day weren't worth recording, but in the age of digital photography it's easier to point-and-press to preserve a memory than bother writing it down. In any case, I would find it more interesting to look at a photograph of us cooking breakfast than a view of Uluru (Ayers Rock) for example, identical to those taken not only by my three companions, but also hundreds of tour buses that same day.

Actually those eggs were the first breakfast we had cooked on the road, fried successfully with our new gas stove and eaten off our new camp table and chairs by the beautiful Grampians mountain range, Victoria. Here we had spent the night sleeping amongst the gum trees in 1 or 2 degrees in not only our sleeping bags but also our jumpers, jeans, socks and hats. It seems a distant memory now when the first thing you want to do when the sun comes up is take a cold shower. It is these little details that characterise our trip; like the random rest areas where we sleep, the people we meet, the food we cook and the sugary drinks we get addicted to. However, some moments in time can be difficult to photograph; they may be spontaneous or happen too quickly or unexpectedly to get the camera out, though these are often the most bizarre, funny or frightening times. These moments will probably form the most potent memories of our trip so far, so these are the incidences I will write about.

The Port Germein Hotel

Port Germein is a small coastal town in South Australia, north west of Adelaide at the top of the Yorke Peninsula. The town is known for its shellfish and fishing and seemed mainly to consist of the caravan park where we were camped, a hotel, a roadhouse and a muddy beach and jetty. Here we met a guy who was on a fishing holiday from his Adelaide vineyard job, he was wearing a woolly hat and was cooking and smoking in the camp kitchen. He offered Laura and I some oysters that he collected earlier that day and having never eaten oyster before we accepted partly out of curiosity and partly so not to seem rude at declining his generosity. As he opened them up with his knife he cut himself and blood started to drip from his hand. “Oh, look your bleeding” Laura told him. “No worries”, he said, handing me the first oyster. “it's nothing... just a bit of blood.” I noticed a spot of blood on the outer shell as I thanked him for the oyster. Now I really didn't want to eat it. I inspected the slimy contents of the inner shell for any more blood while I waited for Laura to be given hers. It was clean. “1... 2... 3...” The oyster was cold and fishy, and slightly salty from the sea water. Not very enjoyable. I think I chewed a little which may have been a mistake as the taste stayed with me a while, but now the thing was in my stomach and I hadn't been sick, so overall it was a success. “Did you like it?” the man asked. “It was something different” I said. “Do you want another?” he asked. “No...” we said together, “we can't eat all your dinner.” Laura added politely.
We needed a drink, so we went to the only place in town – The Port Germein Hotel. The noticeable thing about the Port Germein Hotel from outside was how loud the music from within was. As we approached from down the street we could hear muffled bass - the track indistinguishable. I half expected to see a live band inside but when we entered there were just six or seven drinkers, all sat around one corner of the bar. The music was rock along the lines of ACDC and Guns 'n' Roses and was being kicked out by a huge digital jukebox at the other end of the room. The place was lit harshly by two strip lights running the length of the bar and there was no décor to speak of, just a TV showing Aussie footy. Coopers Pale Ale was advertised at $5 a pint which is a good price for a decent beer so we ordered three pints from the old man behind the bar and a glass of red wine for Laura. The beer was nice but was well short of being a pint.

Working at the bar in Melbourne for six months I learnt that Aussies have completely confused themselves over the size of their beer. Beer is served in at least three different sized glasses in Victoria alone and these measures have different names in different areas. In the Melbourne bar I worked in you could order a pot, a schooner or a pint. Pints seem to be a new concept to most Victorians so they would order one by asking for 'a tall' or 'a large' or 'a heavy'. A schooner was sometimes 'a normal beer' and if the punter didn't specify a size I'd just pour them a pot, also known as a middy, a handle or a ten (10fl.oz) depending on where you are. A pot is a bit of a joke, its 285ml and is what the government call a 'standard drink'. A standard drink contains approximately 10 grams of alcohol and the drink drive limit is two standard drinks. If you order a pot you'll be back for another in a couple of minutes, it's about the same size as a decent glass of wine. But more about 'grog' later - back to the Port Germein Hotel, SA:

We have our pints of Coopers Pale, and looking down the bar I can see the six or so other customers are generally sporting moustaches, mullets or are cleverly combining the two. They are all drinking premix stubbies, which are bottles of ready mixed spirit and mixer such as bourbon and coke. The barman in the Port Germein Hotel is friendly, and starts chatting to us about our travels. It turns out he is the landlord and he is soon joined behind the bar by his wife – I would say they were in in their 70's. They are full of wisdom they want to share about our upcoming drive across the Nullarbor Plains and South Australia. Soon they start refilling our glasses on the house, then they bring out a pizza, also at no cost. That's Australian hospitality.

I have my back to the other people in the bar, but I keep hearing a kind of hollering or wailing over the loud music coming from their general direction. It's quite unnerving and I want to see who is making this alarming noise, but I think it safer not to further disturb them with unwanted attention. A bloke comes to join us from the other end of the bar. He is probably around our age, with cropped hair and a rats tale and manic eyes that point in slightly different directions. He tells us he lives upstairs with a half-wild hyper active dog called Tyson, and did we want to meet him? Feeling cheered by the beer we said what the hell - why not? My line of thought on vicious dogs is if it tries to maim my leg, I'll kick it in the head before it gets a chance. I was thinking this as crazy eyes leads Tyson down the stairs to meet us. I held my breath, braced for the bloody onslaught. But Tyson was a pup, about shin height, and the only vicious act he was capable of would be to cock his leg over your shoe.

ACDC is now blasting out of the jukebox and the hollering man is suddenly behind us, yelling wildly along with the music, words inaudible. Maybe the landlord sensed our mild alarm, because he yells “Butch, shut-up or I'll take you outside for a flogging!”
“Butch is ever such a nice fella when he's not pissed” the landlady adds apologetically. I turn to look at this Butch, and I find this statement hard to imagine. Butch looks 50 or so and was fat and heavily bearded, but not enough to hide his lack of front teeth. He was wearing a cap, fingerless gloves and the obligatory wife beater vest. One eye was bloodshot, the other was closed, probably to aid balance due to drunkenness. Shit - he has seen me looking at him and he's coming over. He's still yelling, and he's making frenzied shapes with his hands, which I assume is him expressing himself to the music. I nod and smile. He then grabs my hand, gripping tightly, shaking my arm from the shoulder.
“Nice to meet you Butch” I say.
He's friendly too. In fact, everyone here is friendly. I start to relax and sink a few more of the free beers. This is what travelling in Australia is all about, I think to myself, looking around and pleased with our situation. The landlord continues to shout advice about the upcoming drive over the music, which turns out to be useful and accurate over the next few days.

Then the most brilliant and bizarre thing happens. One of those completely unexpected moments in time that feels surreal enough that you need to keep looking at whoever your sharing this moment with to check that, yes, they are seeing it too and it is that funny. MC Hammer's 'Can't Touch This' starts pumping out the jukebox, which is unexpected in itself as until this moment only a steady stream of 80's and 90's rock anthems have been blasted mercilessly into the bar. I turn to Phil to laugh as he will tell you this is his favourite tune – but he and Laura are distracted by the landlord and lady who are doing some sort of twisting jive dance along the bar, a look of unbridled joy upon their faces. Laura is half laughing, half open mouthed in astonishment at this old couples timely jiving along with the elastic bass line of 'Can't Touch This', sampled from Rick James's 'Superfreak'. The red-necks at the other end of the bar are also clapping or dancing along, in fact the whole place is jumping. Behind us Butch is transformed from a dishevelled drunk to a brother straight outa Compton, pawing the air with his hands like a homey in a rap video. Martial has Tyson the dog by his front paws and is dancing salsa with him (he later told me it was the bachata). When the track finished everybody stopped dancing, the red-necks got on with sipping their stubbies and the landlord and lady carried on chatting to us about the Nullarbor, as if nothing had happened.

