We continued along the see-sawing track. After fighting up a steep hill, it felt demoralising to drop down into the adjacent valley and lose all that hard-earned altitude, only to be faced with another painful incline. There were no flats on Kokoda, just inclines and declines. We traipsed into the next village, Maguli Range, and stopped for some rest and a drink. One of the trekkers was really struggling with the terrain, and he’d been in the hurt locker for the last day or so. A chopper was arranged to pick him up and take him back to civilisation – there was no way known to man that he’d be able to finish the trek. In spite of his uncompleted attempt, he resolved that he’d come back and try again, when he was in better shape. I haven’t spoken to him since, but I have no doubt that he did exactly that.
As we sat around sipping from our drink bottles, one of the local villagers appeared from the jungle, to a hysterical Hollywood superstar’s welcome from the local kids. Over one shoulder, he carried a rifle. Over the other shoulder, he carried a dead cassowary. That Big Bird would feed the entire village for at least a few days. Kids swarmed around the village hero, cheering as he held the bird up in triumph and posed for his Hunter’s Monthly Magazine cover shoot.
After that Kodak moment, we pressed on. The jungle on either side of the track was dense. The foliage ranged from light, fluorescent-highlighter green to deep, dark envy. Even in the midday sun, the jungle canopy gave the UV rays the unambiguous middle finger, and light never reached the jungle floor, scared of being photosynthesised and trapped forever in the thick, dark undergrowth. Every now and then, a bright, electric-blue flash of colour caught my eye.
What in the name of Eywa was that? Was that a fucking avatar?
The flash of brilliance wasn’t an animated movie character; it was a butterfly. But it was no ordinary butterfly. It was as bright as a magnificent blue neon sign, as big as a dinner plate. When these spectacular, gigantic jungle butterflies flew within a ten-kilometre radius of my head, it sounded like an attack from an angry, dive-bombing, asshole magpie.
As they have a nasty tendency to do, the days continued ticking over. We traversed down the steep terrain, waded through the valley rivers and inched across the makeshift log bridges suspended above the flowing waters. Then, we marched up the next arduous hill, before repeating the process again. On day five, we stopped at a village for lunch, greeted by the extraordinarily friendly villagers before continuing on to our next night camp at Menari.
Little did we know, the villagers had followed us along the six-hour trek to our camp. As we settled in for the night, they caught up and serenaded us with an impromptu sing-sing – a traditional musical slice of PNG culture, a welcoming tradition. The sing-sing was mind-blowing. The melody and harmony: angelic. We trekkers gave the villagers every spare dollar we had stashed away in gratitude for the amazing experience, before they turned back down the track for the six-hour walk home – in the dark.
19
SHE GONE PROPER BUGGER UP
Up until this point, Kokoda hadn’t been as hard as I’d anticipated. The countless hours I’d spent humping a pack around in the army more than accounted for that. While I enjoyed the PNG culture and sense of adventure, the difficulty level of the trek just wasn’t challenging enough to give me that euphoric sense of achievement when I reached the finish line. But that soon changed. Given my egotistical hubris, irony and karma decided to serve me a tag-team-style roasting.
A year earlier, I’d been doing some interval sprint training when I felt the ‘twang of death’ in my right calf muscle – the Old Man’s Injury. After a few weeks of physio, I tried to return to playing sport too early, and tore the calf muscle again. It had never been the same since.
So, after climbing up the steep Kokoda mountains for a few days, my calf started talking back to me – it felt like it was about to rip again. One of the fitness freaks, who was also a sports trainer, strapped my calf from knee to ankle. An hour into that day’s walk, the strapping tape cut off the blood supply to my toes, as my calf muscle swelled with blood. I stopped and cut some slits into the tape, which allowed the blood to flow, but also felt excruciating if I flexed the muscle enough that it might tear, which was a good protective mechanism. My lower right leg was pretty much splinted, so my left leg had to assume the lion’s share of effort. It didn’t take long before my left leg blew out from fatigue, and my right leg was unusable so I had to substitute with my trekking pole. This kind of hardship was exactly the type of challenge I was after.
