Kamikaze Kangaroos!

by Tony James Slater

  Jim also sold us two small guidebooks, which he considered essential. We grudgingly forked out $16 for the pair of them, more to make him feel better than for anything else. As far as we knew, the track was signposted; surely we just had to follow the yellow triangles, and we’d get there in the end, right?

  Wrong.

  Those two books turned out to be every bit as essential as he suggested. They actually saved our lives on several occasions, and kept our sanity together throughout the entire trip. The mere thought of doing the Track without those guide books makes me go cold all over. It almost makes me wonder what difference dehydrated food would have made…

  Ah well! We’ll never know. Because it was far too late for that; we’d done our shopping, and spent the rest of the evening separating it out into our backpacks.

  We’d bought chocolate, fruit, corn flakes, bread and nuts, tuna and pasta, jam and butter, and noodles, noodles, noodles.

  We planned out three meals a day, for eight whole days. We matched up our supplies to this before dividing them up to carry, and put another eight days worth into a pair of plastic crates. These would be delivered to us by a friend of Roo’s, at the first place the Track crossed a road – and hopefully before the stuff we had with us ran out.

  At last, the packing was done.

  My rucksack positively bulged. I’d had to strap the tent to the bottom of it, as there was no way it’d fit inside. “I wonder how heavy it is,” I mused.

  I tried to lift it.

  And failed.

  “It’s stuck to the frigging floor!” I moaned.

  But it wasn’t. It was just very, very heavy.

  “I can almost lift mine,” Roo said. Helpfully.

  Gill squatted down and tensed her whole body, as though she was struggling to squeeze out a long-overdue turd. Her face went red with the effort, but hugging her rucksack with both knees and both arms, she hefted it a few scant centimetres off the floor. Then she collapsed against it, breathing heavily.

  “This isn’t going to work,” I said.

  “No shit,” said Roo.

  “Either we get dramatically stronger overnight – or we’re going to have to do a little repacking…”

  First Steps

  The following morning, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, we dropped Rusty off with Roo’s family and caught a lift with Sonja up to the start of the track.

  It was a hot day, and we sweated and swore as we manhandled our ridiculous rucksacks into a Sonja’s beloved Morris Minor 1000.

  Three passengers was quite a squeeze for the antique car, even before considering that our luggage outweighed us… and the windows didn’t open.

  The sun beat down, raising the temperature in the back of the Morris from ‘uncomfortable’ to ‘molten lava’. Sweat dripped off Roo’s forehead, onto mine (as we were quite oddly positioned), and we sweltered and steamed all the way down the freeway from Perth to Kalamunda – making the trip in exactly the same length of time as it takes to roast three large turkeys.

  Popping like corks from the car, we hauled out our rucksacks and dragged them into the shade of a small log pagoda. This was the Northern Terminus of The Bibbulmun Track, which sounded rather grand for a few planks of wood with a map nailed to them. But it kept the harsh midday sun at bay, as we psyched ourselves up for our biggest challenge so far: putting on our backpacks!

  It took all three of us in careful coordination to hoist one bag up and attach it to its target. By the time we’d done this three times, we were already knackered. My back was aching, and I was finding it difficult to take a full breath. Gill was panting and staring at the ground, and Roo had propped herself upright against the Northern Terminus, using it to take some of the load off while she hauled futilely on the various straps and buckles. It was a brave effort, but the reality of the situation was that no amount of rucksack adjustment would stop the things weighing well over twenty-five kilos apiece.

  But task one was complete! All three of us were standing, mostly upright, and almost all under our own power. We’d done it! Surely that meant the hardest part was behind us.

  All we had to do now was maintain this position whilst walking forwards for the next two months…

  Beyond our miniscule shelter, the sun still blazed. The first stand of trees, our entry point into the vast jarrah forest that would dominate the northern section of the track, shimmered in the heat-haze.

  I remember thinking, what a beautiful day for a walk!

  And for the next five minutes, it was.