After a couple of hours we said our goodbyes to everyone and left. As we walked back to the campsite I asked Phil what Butch had been saying to him, as since MC Hammer they had seemed to be in deep conversation. Phil said it had been a one way conversation and he hadn't understood a word Butch said.

Grog

The Aussies also have some confusing and conflicting laws regulating the sale of alcohol. Before starting work in the bar I was obliged to take the Responsible Service of Alcohol (RSA) course. Sounds reasonable enough, although I have plenty of bar experience. So I paid my seventy bucks and sat with thirty other hopeful bar tenders through several dated video clips of actors playing drunk people, and then a couple of role-plays which my kiwi friend Matt livened up by playing a difficult punter. He told the acting barman “a drink, now, or I'll burn this f***ing place to the ground.” The lecturer cut the role-play short here. The RSA is designed to generate money for the government and the agencies who host the courses. It is another way of taxing a casual and often migrant labour force on entering an easily accessible industry like hospitality. Nobody failed the exam in my class, though I'm not sure everybody could read or speak English. You learn nothing and your pass certificates are printed the moment you pay.

One thing I did learn was that as bartenders we personally receive penalty notices that exceed $1000 if we serve somebody deemed to be intoxicated. After working six months in the bar serving wines and whiskies to the lawyers and judges from the courts next door, then watching them struggling to get out of their chairs to leave after their four hour business lunches, you realise what a farce the RSA is. If you refuse to serve Mr Bigwig from Grabbe & Greedison's city law firm yet another bottle of that fine '94 Cab Sav because - sorry sir, you are intoxicated - most bar owners would sack you on the spot. If the law was enforced, the bar would be empty and probably bust.

You can't comment on alcohol law in Australia without mentioning Aboriginals. On the way into Broome, North W.A, we met a cockney who was carrying forty boxes of goon (boxed wine in 2-4 litre bladders – the cheapest alcohol available) to sell 'on the black-market' to other backpackers as it is banned in many off licences. To buy alcohol in parts of West Australia and the Northern Territory you have to show ID to prove your not on a police list of banned drinkers. In fact there is total prohibition across many parts of WA and the NT, with signs every few kilometres reading 'No Alcohol'. These laws are specifically designed to target Aboriginal drinkers. In Alice Springs there are bars where blacks and whites are segregated. Aboriginals are even banned completely by certain landlords. I am honestly not sure what to think about some of this legislation, although I do think Australians need to remember recent history and that alcohol is a factor in - not the cause of - many Aboriginal social problems.

A pint of beer in Melbourne would normally cost from $7 to $14 due to tax on alcohol. You could probably find cheaper during a happy-hour, but anyway the cost was enough to keep us out of the bars. One night we went to a cheaper backpacker bar, and I was waiting at the bar for my second beer when I was manhandled away from the bar by security who told me I had to leave immediately. I asked what heinous crime I had committed and they said they thought I was intoxicated (drunk in a bar? Struth!). I did tell them that I had only had one beer but that didn't warrant a response. Luckily the group of friends I was with didn't mind changing bars. I really can't explain why they decided I was drunk, I had been waiting patiently at a crowded bar for ten minutes. I was actually bored not drunk.

A couple of weeks later after getting thrown out of another bar I decided that security in Melbourne are paranoid. This time it was in a music venue, and due to the extortionate price of beer myself and my German friend Nils had ordered a jug of beer each – A jug equates to about two pints. So standing there watching the band, pouring from the jug in one hand into a (plastic) glass in the other, we decided it made more sense to drink straight from the jug. Not unreasonable to Nils, who drinks steiners back in Bremen, which are bigger than an Aussie jug. Certainly a two pint jug did not look out of scale in his hand - he is a bearded giant, a truck driver by trade and he was doing removals in Melbourne (probably single handedly). After a few sips on my jug I notice we are completely surrounded by security in plain clothes but obvious due to their earpieces.
“Er, your gonna have to leave guys” one says to us.
“Why? We've just got here.”
“You can't drink those in here” he says, pointing to the jugs of beer we bought from their bar. When we question why, he says if we consume a jug each we will be intoxicated, or something along those lines. I laugh, Nils shrugs and luckily for them agrees to go quietly.
“What about the beer?” I ask – they had cost us $20 each.
“Drink them quick” another of the goons says, as if he is doing us a favour. So there is Nils and I, stood in the middle of the dance floor surrounded by bouncers as we sink our two pint jugs on the spot. They then escort us out onto the street, where we waited for the rest of our friends, by this point nicely intoxicated.

The Nullarbor Plains

The drive from Melbourne to Perth is the equivalent of London to Moscow but with a desert in the middle and hardly any fuel stations. Part of the route includes a 90 mile straight across the Nullarbor Plains which is reputed to drive you round the bend (apologies) due to the monotony of travelling the longest stretch of straight road in Australia. This stretch of road seems to attract a special kind of weirdo; one who chooses to run, cycle or ride some odd bike / trike across the most desolate landscape I've ever seen. There is nothing really on the ground except a bit of scrubby plant life and it's flat as far as the eye can see. The sky is huge. That day small solid looking clouds were suspended in the blue and trailed for miles until they met what looked like the curve of the Earth. The clouds were the only real features to provide perspective on the landscape, though at times you felt you could reach out and touch them. Driving in these conditions is difficult, your mind can easily disengage as your body is not really driving as we know it: You are in cruise control, holding the steering wheel still and all the scenery is the same. Distance and perspective are easily confused. I felt like I was in an early 90's computer game, where you car is driving toward the inanimate scenery in the background but it never gets any closer.

All along the coast here Southern Right whales are making their way to Antarctica for the summer. There are lots of places to pull-in to view them, but after what felt like a long time scanning the ocean we saw nothing. It felt like every time we turned away in frustration, they would break the surface, blow holes blasting water high into the air. On the side of the road trees had been selected at random to decorate with man made junk. Some hung just with sandals, some with bottles and some with underwear. The sides of the road is also littered with road kill. This is mainly due to the impressive road trains – sometimes 3 trailers long – that plough down the road and through wildlife both night and day. We were advised not to drive at night in our car. In fact we were told it is suicide. It is definitely suicide on the part of the kangaroos, who are confused by the sound and light of the oncoming vehicle and bounce full speed into the headlights. This will usually write-off your car even before you crash, and if your unlucky it will come straight through your windscreen so you better get out of there before it kicks the living shit out of you. Of course if you're sat a couple of metres above the road, travelling at 130 kph in the cab of a 100 tonne road train you probably wouldn't even hear the odd 'roo bouncing off your roo bars. Australia has the longest and heaviest road trains in the world, legal up to 200 tonnes and four trailers long.