I looked and felt ridiculous. I developed this weird, limping, twisting motion that alternated between my left leg and right trekking pole. I looked like a hunched-over, haggard senior citizen trying to get to the bank on pension-pay-cheque Thursday. Within a few hours, Kokoda had gone from piss easy to excruciatingly painful. I’d have to earn the right to reach that finish line – gold. Tapping out never crossed my mind.
PNG is not a technologically advanced country. So when a piece of tech or machinery breaks down, the locals say that ‘she gone proper bugger up’. They haven’t yet discovered the virtues of maintenance. Instead of trying to fix it, they discard it and get a new one. This is precisely how I felt about my leg – I wanted to return it to the manufacturer and get a new one.
Most of the places we passed through held some sort of military significance in the context of the Kokoda campaign. Pete described the battles that had taken place at each village, pointing out Aussie positions in relation to the Jap enemy. Most of the Aussie fire trenches had been reclaimed by the jungle, but you could still make out the square shape of the pits because the straight edges contrasted with the natural jungle growth. I tried to relate my experiences in Afghan to the Kokoda battles, but I just couldn’t – they were incomparable. Afghan was a cake-walk compared to the hellish Kokoda conditions.
Kokoda soldiers were hard as fuck. I needed every ounce of concentration just to keep myself upright along the muddy track, but those soldiers had to shoulder a weapon and maintain tactical awareness in an environment where the enemy could be sitting a metre away in the jungle, and they’d never know. They had to sprint up near-vertical mountain faces to take Jap gun positions under intense fire. They had to carry their wounded mates for countless kilometres back to some semblance of basic medical care. My minuscule medical complaints, and any other problem I would ever experience later in life, suddenly seemed petty and invalid.
Towards the end of the trek, we arrived at the Isurava Memorial. The joint had a series of monoliths dedicated to Aussies who’d given their lives for their country in the decades previous. On Isurava Ridge, the Aussies had fought an intense battle against the Japs on the adjacent mountain range – only a few hundred metres away. This place had a strange and profound energy about it: it was the scene of a massacre – and it just felt like some serious smack had gone down here.
After settling in to my tent for the night, I woke up a few hours later for a piss. But as I ventured outside, I smelt a familiar aroma.
It was weed. Was it weed?
It was 2 a.m., but the porters were still awake, sitting in a circle and talking shit.
The Kokoda experience was drawing to a close, so I wanted to soak up every remaining drop of juice. The porters moved aside as I tactfully sat down in their circle, offering them cigarettes. I tried to converse in my broken pidgin English, but the lads pointed at me and laughed uncontrollably at my feeble attempts. They tried to teach me some new pidgin words, but my chops were so pathetic that the boys rocked backwards and slapped the ground with laughter, man-hugging me when I came close to blurting out a phrase that made sense. Their hilarity was so contagious that I couldn’t help rolling around on the ground, laughing hysterically at my own shortcomings.
A few long-rolled tobacco cigarettes were passed around the gang throughout the night. I deeply breathed in the fully taxed and perfectly legal tobacco when it was my turn to inhale. PNG tobacco seemed a little bit funny though; it made me laugh uncontrollably, smelt sickly sweet and gave
me the munchies. Weird tobacco, dude.
A few hours before daylight, I made my way back to my tent. We were high up in the mountain ranges, so the moisture of the passing clouds gently kissed my skin, offering temporary relief from the heat and humidity. I don’t know if it was the PNG tobacco or the ambience of Isurava, but I sensed a strange and supernatural energy in this place. That brief moment was a profound, almost spiritual experience.
We moved down to Deniki for our last night and were treated to a decadent jungle feast. Most of the food looked and smelt incredible. The baked bananas looked like the most delicious treat on the table, so I loaded my plate up. But those PNG cooks must be the only people on the planet who can skilfully remove any and all flavour from a banana. The baked banana tasted like a mixture of plain porridge and soil. And I’m not talking about flavoursome, uranium-rich soil either; this shit tasted like bland, tofu-flavoured dirt.