  As we hugged Sonja and said our goodbyes, the clouds rolled in. Then with a flash and a rumble, they split open and pissed all over us. By the time we’d finished fiddling with our packs, the rain outside the shelter was so intense it was making it hard to see the trees. The sound of it on the tin roof was deafening. Sonja had to shout as she explained she wouldn’t be leaving – if we changed our minds about the whole endeavour, she’d be here to take us back. She had no choice; the sudden downpour was too heavy for the tiny windscreen wipers of her Morris. She couldn’t drive home.

  But we were not deterred.

  Well, some of us were deterred, but were dragged along anyway by those less deterred.

  “Should we wait for it to go off a bit?” I suggested.

  “Nah, we’re all wearing waterproofs!” came the reply.

  So we marched off, into the deluge.

  Instantly, we were soaked.

  At first, we could cope with it. Despite the crippling weight on our backs, we were cautiously optimistic about our chances. After all, how bad can a bit of rain really be?

  An hour or so later, we’d realised the truth about ‘waterproof’ gear. Which is that the vast majority of it isn’t.

  And the rest of it might as well not be.

  Because, when it rains heavily enough, water forces its way into anything. When it meets an impermeable something, it simply finds another route. Waterproof shoes lose their appeal as soon as the rain soaks through to your socks, wicks down to your feet, and turns them into a pair of shoe-shaped swimming pools. Jackets ride up, exposing your soft undergarments, which absorb enough water in a few seconds to make it feel like you’ve peed your pants. And the bit that stays waterproof? The torso, heavily protected by all that costly Gore-Tex™? Well, when you’re hiking at speed through difficult terrain whilst carrying something the size and weight of a dead rhino on your back… let’s just say, what the rain doesn’t do, the sweat does in spades. Only it’s smellier.

  After a few more hours, we were all getting a bad case of the ‘are-we-nearly-there-yets’. It was at this point, consulting our miniature guide book for the first time, that we realised a) our miniature guidebook was ruined, and b) we were nearly there – so long as the halfway point counted as ‘there’.

  We stopped for a soggy sandwich, and what little conversation there was revolved around how to make our gear more waterproof.

  Personally I was hoping we’d be talking about going home. I mean, this was ridiculous, right? This rain was too much! It’s one thing to nip out to the shops and get a bit wet crossing the car park, but this was something else. We had nowhere to go and nowhere to hide. We were walking through something approaching a biblical flood, for no greater purpose than to carry on walking. We were headed to the middle of nowhere, with no plan more gratifying than to repeat the process the next day – and no reward stronger than a bowl of instant noodles at the end of it.

  And yet, with the sandwiches consumed, we struggled back into our bags and carried on. Walking.

  There seemed to be a lot of walking on this… walk.

  Darkness overtook us as we struggled on towards our destination. Night-time in the forest comes swiftly, and results in much blundering into stupidly-positioned trees. We’d hoped and planned to arrive before dark, but we learnt several important lessons that evening. One was that planning, however detailed it may be, is utterly useless if you know nothing at all about the trip you are planning. Likewise, hop
e is about as much use as a non-waterproof torch buried at the bottom of a soaking rucksack. Or three such torches, in fact.

  Finally, just as we began to panic, a tiny pinpoint of light appeared through the forest ahead. It was in the direction we were heading in, which comforted us; we hadn’t been wandering lost for hours, as we’d imagined. It had just taken us a bloody sight longer to reach the campsite than we expected. Gratefully we waddled towards the light, finding its glare outlined a small, three-sided wooden hut – not unlike the shelter we’d set off from. Kind of like a medieval bus stop. A tin roof and walls of rough planks, and a raised platform of the same for us to sleep on – this was our lodgings for the night. And the night after that. And… well, it’d be a while before I’d be seeing a double bed again, that’s for sure.

  We crawled into the shelter, made somehow inviting by the torchlight of a hiker who was already tucked up in her sleeping bag. We shed our wet outer layers, keeping our wet underwear on because we didn’t have much choice. All we had to do was find our stove, set it up, find our food, prepare and cook a meal, eat it, dig out all our sleeping bags and mats and arrange them, hang up our wet clothes somewhere, and then we could do the one thing we’d all wanted to do since about ten minutes into the walk: crawl into bed and go to sleep.