We camped for one night on the Nullarbor Plain; 50 metres off the highway in the scrub. Laura was nervous of dingoes and of camels trampling our tent. Phil wasn't, but decided to sleep in the car anyway. That night we heard some peculiar noises across the plains, and it rained heavily. This was strange as it only rains twice a year in the Nullarbor. Freak rain proved to become a theme in our trip up the west coast. It rained regularly, and locals would comment how 'this is weird weather for Albany / Margaret River / Perth / Geraldton / Carnarvon/ Exmouth/ Tom Price'. Once we stayed on one cattle station where the farmer said it hadn't rained for 16 months and sure enough it rained while we were there. Laura commented that we should call the local media to let them know we were in the area and we would bring rain. We're not rain charmers Laura but alas, just British. Rain will follow us to the desert.1

The night we spent in the Nullarbor I awoke to find we had put our tent up (in near darkness) next to a cavernous hole in the ground, probably 5 metres in diameter and pretty deep. I read the small, faded notice which said it was a blow hole for an unexplored network of subterranean caves that span much of the coastal Nullarbor region. The caves come to the surface intermittently as blow holes and make breathing noises as the subterranean air equalises with the pressure from the weather system on the surface. The blow hole was not even marked on our map. For me this really illustrates the beauty and vastness of Australia. Amazing natural features are too numerous in Australia's landscape for people to fence off and start selling tickets for, as we do back home. You do not have to form a queue and there is no exit via a gift shop.

Rula

Our White Ford Falcon wagon, Rula, got us safely across the Nullarbor to Albany, WA, before she had any problems. Unfortunately her problem in Albany was pretty major. The automatic gear box stopped working, and the smug mechanic told us our 3rd and 4th gears had turned to liquid. This cost us two nights in Albany and about a thousand bucks. The worrying thing was she had started to make a sort of moaning, grumbling noise at higher speeds before the repair, and the new gearbox did not fix this.

We named the car Rula after the Greek mother of our eccentric boss at the bar, Alex. She would come in to the restaurant and do very little except change the flowers, take a few payments and tell people off. Nobody was safe – though her son Alex mainly took the brunt. She was incredibly stubborn and would tell you off for seemingly random things and wouldn't listen to any arguments on your behalf. Strangely enough though, most of us liked her. Sometimes she was quite funny, and she would always put Alex in his place, even in front of staff and customers. I guess that's why Rula seemed such an appropriate name when Martial suggested it; because we all know Rula is really the boss, and we are all at her mercy.

I remember a typical Rula encounter: I had come downstairs from the bar to fetch something from the restaurant bar. I had little to do with the restaurant bar, I ran the cocktail bar upstairs Monday to Friday and would only go down to fetch stock or to eat. I saw Rula so I said hello.
“Maaaaatt” she says in her Greek accent, “where are all the towels?”
“I don't know” I say. I didn't have a clue.
“I put twenty here on Monday... Now they're gone.”
“Sorry I really can't help you Rula” I say.
“What have you been using them for?” She asks irritatedly.
“Nothing... I mean I've not been using them and I've not seen them, sorry Rula.”
This does not deter her, and I realise I'm trapped as she is blocking the way out of the bar. I try to be helpful in order to find a way to escape, and suggest they might be in the kitchen...
“Why did you put them in the kitchen!? The kitchen will have made them so dirty!...”
At this point Sy, the barista, ambles over. Sy loves nothing more than winding Rula up.
“Rula...” Sy says. Rula pretends not to hear him. She knows Sy only wants to take the piss, and ordinarily she completely ignores him.
“Rula – are you looking for the tea-towels” Sy says, and that has got her interest...
“What Sy... What do you know about the tea towels!?” Rula asks him incredulously.
“Matt's been taking them back to the hostel!”
I can't hold in a burst of giggles, and now Rula is raising her voice:
“STOP it! That's not funny!” She says, though she is looking at me and I can tell she is trying to tell if Sy could be serious. She has taken the bait.
“Yeh, he takes them back to the hostel and makes them into blankets for the other backpackers.”
I snort uncontrollably and I have to grab a tissue for my nose but it's hard because we're both laughing too hard. Rula has gone off on a rant about how nobody cares about the restaurant and I can't get a breath enough to protest. Eventually I escape to the kitchen to compose myself and I manage to avoid Rula for the rest of the day.

We've had a lot of trouble with Rula (the car). We have begrudgingly spent many hundreds of dollars on various repairs at various mechanics, and she continues to make the grumbling noises. This noise can be quite alarming when your hundreds of kilometres from the nearest town, where there is no shade and no mobile reception. Eventually we changed the bearings in the wheels, then she was diagnosed with a bent rear axle. Now the wheel just makes a loud tweeting noise as the brake disc rubs on the pad. Yep, Rula is trouble alright. Though she has never broken down on us in the middle of nowhere. In fact she's never really broken down – as in forcing us to stop. It would be unrealistic to expect a 14 year old car with 320,000km and counting on the clock to do a 20,000km trip all the way around Australia without us spending anything on repairs, especially in the hot and dusty conditions. Outside of Perth we very rarely encountered another vehicle that was not a 4WD. I have to admit we took her down a few dirt roads, some of which were pretty badly corrugated and will literally shake an old car to bits. Maybe that's why Rula's ceiling came down.

Maggie River

We have been to some awesome places on this trip, but not many as awesome as Margaret River. I could have spent months there, and after a couple of days I'd decided I should live there. It reminded me a bit of Devon, with farms and narrow lanes with tall hedges that lead down to beaches, though the coast is far more rugged here. The small towns are full of pubs and surf shops, and there is a good mix of surfers, farmers and tourists that keep the places buzzing. Vineyards are everywhere, as this is the biggest wine producing region in Australia. Some are sprawling estates with grand entrances and a modern, expensive 'cellar door' restaurants. Others are small and hidden away, with just a home made sign indicating you can taste their wines at the (actual) cellar door. The vineyards we visited fall somewhere in the middle of these two distinctions.

The first place we stopped was Hay Shed Hill – a fairly large vineyard with a cellar door bar built from white wood in a colonial style, plonked at the end of the driveway that winds up through fields woven with thousands of vines. Inside, the long wooden bar was stocked with hundreds of their wines, all available to taste for free. The winemaker soon came over and asked us which one we would like to start with. We went through the entire list of wines; reds, whites and some strange dessert wines, one of which they allow a fungus to grow on the grape to draw out the moisture resulting in a sweet concentrated taste. The winemaker was more than happy to keep pouring and educating us about each of the wines, some of which sell for $70 a bottle. The bar where we worked in Melbourne stocked their Sav Blanc and Cab Sav, and it was the 2008 Sav Blanc I enjoyed the most. We left Hay Shed Hill with a couple of clean skin Merlot's, unlabelled as it was the leftover grape from the 2010 Cab Merlot and cheap at $10 a bottle.

I recognised many of the vineyard names from bottles we sold at the bar in Melbourne. It was interesting to see these places as we had been repeating the estate names and wines to customers for months, with little knowledge of where they are. The next stop was Lenton Brae, a much smaller vineyard with the cellar door overlooking the vats where the wine is made. The elderly lady at the bar explained that the vineyard is a small family business and her husband designed and built the building and her son is the winemaker. Again we drank our way through the wine list and when we got to the Cab Merlot I explained to her that it was one of most popular house reds by the glass at our Melbourne bar. She was very happy about this and gave us a bottle of the Sav Blanc and showed us the cellar where they store the wine in oak barrels - each oak barrel costs $2000 each! I've never seen so many bottles of wine as there was in that cellar. We left quite drunk and that night at the campsite we cracked on with the Merlot.