The next morning, we hooked into the last few kilometres of the adventure. Big Bro had struggled through the last few days of the trek. He was extremely gym fit, but he’d never faced tropical jungle hardship before. His decaying trench-feet and heat rash had started to take a toll on his mindset. The weight of his pack was stifling, so he started to give all his gear away to the locals at each village he passed to reduce the weight. But Marty was, by far, the biggest philanthropist. His fifty-year-old knees were killing him. By the end of the trek, Marty had given every personal belonging away to the locals. When he finally crossed the Kokoda finish line, he only had a plastic bag with his passport and wallet inside.
After nine long days and ninety-six kilometres of jungle madness, we made it to the famous Kokoda arches. A lot of emotion bounced around the group. For some, this accomplishment was a life-affirming moment. For me, it marked something different entirely, although I hadn’t realised it yet: I’d rediscovered adventure.
We spent the morning perusing a Kokoda museum, waiting for our flight back to Moresby. The clouds closed in around the township of Kokoda, so our flight prospects were sketchy at best due to poor visibility. A small window of opportunity emerged and we boarded the tiny, single-prop plane. I stared out the window at the duct tape flapping in the wind, seemingly holding the wing together. Unbelievably, we made it back to Moresby, without crashing to our flaming death aboard the Highway to Hell Pty Ltd flight. We had a few cheeky beers back at Sogeri Lodge before our return flights to Australia the following morning. Unfortunately, our return flights were all cancelled because the PNG cabin crew simply decided not to show up. Par for the course in PNG, I’m afraid.
With the flights cancelled, we got an extra night in a popular Moresby hotel and I got talking to Pete, the trek leader. He was a card-carrying jet. He ran a successful farm in central Victoria, so he spent some of his time on the upkeep. He was a pilot. He loved university study, not because he needed the qualifications to land a good career, but because he enjoyed learning. He volunteered for the Kokoda unrecovered war-veteran association and chose to help struggling PNG villages whenever he could. He regularly travelled to Europe, not because he’d saved up decades of annual leave, but because it was a Tuesday. He spent a few hours of each day trading shares on the stock exchange, which is how he made his millions to bank-roll the things he’d rather be doing with his time.
Pete had life in a squirrel grip. His time was spent completely on his own terms. No one taught him how to do that; he figured it out for himself. That being said, it would be remiss of me to paint Pete’s life as a picture of perfection. After all, he wasn’t completely immune to the stark reality of life in the Real World. We all live in a world of compromises, and these were Pete’s:
What should I do today? Something that interests me, something that I enjoy, or something that I love?
Tough life.
Just as I boarded the plane from Moresby back to Brisbane, Pete shook my hand in farewell. ‘Don’t let that rat race get to you, Tezz,’ he said.
Pete had planted the seed.
The night I returned from PNG, I caught up with some mates for a few brewskies at the pub, back home in Whyalla. At one point in the evening, everyone was glued to smartphones, texting, tweeting and twatting their lives away. Most were tapping on their screens to share with the world that they were out having beers with mates.
I was dumbfounded.
Succumbing to the awkwardness of being the only person not looking at my phone, I scrolled down my own social-media newsfeed. One small glance at my Facebook page made me want to exfoliate my retinas with a house brick. It wasn’t the photos of people’s daily meals that ground my gears. The narcissistic gym-selfie photos were most certainly a point of contention, but they’re not what got my knickers in a knot. I could even handle the Robo-Mums who posted three thousand identical photos of their baby within the hour; once upon a time, embarrassing baby photos were reserved for twenty-first-birthday parties, but they’d seemingly become the most valuable form of social currency in the new world order.
By far, the phenomenon that most made me want to climb a bell tower with an automatic weapon was the Facebook philosophers.