  But all that had to wait. For now it was freezing cold, and we were mostly naked. I squeezed my undies against myself to wring the worst of the water out of them, and fumbled around inside my backpack for my tights.

  What?

  Don’t judge me! I acquired my gear exclusively from charity shops, remember. There wasn’t always much choice in the thermal base-layer department. Not in the men’s section, anyway. So… I bought leggings. Beige ones. Size 16, as I recall. They were quite comfy.

  It took considerably longer to cook the noodles than to eat them. I was left thinking that a second portion of about the same size would have been nice.

  And a steak.

  But the rest of the noodles would be needed for the rest of the week. As for steak… well, I could always kill and skin a kangaroo? Except that most of them were substantially bigger than me, and I was armed only with a plastic spork.

  Steak looked about as likely as duck á l’orange, which is to say, not at all.

  Part way through our list of chores, we received our final lesson for the night, from the solitary hiker sharing our hut.

  “You should try to arrive before dark,” she said, “it’s not safe to walk at night.”

  This was followed by an apology – then her torch was switched off to save the batteries, plunging the hut into blackness.

  To be perfectly honest, I was pretty sick of hiking.

  Staying On Track

  We woke to the sound of rain.

  Heavy rain, pummelling the wooden roof of the shelter, filling the view through the gap where a front wall would have been in a house.

  “Holy shit, that looks miserable,” was the first thing I said.

  “Maybe it’ll stop by the time we’re ready to leave?” Gill suggested. “Surely it can’t keep on like this!”

  She was wrong, of course.

  It rained almost without pause for the next two weeks straight.

  Getting out of bed – when bed has been a sleeping bag on a wooden plank – is probably the second most miserable experience I encountered on the Track.

  Every morning I awoke feeling as stiff as the board I was laying on, muscles screaming from a day of serious abuse followed by a night of extreme discomfort.

  I felt broken as I struggled to sit, and instantly regretted the decision to stand – because this meant getting out of my sleeping bag, and the world outside of my sleeping bag was freezing cold, depressingly grey and unfairly moist.

  The first most miserable experience was the one that came next: putting on the cold, sopping wet clothes from the day before. They’d been hung up in the shelter overnight, but had less chance of achieving dryness than an insurance commercial has of making you buy insurance. The feeling of soaking, frigid material pulled on over cold bare skin is something I’ll never forget. Especially when it reached the more tender parts of my anatomy. There was a chorus of shrieks and wails as we variously dressed ourselves, followed by a frenzy of activity as we all rushed around doing anything we could think of to take our minds off the disgusting, clingy sensation of wet technical-wear.

  Breakfast was next, and was devoured with a desperation that belied its modest components; corn flakes from a zip-lock bag we each carried, and powdered milk from another. Our rucksacks were festooned with zip-lock bags, and they were one of the few bits of equipment that actually did what we expected of them. We quickly learned to divide our foodstuffs into three plastic shopping bags, each corresponding with one meal, so that when we stopped for lunch, but the rain chose to carry on, we could locate everything we needed to eat in one quick move.

  And then it was time to head off, into the deluge.

  The northern-most section of the Bibbulmun Track takes walkers “through towering karri and tingle forests, down mist shrouded valleys, over giant granite boulders,” sayeth the guide. It sounds so beautiful.

  I wish I could’ve seen it. The relentless ferocity of the weather reduced visibility to a tiny patch of saturated foliage about the size of the eye-slit I left in my hood. All three of us squelched along in disbelief that this much water even existed in the world. For us to get all of it, right through our rain jackets, seemed unfairly generous when so much of the world is in need.

  Regularly as I walked, I cursed the woman who’d told me my boots were waterproof. They’d lasted about twenty minutes.

  Wet feet, however, were a comparatively minor inconvenience.

  How does that expression go? Something like “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

  Well, honestly I don’t know.

  But in case you’ve ever wondered, a Tony most definitely does.

  It’s not like I had much choice!