The beaches are spectacular on the Margaret River coast; from Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse at the bottom of the peninsula where the Pacific and The Indian Oceans meet, up to the gnarly Cape Naturaliste Lighthouse at the top. The wild beaches of the south coast were also beautiful, but Margaret River's are more dramatic, with powerful waves driven onto the beaches from the big swells of the Roaring Forties 1000km south of Cape Leeuwin, making some of the best surf spots in the world. We stopped at five or six of these beaches and watched in awe as the waves crashed in. A couple of days later on our way to up to Perth we heard on the radio that a surfer had just been taken off his board by a great white shark and killed off Margaret River.

Crocs

According to my guidebook there is only an average of one fatality a year from shark attacks in Australia, and the same from salt water crocodiles. When we were in Melbourne there was a story all over the news about a man who had been thrown out of his local pub (The Divers Tavern, Broome) for being too drunk, then crossed the road and jumped the fence of the Malcolm Douglas Crocodile Park where he climbed into the pen of a fully grown male salt water crocodile and tried to ride on it's back rodeo style. The croc is called Fatso, he is 5 metres long and is known by his keepers for having a fierce temperament. Incredibly the drunk escaped from the pen with his life and made it back to the pub where an ambulance was called.

By the time we got to the croc park a few weeks later, they had put up a notice on Fatso's pen commemorating the now one legged man's stupidity. It goes beyond stupidity though. Fatso is a monster, like a ferocious dinosaur. If he was in Jurassic Park he would have eaten those damn children. When I first heard this story I wondered how the man had gotten so completely out of touch with reality to think it a good idea to ride the thing but was still sober enough to climb 2 large fences twice, the second time with only one leg. Then the mechanic who 'repaired' Rula in Broome explained that he is now in a mental hospital, which makes sense.

According to the guide in the croc park male 'salties' grow up to a staggering seven metres in length and are extremely territorial. They won't stray far out of their territory, but good luck if you stray into it. Half their length is made up from their powerful tail which they use to propel themselves out of the water to take down prey as large as cattle and horses.2 The guide said if a croc this big gets hold of you it probably would have snapped your spine from violently shaking you in its jaws before it can drown you in the death roll. The day before we had been swimming off the picture perfect Cable Beach in Broome, where the croc park is situated. So the following afternoon after our visit to the croc park we decided to hit the beach to cool off in the sea, but a large sign blocked the footpath warning us the beach was closed due to croc sightings. Cable beach is a hugely popular beach and advertises itself as the best in Australia, so it has a spotter plane flying over all day looking for salt water crocs. I was glad I wasn't in the water when they were spotted that afternoon.

There are lots of crocs in the lake by which we are camped at in Kununurra, but they are fresh water crocs, smaller and much less aggressive than their salt water cousins. They come up onto the shore most nights, just thirty to forty metres across the grass from our tent. Their jaws are designed to catch fish so they are not really a threat to humans, though they have razor-like teeth. We go with my torch to look at them some evenings. You can get pretty close to them before they slide back into the water. One evening there was a two metre croc unusually far up the bank and he didn't seem too bothered by us. I wondered if it was the same two metre we had heard about a few days before. Some kiwi guy we had met in the pool reckoned he and his mates were walking the shore looking for crocs, shining their torches onto the water searching for the unmissable reflection of a croc's eyes. Nobody noticed a two metre croc laid out on the bank directly in front of them, and this kiwi said he was about to tread on it when he looked down, screamed and had to hop over it. The croc still hadn't moved, so the kiwi had the bright idea of throwing his left jandal (kiwi for flip-flop) at it. Sure enough the croc snapped it out of the air with lightening reflexes. They then threw stones at the poor croc to try and get it to drop the jandal, but it only did when one of his mates threw his jandal at it. The croc then had enough and slid off into the water, leaving the kiwi with a chewed up left jandal as a trophy and his mate with no right jandal.

When he was telling me this story I wondered if the drunk who had jumped into Fatso's pen was also kiwi. Martial and I also met a couple of French guys who found the body of dead croc on the shore. They chopped of its head, then soaked it in a bucket of bleach for a week. They now had the skull, completely clean of flesh with working jaws and teeth intact, in their van. It's a hell of a souvenir but there is no way they would have got it through customs and back to France.

Attack at New Beach

On the west coast north of Perth we fed wild dolphins at Monkey Mia, snorkelled at the Ningaloo Marine Park and saw turtles at Coral Bay. Between Monkey Mia and Coral Bay we spent a night at a free beach camp site called New Beach. New Beach was a long way from the nearest town, and 8km's off the highway down a badly corrugated dirt track. The road signs all had bullet holes through them here – with hindsight perhaps we should of taken this as a warning. When we eventually reached the camp site we found it busy with a few semi-permanent caravans on bricks and improvised fencing. The first area we chose to pitch our tent turned out to be about shouting distance from our nearest neighbour. I found this out as I jumped out the car to check the ground for firmness and the best spot.
“YOUSE NOT PLANNING ON CAMPIN' ERE ARE YA?” Someone yells at me in a western Aussie drawl from the caravan. I look up to see who is yelling but instead my attention is urgently drawn to the viscous looking dog that is bounding toward me. I immediately panic and turn to take the few paces to safety that is Rula our car, but in my panic I realise I am on the wrong side of her and Phil is in the passenger seat, Martial is in the back, the dog is upon me and neither of them are going to risk opening their doors to let me in.

There are three distinct images that my mind returns to when I think of the New Beach dog incident. My memory has not been reduced purely to these images, but for some reason I recall three frozen moments in time. Frame one is of Martial looking through the rear window, not at me, but at the dog – and the colour has drained from his face. Frame two is when I have turned to face the dog, which is stationary a few feet from me and Rula. The dog has its jaws open mid-bark with strings of saliva suspended around its snout. It is the type of beast that looks bred for violence, with a big muscular neck and a cone shaped head with two red eyes embedded in each side. If it advanced on me any further kicking it in the head was not an option, as I'm sure it would have bitten off my foot.

Frame three is perhaps the most disturbing. I guess I looked to the voice from the caravan to call off the dog. The figure I see is so grotesque as to be alarming. I immediately notice a huge belly that sticks out so far as to nearly defy physics, but not quite, as it sags out from under a stained vest and hangs over unnecessarily short shorts. The face is as ugly as they come, bright red with a greasy yellow streak of hair plastered down by a baseball cap. The man was holding a stubby of beer, though he'd seemingly poured most of it down his vest, or perhaps that was sweat. But what was really alarming was that he was actually laughing as he stood back to watch his savage dog about to maul me. I can't recall exactly how I ended up back in Rula, I guess I scampered around the back and dived in the drivers side, but I remember slamming the door and I remember the reassuring smell of the inside of the car.
“F***inghell” I said.
“Drive” somebody else said.

We camped what we thought a safe distance from the redneck and his dog, but we could still hear the barking every time somebody got too close. The ground had been too loose to peg out the tent so we had improvised by filling bags full of sand and using them to weigh down the corners. That night sleep took a long time in coming as a strong wind was coming in from the ocean, buffeting the tent. It sounded like a huge storm outside as the tent canvas flapped violently making a disturbing noise. I wondered if the poles would snap and if the tent would still be standing in the morning. When I did eventually sleep I dreamt about taking a gun and shooting the dog, but then I had to shoot the redneck, and I was on the run from the long arm of the law in the wilderness of Western Australia. I awoke the next morning amongst the sandbags, sheltered from hostile rednecks and attack dogs. As I climbed out of our tent I expected to see a scene of devastation from the storm, but there was only a warm breeze and a beautiful golden beach, glowing from the sunrise.