FACEBOOK PHILOSOPHERS
Facebook philosophers are a unique breed of . . . creature. Their lives are so devoid of anything that even vaguely resembles real inspiration that they ‘share’ or ‘like’ a post that they deem to be deep and meaningful, while the rest of society – who have an IQ above legally deceased – tend to perceive it as common sense.
The meaning of life is for life to have meaning. Like if you agree.
I’m so crazy! I pay my bills, my kids always make it to school on time, I constantly pluck the weeds from my backyard, and I have a shot of tequila at least once a year. If you can’t keep up with my berserk brand of insanity, then you don’t deserve to be in my circle of friends. Share if you agree.
Responsible dog owners don’t sucker punch newborn puppies in the ribcage. An adorable Labrador pup will die a slow and painful death if you don’t share this post.
That’s some deep smack, Facebook philosophers. Mong deep.
I’d officially rejoined the Real World – and I hated it. Back at work the next day, I looked around the office. Co-workers rushed about the place, trying to square a balance sheet, red-marking an engineering drawing or recovering a wayward construction contract. They all looked stressed. We were all masters of the mundane in our own small domain, connoisseurs of a life of compromise.
Somewhere, out there in the world, Keith Richards was sniffing another line of cocaine off a Victoria’s Secret model’s tits, Kobe Bryant was hitting the match-winning shot, and Richard Branson had just sealed another billion-dollar deal – lighting his celebratory cigar with a burning hundred-dollar note.
I stared blankly at my computer screen.
Fuck, yes, I want to report this issue.
This kind of Diet Coke, homogenised, pasteurised, zero-sugar, zero-flavour style of existence just wasn’t rock’n’roll. Kokoda had re-awoken my addiction to adventure. I was still applying anti-fungal cream to my jungle-rotted ball-sack from the last fix of excitement, and already sweating and trembling after forty-eight hours of withdrawal. Meeting ‘A’ and Pete, the two living legends who weren’t afraid to stray from the pack, made me realise that it was possible to strive for a better life away from the Real World. That ugly pattern of my life was repeating itself again; I was settling for second best.
As I sat there, staring straight through my computer screen, I took stock of the barren wasteland of an existence I’d come to call my life. I wondered what all my wins and losses, peaks and troughs amounted to, when all was said and done.
My account balance read $7562: barely enough to support my dirty addiction to electricity, water and other ‘essential’ services for more than a few months. I’d landed an outrageously high-paying career, that I hated. Every single moment wasted in that job conjured the compulsion to eat a big boy’s serving of cyanide.
Mild hearing loss plagued my ears, because wearin
g earmuffs in a gunfight is more lame than opening an AC/DC rock show with a speech about moderation. Judging by my lengthening hangovers, my liver and I were no longer on speaking terms – the alcohol abuse had undoubtedly upset that poor little drama queen’s feelings.
I’d met some amazing people and forged iron-clad friendships through shared adversity and shenanigans. Some were closer than family – brothers and sisters by choice, not bloodline. But going out and meeting up with people had degenerated into an unfamiliar pattern of pseudo-socialising. Having a few beers with the boys was tainted with this weird, virtual-reality dynamic. I was never quite sure whether the lads were at the pub with me or floating through cyber space when they whipped out their smartphones during half-finished conversations. Apparently, you needed to be fluent in binary and html programming to converse in the modern tongue, but that software hadn’t been uploaded to my hard drive, so I always felt a little disconnected from the net.
I’d loved and lost, discovering that I was a contender for the title of world’s shittiest boyfriend in the process. I now survived on an emotional diet of the occasional meaningless one-night stand, using the ‘awkward morning is better than another night spent alone’ clichéd logic to make my scally-swag, man-whore behaviour seem a little less cunty.
I’d experienced war – I’d seen the best and worst of humanity, all wrapped into a neat, six-month Afghan package. I’d earned a hard-won perspective that only war can reveal; I could see through all the trappings of modern life. The theory that I was ‘ten feet tall and bulletproof’ had been debunked, in the most unseemly of fashions. But I’d also learnt that I was big enough and ugly enough to take the abuse.
Bad Medicine Page 20