  And for anyone that wants to know, a human poo, passed naturally in the wild, curls around and around in one long, delicate spiral – looking rather like a walnut whip, when it’s finished.

  For anyone that doesn’t want to know, you should probably avoid reading the above paragraph.

  Bodily functions were a frustratingly regular occurrence on the Track. They took so much time and effort to perform, I’d have gladly gone without, were it possible – but no. Inevitably, every couple of hours, one of us would utter the dreaded phrase; “Uh, sorry guys, but…”

  And so it would begin. First, we had to stop. And stop in someplace suitable. And stop without falling over, which was particularly difficult, as we were generally relying on our forward momentum to keep us upright.

  Next it required the Removal Of Backpacks. This was a team manoeuver worthy of recognition by the Arts Council; it evolved daily, and by the end of our first week had been refined into a form so beautifully efficient that it rivalled ballet.

  Say for example, Roo had to go. (She tried hard not to, bless her – displaying camel-like qualities of water retention – but in the end it was unavoidable.) Upon hearing the dreaded words, I would take up position behind her and clamp my arms around her rucksack. Feeling me firmly attached, she would then unfasten her waist-belt and shrug her way out of the shoulder straps, leaving me supporting the thing. Then she’d spin around, grab a hold herself, and between us we’d lower the bag to the ground. I would be next; Roo would take the weight of my pack momentarily, while I slipped out to help her; and then there would be two bags on the ground. At this point, if she was desperate, Roo would vanish into the bushes, while I relieved Gill of her bag; it was a necessary evil, as standing around fully-laden for the time it took one of us to pee, simply wasn’t an option. By the time Gill had stretched and managed to fill her lungs to capacity once or twice, Roo would be back – and the whole process would begin again, only in reverse.

  Now, there were exceptions to this procession of events. Occasionall
y – and I stress, occasionally – I would feel strong enough to attempt to pee standing up – with my backpack still in place. This was dangerous in the extreme, as falling flat on my face in a puddle of my own piss was not only undignified, it could also be quite damaging; sort of like lying in a puddle of piss while someone drops a piano on you.

  Washing clothes was also not an option, so anything I did choose to lay in was going to be keeping me company for quite some time.

  But the other deviation from the standard pattern for toilet breaks came not as a result of strength, but of weakness. Because after spending most of the day hiking up mountains with half a sperm whale on your back, your legs tended to get a little… trembly. It made crouching somewhere between difficult and impossible.

  So more often than not, on the last few toilet stops of the day, I would have to follow Roo into the bushes – and hold her up by the shoulders while she peed.

  That, ladies and gentlemen, is the kind of sacrifice you make for love.

  I can only thank God that Gill, with her shorter stature and thighs built up by pushing Trevor’s wheelbarrows, never required this kind of assistance.

  The other major reason for stopping was more appealing; it was the thing we looked forward to all day, every day. And for most of the night too.

  It was food.

  We’d planned our first two weeks of meals very carefully before setting out, but to keep our spirits up – and our bodies alive – we scheduled an extra stop mid-morning, which came to be known as ‘Chocolate o’clock’.

  We’d packed one chocolate bar per-person, per-day – no more, because we couldn’t take the extra weight, and no less – because honestly, if any of us had to face a day on the Track without chocolate, there was a good chance we’d have committed suicide.

  Lunch was less exciting, but equally vital – and whoever said that hunger is the best seasoning, was bang on the money. We’d started out with a loaf of bread swinging comically from each of our rucksacks. Your average loaf gives you around twenty-odd slices – which meant three slices a day, for a week. If it was more than a week before we hit the next town, we’d have to resort to crackers. But three rounds of bread doesn’t make a lot of sandwiches – especially when you’re burning about 6,000 calories a day. We tried ways of making them last longer – like breathing between mouthfuls – but the reality of the situation was that by 1pm we were absolutely ravenous. In the end we developed a desperate way of making it feel like we were eating more food – we invented the ‘open-topped’ sandwich, more commonly known as a single piece of bread with filling on top! This cunning ploy allowed us to feel like we were eating three separate sandwiches, each covered with jam or cheese, which made lunch times a much more satisfying experience.