Bullara Station and the road to the Karijini

Coincidentally we met a guy whose job it was to shoot dogs only a couple of days later. Our route had taken us inland so we decided to camp on a cattle station called Bullara Station. Here we met Jeff, who was employed by the local stations to kill the dingoes who hunt their stock. The evening we arrived we walked around and found an old shearing shed and a bit of a car graveyard. There were also many working dirt bikes and 4WD's to muster sheep and cattle on the quarter of a million hectares of land – small for a sheep and cattle station in the region. The outdoor shower on the camp site was brilliant, it had a huge shower head that pours the water down on you in torrents from the rainwater storage tank above. Before you have a shower you need to throw some firewood into the wood burner and wait ten minutes for the water to heat.

The next day at breakfast the farmer asked us if we would help load his sheep onto a road train in exchange for a tank of fuel and a free nights camping. Jeff picked us up in his ute and we headed out to the pens where the sheep had been mustered to. We were greeted by Tim the farmer, a farmhand called Richie, the road train driver, a goat and one thousand rams destined for Saudi Arabia by boat as part of the live sheep trade. The goat had somehow got in with the rams during the muster. Jeff noticed it immediately as it was bleating loudly over the rams. I spotted it on the edge of the flock, so Jeff yells 'Grab it!' so I grab it by its hind leg and drag it out.
“What do I do with it?” I shout, as I am just stood hanging on to its back leg as it bucks wildly.
“Throw it out the pen!” Richie tells me as he comes over, laughing. I try to get my arms underneath the now panicky goat to scoop it over the four foot fence but by the time I have got a decent hold of it Richie has taken the thing by its hind leg and horns and launches it over the fence. The goat twists in the air and lands sprawled in the dirt on the other side. It then scrambles to its feet, bolts a few metres then stops and looks back, bleating, unsure what to do with its new found freedom. The next time I looked around it had gone.

We had to herd the rams a few at a time from the large holding pen, to pens that gradually get smaller until they are finally bottlenecked into the three level trailers of the road train. The rams were understandably extremely reluctant to go up the ramp, so by way of encouragement we would kick, shove or drag them by their horns – all the time yelling and clapping to scare them into moving. Hard work! We were fully involved as Jeff was crook from his arthritis and Richie was badly hungover. Richie said he didn't normally drink but he'd had a scrape with a nurse shark the night before when out spear fishing and so had a few to calm his nerves. After a couple of hours the rams were loaded so we went back to the camp site and sat with Jeff all afternoon.

Jeff explained that he was hired by the station to control the dingo population by shooting and setting traps. I suggested there is a dog on New Beach he could shoot. He told us a couple of dingoes will kill many sheep and even cattle. He also hunts fox, kangaroo and feral donkey. The donkeys have defected from domesticity and along with the kangaroos eat the sparse vegetation that is needed to graze the stock. Foxes were brought in to control the rabbit population (rabbits were introduced for sport in the 1800's but of course the population exploded) and are now pests eating native wildlife. He eats the kangaroo and donkey and said the donkey meat is delicious and low in fat. Soon he brought out his didgeridoo and we all had a go, though none of us could master the circular breathing needed to play continuously. Then he brought out a bottle of scotch whisky that he had been given though he didn't like it, so Phil and I saw to that. As the evening drew in he told us a few stories about spear fishing, swimming with whales and about life in the bush. He was very knowledgeable about the bush as he spent days at a time hunting and camping under the stars in a swag before returning to the station house.

We left Bullara Station with a full tank of fuel and headed further inland to the Karijini National Park. On this drive I saw my first wild dingo. It stood alone, ears pricked as it watched our car speed past. I was struck by its size and presence in the desolate and rocky landscape. That night we camped amongst thousands of parakeets in some trees at the roadside and we cooked steaks on an open fire - delicious. Before we reached the Karijini we had some power steering problems with Rula and had to stop at the remote mining town of Tom Price on the edge of the National Park. Here we had to wait two days for a part to be flown up from Perth. When we first arrived at the mechanics I was surprised to see an American backpacker that we had met further down the coast, a week or so before. His van had also broken down, thirty kilometres out of town. He was quoted $400 just to get it towed, before any evaluation and repairs. I felt a little better about Rula's problems when I heard this, and we gave him a lift to the towns only camp site.

Tom Price was built in the 1950's around a huge open iron ore mine, which is still working today. Mine workers earn serious money here, and as a result Tom Price is an expensive place. However, there is always free stuff to do, and our campsite had a nice area for Martial, Phil and I to play football (in 40 degree heat!), a pool to cool off in and it also backed on to a decent mountain – Mt Nameless. The 1131m climb was tough in the heat but we were rewarded with spectacular views of the town, the mine, the surrounding mountains and the Karijini NP in the distance. I thought Mt Nameless a strange name for such a significant part of the landscape, especially as it already had an Aboriginal name – Jarndunmunha. Why bother to rename it Mt Nameless?

We only ever intended on passing through Tom Price on the way to the Karijini NP, but the Karijini was worth the wait. We did some great gorge walks and I swam in a waterfall at the end of one called Dale's Gorge. There is a photograph on display at the Aboriginal run visitors centre here showing a 6m python consuming a whole dead cow that washed up on the bank of a neighbouring gorge. It is an incredible picture – the back half of the snake is coiled on a ledge then the rest of it is hanging down to the edge of the river where it has dislocated its jaw and is swallowing the cow head first.

The Giant Boab Tree

The night before we reached Broome we camped at a rest stop where there is a giant Boab tree. The Boab is an icon of the Kimberley region, and had a special significance to the Aboriginal community as they use them for shelter, food and medicine. It has a wide, bulbous trunk that looks swollen with huge branches that burst out the top and it is covered in silvery bark. The branches look like crooked arms, all fingers and elbows. It looks like a child's drawing of a tree, or a disproportionate tree from a cartoon. They grow to 15 metres tall, though trunk girth can reach 20 metres. The Boabs are impressive not just for their enormous size, but also their enormous age. They are the oldest living things in Australia and can live for thousands of years.

This particularly gigantic Boab outside of Broome must be ancient, even by Boab tree standards. The trunk is easily as wide as it is tall and it is hollow, so that you can climb within. The trunk was used as shelter by the Aboriginals and later to imprison them as they were transported across the region. Inside is perhaps the size of an average bathroom or kitchen, only with a much higher ceiling. When we first arrived the sun was setting, causing the tree to be silhouetted against the fiery orange sky. We hurried to put up the tent in its shadow, which stretched way across the rest stop. By the time camp was set up it was dark and the family that were camped on the other side of the tree had lit a large fire. This is when I first climbed the tree. To climb it I squeezed into the trunk through a sort of slit window and followed it up to where it widens at the top. Here I emerged out onto the lower branches, and was in awe at the size of them. There was comfortably enough room for two people to walk side by side along the main ones. I sat on one branch and looked down at the fire below, which was casting shadows dancing into the higher reaches of the tree.

The next morning I woke up early to watch the sunrise from from up in the Boab. The smooth, shiny bark was glowing violet in the morning light and was not yet warm under my bare feet. The two kids from the family were also awake and had found another way up. They clambered onto a branch that reached way out and bowed almost to the ground under its own weight, and crawled along. Laura, Phil and Martial then woke up and also came up, and I climbed right to the top, as far as the branches could bear me. Hanging at the top were some Boab nuts, which are about the size of a lemon. The Aboriginals decorate these with detailed engravings, and I have seen some in galleries for hundreds of dollars. A drunk Aboriginal man tried to sell me one outside Coles supermarket in Kununurra the other day for ten bucks, but I wasn't in the market for one.

Dreamtime at Mimbi Caves

Between Broome and Kununurra is the Kimberley region, just north of the Great Sandy Desert. The region was named after the Kimberley diamond fields in South Africa as the landscape is so similar. The Kimberleys are made up of rivers, gorges and strange sandstone rock formations like the Bungle Bungles, but unfortunately for us most of it can only be reached by 4WD. The drive is over 1000km's along the Great Northern highway, which skirts the southern Kimberleys and the northern Great Sandy and Tanami deserts. It was seriously hot and it is necessary to stop and refill your water storage whenever possible in case of breakdown. One scheduled water stop was at the Aboriginal town of Fitzroy Crossing, about halfway. Here Laura found a copy of Hunter S Thomson's 'Kingdom of Fear' in a shoebox of second-hand books in the visitors centre and bought it for me as a surprise. I was chuffed as it hard to find good books in remote WA and they are often expensive. Hunter S Thomson's writing is provocative and inspiring and reading 'Kingdom of Fear' prompted me to write this travelogue.

At Fitzroy Crossing visitors centre we also bought tickets for a tour of the nearby Mimbi Caves, a cave system in the limestone cliffs that were originally underwater reefs in the Devonian Age, 400 million years ago. That night we camped on some windy cliffs overlooking the vast open landscape, 100km's out of Fitzroy Crossing and close to the caves. We met the tour guide, Ronnie, the next morning. He was an Aboriginal from a community in the nearby desert and had married into Mimbi's 'Gooniyandi' community. He was a broad man with a long black ponytail and a gentle manner that immediately put everybody at ease with each other. There were three other people on the tour with us, all Australians from the east coast, and Ronnie's dog named Mimbi who was half dingo. Mimbi ran alongside the ute as Ronnie took us off road for the last few kilometres to the caves.

The sun beat down on us as we stood at the edge of the limestone reefs that make up the caves, while Ronnie gave us a short lesson on the Aboriginal tribes of the area. He was very softly spoken for a big fella; his words deliberate, pausing between sentences as if allowing us to imagine the picture his words paint. As we walked in I was struck at how the landscape so dramatically changed from the stark grasslands we were just stood in to the limestone rock formations that now leaned over us. As we walked Ronnie showed us fossilised sea life from the Devonian reef system 400 million years old, and he told us the Aboriginal names and uses for various plants and trees. It seemed the Mimbi people had uses for everything in their natural environment, so much so that at one point the Aussie guy asked him “What do you use this tree for?”
“Ah... that's just a tree mate” Ronnie replied. We chuckled.

He pointed out different shapes in the rock formations that resembled native birds, a turtle, a goanna and even the continent of Australia on a cliff face. This seems to be a theme in the Aboriginal view of the landscape. I think seeing these shapes and resemblances everywhere signifies how they attach importance to their natural surroundings beyond how they can be used or manipulated. They tell dreamtime stories which are imaginings about how their environment was formed before humans walked the earth, with certain features such as mountains, rivers, pools and even trees being of significant importance. As we walked further in, the cliffs began to loom over us on all sides creating an intense atmosphere magnified by the heat. It was peaceful but also slightly eerie, like the place had a presence.

Ronnie showed us a stone hut built partly into the rock and put together with cement. It looked completely out of place in the untouched landscape. It was solid but crooked, with cement everywhere. Ronnie assembled us inside and explained that two generations ago, two German men came to Mimbi and decided to live here, so they built the hut and claimed the land as their own. Ronnie said that the Gooniyandi elders were not happy about this, but they did not force the Germans out, instead they reluctantly accepted their presence at Mimbi but kept their distance. Aboriginals do not traditionally believe in the concept of land ownership and so did not challenge them. This says a lot about Aboriginal nature, and perhaps how they were so easily forced aside when settlers first arrived in Australia.

Ronnie then showed us where the Germans had built two huge statues of American Indians, but they have since been taken down and are now on display at the headquarters of a large mining corporation. Ironically it was the mining company who came to the aid of the Mimbi people as they had some sort of legal claim to the land and so eventually forced the Germans out, leaving the land to the Aboriginals as they had no use for it. Ronnie did not explain why the Germans chose to live at Mimbi and why they built the statues of the American Indians, probably because he did not know. We were then led to a shady area amongst some trees where there was a large pool of water emerging from the mouth of a cave and where several chairs had been arranged around a camp fire which was heating a billy can of water. Here Ronnie said it was important we observe an Aboriginal custom by placing a small stone in our armpit, then throwing it into the pool. This was our way of saying 'hello' to the caves and would mean that we were now welcome to enter, so we each took a helmet and headlamp and followed Ronnie into the first cave.

Inside the air was much cooler, and there was fine sand under foot. Once my eyes had adjusted to the contrast in light I saw the huge old corals that sparkled under Ronnie's torchlight. The cave was just big enough to walk upright in most places, but then it would suddenly open up into a large cavern with a ceiling as high as a cathedral which often let shards of light cut through, spotlighting random rock faces in the gloom and illuminating them far brighter than our headlamps could. Some caverns had perfectly still crystal clear pools of water that looked as if they'd never been disturbed. As we walked further in I noticed dark passageways that veered off in different directions that Ronnie would lead us past without mention. I shone my headlamp down a few and saw some led to other large chambers or just dropped away into the darkness. Although geologists and archaeologists regularly visit Mimbi, the vast majority of the cave system remains unexplored as parts are cut off or are prone to flooding. Ronnie said he once got badly lost in the caves when he was exploring and was never so relieved to see daylight.

We emerged from the cave by the camp and drunk billy tea from the fire and ate bush damper with butter and jam. Ronnie then told us the dreamtime story about how Mimbi Caves came to be. He then picked up his guitar and played us a couple of country songs. It turned out he plays with a popular country group called The Fitzroy Express, and had played at The Tamworth Festival, the biggest country music gathering in Australia. The first song he had written, and it was about how the land was here before his time and it will be here after so it belongs to nobody. The song had resonance with the caves as a backdrop and the limestone cliffs provided assistance with the acoustics. The second song he sung was Yellowstone, Coming Home by John Denver.

In the second cave we entered we drunk some of the water that ran through it. It was cold and refreshing, unlike the warm calcium treated water we had been filling up with at the roadhouses, so later we filled all our water containers for the upcoming journey here. Ronnie then pointed out some rock paintings in red, he didn't know exactly how old they were but possibly thousands of years. In fact I later read that archaeologists had uncovered evidence of human occupation at Mimbi Caves of up to 40,000 years ago. That's amongst the earliest sites in all Australia. More recently the caves have been used as a hide out for Aboriginals from the police and pastoralists, as recently as the 1970's. Ronnie didn't go into great detail on the geology and archaeology of the caves, but instead focused on the Aboriginal interpretation and the recent human history.

Back outside again and we were shown where the Germans had inscribed a quote from an American Indian chief onto a rock face. I can't remember what the quote was, but I couldn't see any relevance to Mimbi Caves. Ronnie then led us to a small shady spot under an overhanging cliff and obscured from the path by bushes and trees. Here the Germans had carved a chessboard onto a large flat piece of limestone, with two rocks for seats. I admired the detail of the sculpted stone chess pieces, of which only a few remained. Some of the pieces had moss growing on them and they probably hadn't been moved for years, though the pieces still looked poised, as if the game had was on pause, ready to be returned too. I have been playing some chess recently, on a wooden travel set Laura bought me, and also against the computer. This must be the perfect place to play though, with no distractions, and the pieces made from the towering limestone cliffs that make up an awesome natural arena to duel in.

Mimbi Caves is undoubtedly a beautiful place, but it is very remote and is a strange landscape for two Germans to decide to make their home. They were obviously eccentric, and their fascination with all things American Indian is bizarre. If they were trying to live amongst nature like native Americans, then why not be authentic and live in America? And if they had to be in Australia, then why not take an interest in Australia's indigenous people as oppose native Americans?

The final cave we entered was the birthing cave. Inside was one huge cavern, more than half of which was taken up by a large pool. The pool was overlooked by a small chamber not big enough to stand up in, set back into the cave wall. In this small chamber generations of Gooniyandi babies had been born, possibly for the last 40,000 years. The last women to be born here only died recently. It is difficult to fathom so much human history coming from this one small chamber.

For me the tour of Mimbi Caves was a real experience, not just another box ticked off the list of places we wanted to visit. Ronnie was a brilliant guide, and it was great to finally have some substantive contact with an Aboriginal person and be able to ask questions about traditional Aboriginal life. We have seen Aboriginals everyday as we travelled through the small towns of SA and WA, they are often sat in the shade of a tree in public spaces. In these towns they are not normally the roadhouse attendants, the shopkeepers or in the visitor centres, and these tend to be the only people we have contact with. We have seen so much Aboriginal art, but the people themselves - though always present - have so far been on the peripheral of our journey.

When Ronnie showed us the fossils, the ancient corals and the rock paintings, he did it with no hype or hoopla. He wasn't sure of the exact age of many artefacts, though actually I don't think he thought the numbers important. What is important is that visitors gain an actual sense of the place – a textured memory that can be taken away, instead of the facts and figures which can be taken out of context, easily forgotten and can always just be looked up in a book.

The sense I gained of the place was one of time, or more accurately timelessness: Brief instances of human activity such as the poised chess game sit alongside the birthing cave, which could chronicle a peoples entire history. Here they have collided in a partly subterranean landscape, hidden from the rest of the world by the limestone rock faces that could write an entire book in which humans would only feature in the last sentence.
The Aboriginals cultural heritage has been formed from their interpretation of the rest of this book - their Dreamtime stories. A Dreamtime story chronicles creation in such a way that the natural environment itself has taken on significant meaning. I think they give Aboriginals a sense of perspective, a connection and therefore an understanding of their environment that could be invaluable in a country feeling the brunt of climate change and extreme weather.

Cow?

That night we camped surrounded by the bush, now only 200km's from Kununurra. The sky was completely clear and the stars were more vivid than any of us had ever seen. Martiel and I were both sitting out on or camp chairs, necks aching from staring up at the night sky, when we first heard the noise. We decided it was probably a cow, as initially the noise could best be described as a loud mooing. But one 'moo' followed another, gaining in frequency, length and volume – 'moo... moooo... Moooooo... MooOOOOOooo....' - until whatever it was suddenly bellowed out two horrific roars or screams or howls... I don't know how to describe these nightmarish noises but I know they are the loudest sounds I've ever heard come from a living thing.

They sounded as if they conveyed some tremendous form of terror, or perhaps pain or strain or all of the above as they tore through the empty night, echoing around the bush. Then for two or three minutes there would be silence again and we laughed and discussed what it could be. Laura called from the tent that it was a cow giving birth and Phil and Martiel agreed, though I was imagining a cow in quicksand or in a ditch, stricken and perhaps being tormented by some predator. Then the mooing would start over again, building to the hellish crescendo. Then silence. Then we'd debate if the calf had been born, or the cow had died out there or been eaten, and then the noise would restart. My theory was soon discounted as the noise gradually became distant – whatever was making it was moving slowly away. I don't know if I fell asleep before the noise disappeared completely, but when we awoke in the morning there was no sign of a cow or calf. Martiel and I spent an amusing time trying to imitate that strange sound, but we never got close.

We arrived in Kununurra that morning and immediately checked in with the harvest recruitment agency. That was a few days ago now, though we keep being told the mango harvest is due to start shortly, so we are all hopeful of starting work soon. In the meantime I have been taking my place on this sun lounger underneath the coconuts and I have been having a great time writing this travelogue, with intermittent dips in the pool to cool off. We are still camped by the lake full of crocs.

Prologue:

Mangoes in Humpty Doo

I have been thinking what to write for this prologue when out in the fields picking Mangoes. You get a lot of time to think when your out for ten hours a day, everyday, picking fruit. It would have made sense to finish this travelogue in Kununurra where I started writing, but I feel this mango picking chapter of our trip needs to be recorded.

The mango crop failed in Kununurra and we only got a couple of days picking, so we crossed the border to the Northern Territory and in two days we were just south of Darwin, where the mango crop was much better. We had been promised work here but were let down by the recruitment agent, so after driving around many farms in the area we eventually rolled up to a relatively small mango farm a few kilometres outside the tiny town of Humpty Doo (or Humpty Dump as it came to be known), an hour south of Darwin.

We were greeted by a very short, middle-aged Vietnamese man with a thin moustache who looked like a cross between Kim Jong-il and The Man From Delmonte (he say Yes!), who introduced himself as Xeng, the owner of the farm. Initially I found him impossible to understand as he spoke broken English in a very high pitch voice, which we later found out was the result of a car accident. He sat us all down and asked if we would work hard for him. We said yes, so he told us the rate of pay and the hours and said that we could live on the farm for free. We were incredibly happy and relieved to find work and started excitedly the next day - the 1st of October.

The money was great, we were clearing over $1100 a week each, with no rent to pay and no shops to spend the money in. The farm had 13,000 mango trees growing in long rows with corridors between wide enough to drive a tractor down. Once you were in amongst the trees it is easy to lose your bearings, all the rows look the same and the trees trail off into the distance. Some mornings we would be out picking at sunrise when it was cooler and before the crickets had begun creating their wall of sound, and the place had the feel of a huge country garden or orchard. It is actually quite a spectacular sight – the trees have a dark green leaf and can look beautiful when laden with ripe mangoes, skins ranging from red, orange, yellow and fluorescent pink – colours that were sometimes matched by the dawn sky.

The farm was owned by a Vietnamese family and Xeng, the father, was the boss. Phil and I came to know him as Xeng-master, his persona that of a James Bond villain as he as he yelled commands at us in his squeaky voice. He drove around the farm in a new white fork-lift truck (known to us as the Mobile Command Centre), or on his mini-tractor which was amusing as it looked as if it had been scaled down especially for his small stature. He wore a tea-towel under his hat and draped down his neck to keep the flies and sun off. As he cruised along on his mini-tractor (sometimes standing up), tea towel under his hat flapping behind him in the wind, he could have been Genghis Khan riding across planes of Mongolia. The rest of the workers were Vietnamese too, though most could speak some English. For a month we learnt Vietnamese customs and regularly ate Viet food. The time we spent here it did not feel like we were in Australia, it felt like Vietnam. And at times it felt like the Vietnam of the 1960's.

I will briefly explain the three processes that we were involved in during the harvest, but before I do this you must understand that mangoes have have a hazardous, inbuilt self defence system. The fruit is attached to the tree by a stem which if snapped off triggers the mango to squirt out a jet of sap several metres, sometimes for several seconds. This sap is highly acidic and will burn other fruit, your skin and your clothes if not washed off immediately. Ensuring the other fruit does not come into contact with the sap is fundamental to the processes involved in the harvest.

First the mangoes need to picked from the trees. This is done with secateurs – the blades on one end of a two metre pole, the trigger on the other. The stem is cut a couple of inches above the fruit, but the mango does not drop as the blades are serrated to grip the stem. The mango is placed carefully on the ground, stem up – this is picking. A machine follows the pickers to collect and 'wash' the mangoes. It is manned by three or four people: the driver, the washer and one or two collectors. The collectors pick up the mangoes from the ground by the stems (the pickers have left them in the shade of the tree) and throw them onto the machine, where the stem is snapped off in an alkali bath by the washer to neutralise the acid. This process is called washing, and the machine was quickly dubbed 'the machine of death'. The third and final process we were involved in was packing. The mangoes are collected from the machine by tractor and taken to the packing shed where they are sorted for quality, then packed into crates ready for transportation to the markets.

As me and Phil had some experience of picking mangoes in Kununurra we were assigned to picking on our first day, whilst Laura and Martiel were initially collectors for the machine. At the end of our first day Laura had some burns on her cheeks in the form of a line of small scabs and blisters as some sap squirted right across her face. She still has the scars a month later, though barely visible now. Martiel's forearm was badly burnt, half of it completely blistered and scabbed over as he had not been wearing long sleeves. He went to the doctors and was prescribed steroids. Because of these initial injuries Laura and Martiel worked in the packing shed, whilst Phil and I spent the next few days on the machine and then switched between washing and picking for the rest of the harvest.

Picking was probably the easiest job. The main problem was the heat. Humpty Doo is in the tropics and it's hot and humid, especially in October just before the rainy season. As we got into late October, it rained in the afternoons more and more. We had some spectacular electrical storms, and there was us fools out in the fields sticking two metre metal poles up into the trees. One afternoon it looked like rain for a couple of hours but it had remained dry. Suddenly we heard a roar – like a train going by – and it was getting louder. We looked down the row of tree's and just saw a wall of water coming towards us, the rain making such a loud noise on the trees. 'Run!'... We just outpaced it and got to the ute before another set of clothes were soaked.

The work itself was hard but manageable, but the working conditions were terrible. We quickly learnt it was necessary to cover all exposed skin to avoid sap burn, so this meant wearing sleeves, trousers, gloves and even scarves in temperatures 40 degrees plus. You were not expected to work in a hurry though, as mangoes are ruined if dropped or sprayed with sap, so they are placed carefully on the ground in the shade of the tree, stem up. This slower pace is reflected in the pay as mango picking is paid hourly as oppose by weight of fruit picked – unusual in fruit harvesting work. Phil and I generally worked in a pair, stripping the tree's of their fruit. We got quite efficient at it, but never as efficient as the experienced Vietnamese.

Ten hours is a long day in the fields, so we invented games to help the time go by. We competed to see who could 'reel in' the biggest bunch of mangoes, and place them safely on the floor. The mangoes are heavy when ripe, and any more than three on the end of a the two metre pole would bend the 'rod' and make it hard to land them safely. I think the record was a bunch of six. If a mango ever snapped free of the stem it would bounce down the tree squirting sap everywhere. These were 'grenades', and you'd do well to get out of the way. A ripe mango always hits the ground with a good thump.

It was out picking one day that Phil pointed out to me the curious phenomenon of the 'drop-drop'. He said he had been noticing as soon as he dropped a mango – thump – it seemed to be always followed by another thump, as close by another picker would drop one immediately after. After this was highlighted to me I noticed it continuously – If I dropped one you would hear another thump almost straight away, and if I heard one thump down a few rows away Phil or me would lose one every time – thump! It was uncanny, the curious phenomenon of the drop-drop.

We also worked out a drop-drop was far more likely if a Xeng-by was in progress. A Xeng-by was when Xeng-master would drive a circle around you on his mini-tractor, presumably to check on your progress, but he would always circle with a few tree's between him and us as if to provide cover so we could not see him. Of course we could hear the tractor from miles off. It was during a Xeng-by that drop-drop is likely to occur the most. Perhaps it was the pressure. Occasionally if he witnessed a drop or worse a drop-drop he would come over and offer you some advice on how to land the mangoes better.

Washing was a nasty job. The machine never stopped and it was a race for the picker-uppers to grab the mangoes by the stems, four in each hand, and drop them onto the machine. Often a stem would just come away from an over ripe mango and squirt the picker-upper in the face – this is how Laura was burnt on the first day – so picker-uppers wear a scarf tied around their faces and sunglasses for protection. I got sap in my eye once or twice, it was excruciating. Once the mango is placed on the machine it is rolled down to the washer, whose job it is to snap the stems in the alkali bath.

For me, the washer on the machine had the worst job of all, though it often came as a welcome break from picking-up as you had the opportunity to sit on the machine under a shade. As the washer you got sprayed regularly by sap, and soon the alkali bath goes from clear to orange from the acid, and towards the end of a session it will start to tingle and burn your skin. Any new backpackers that turned up during the harvest - Xeng would put them on the machine immediately to 'break them in' and give the regular crew a rest. Many backpackers would turn up at the farm, do a couple of days on the machine and then disappear, leaving us to man it again. It was for this reason it was dubbed 'the machine of death'. I hated the sight of the machine; the way it lumbered along tank-like at a slow steady pace, causing increasing pain and discomfort for every metre it travelled. I saw it more as an instrument of torture than as piece of agricultural machinery. It makes me shudder to think about it. Every hour on that machine felt like three, and a session was a psychological battle between you and the clock. A full day working on the machine of death would leave you damaged and exhausted.

After a few days on the job Laura started to get a rash on her neck and belly, which quickly spread all over her body. We had previously heard mango allergy is common, so assumed Laura must be allergic. She went to the doctors who prescribed her steroids and advised that Mango sap contains urushoil, the substance which is also found in poison ivy. Any quantity of this on your skin will likely cause a rash. Over the next few days the rash got worse and spread all over her. A couple of days later the rash started on me, then Phil and Martiel. It itched a lot and prickled in the heat. Soon we were all on steroids and dope strength antihistamines and work became nearly impossible, but we carried on. I used to have a cold shower three times a day to relieve the itching. Laura and Phil both had swollen limbs and each we all had a day when our faces were swollen like hamsters. Towards the end my lips swelled so much they split and got infected and took weeks to heal. We looked and felt like we the victims of a medical testing programme gone horribly wrong. Each day I wondered what new and bizarre thing would happen to my body, and at night it was difficult to sleep. Strangely, the only people who were safe from the rash were the Vietnamese – none of them were allergic to the mango.

It has been tough work on the mango farm, but I am proud we stuck it out for the full harvest, as we were the only backpackers to do this – others came and left because they could not handle the work or conditions. We earned over $15,000 between us, which makes us rich by backpacker standards and means we can go diving on the Barrier Reef, cruising on The Whitsunday Islands and go on 4WD tour of Fraser Island when we get to the East Coast. But first we must go shopping in Darwin for some new clothes as ours have been destroyed by the mangoes – and of course we're going to sink a few beers to celebrate... Let the good times roll!

From Kununurra - A Travelogue of Sorts

From Kununurra – A Travelogue of Sorts

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