It didn’t actually change what we were eating though, with the result that, over the course of the first couple of weeks, we all shrank dramatically.
Gill got skinny.
Roo became skeletal.
And I discovered my hip bones, and ribs, and the nobbly-bits of my spine.
All of which made sleeping on a plank even more enjoyable…
Oh yes! Those first two weeks. They were a killer.
Then, one morning, I woke feeling grumpier than usual. I couldn’t quite figure out why, until…
“Happy Birthday!” the girls chorused as they sat up.
Ah yes, that was it.
“You owe me a donut,” I growled at them.
The girls had outdone themselves, though. Somehow, without me noticing, they had smuggled an extra item with them all the way from Perth: a bag of marshmallows!
That evening we clustered around our miniature camping stove, toasting marshmallows on sticks to the amusement of a pair of elderly ladies who were also in the hut.
They were doing an overnight hike, and when Gill stuck a match in the top of a marshmallow and gave it to me as a surrogate birthday cake they came over and offered us something better. Unbelievably, it was a tiny birthday candle! They were travelling with a whole packet of them in lieu of proper candles. This was the kind of revolutionary idea we’d probably had learned from Jim, if we’d had time.
With the lit candle in the top, the marshmallow made an admirable imitation of a cake – so as the two octogenarian women sang Happy Birthday to me, I blew it out and made a wish. Actually I made two; Please, God, I thought, ‘let me be in a better place this time next year. Or tomorrow morning, ideally. And more than anything, tonight let me sleep…’
The marshmallow itself I decided to save for breakfast.
I slept remarkably well that night.
In the morning I was still in the same place – but the sun was shining! It was a phenomenon I thought I’d never see again. And deep down, I knew that something else had changed too.
It was the marshmallow.
I’d placed it next to my tiny travel pillow as I slept; mere inches from my nostrils, which were the only part of me that dared protrude from the sleeping bag.
Now, weak sunlight revealed the damage; my marshmallow was half gone, having been thoroughly enjoyed in the middle of the night by some kind of rodent. I could only be grateful that the tip of my nose hadn’t shared the same fate.
I picked it up by the (uneaten) candle, and stared at it in disbelief.
“The bastards,” I moaned, “they ate my birthday marshmallow!”
“Aw, I’m sorry love,” Roo said, patting my arm in sympathy. “Next year we’ll try and get you a proper donut.”
Supply and Demand
As we approached the first town we’d seen since leaving Perth, we realised something; it wasn’t just the promise of good food and a real bed that was putting an extra spring in our step. Nor was it a sudden dramatic increase in strength and fitness, much as we may have wished otherwise. No, what we realised is this: being able to lift our own rucksacks meant that we were dangerously short of food. We were now eating almost double our starting amount at every meal, and were constantly hungry in between times.
Everything had gone well with our first re-supply; eight days and 120km into our journey we’d reached the first point where the Bibbulmun Track was accessible by road. We’d eaten every tuna-tin and pretzel we’d brought, and had come dangerously close to eating Gill – but cannibalism had been staved off by the timely arrival of Roo’s friend in a car full of food.
Now, as we hiked into the small mining town of Collie, a suspicious lightness to our rucksacks told us we’d made it just in time.
We trudged wearily down the main street and stopped at the first hotel we came across. This was not a glowing endorsement of our decision making paradigm; it was the only hotel in town. It was overpriced and it was shabby as hell – and we didn’t give a shit.
We checked in and were delighted to find that the rooms had heating. In fact we very nearly collapsed right then and there – but somehow we dragged ourselves back out to complete our chores.
“I think we should post the tent home,” Roo said. “The shelters have always been empty and we’ll never use it – and it must be seriously heavy.”
“It is,” I agreed. “I’m going to get rid of my fire-stick too. I’m always far to knackered to practice with it. I can’t believe I was dumb enough to bring it, to be honest.”
We bagged up the items we were each sending back to Perth, and bought a giant cardboard box from the post office.
Gill unburdened herself of a pair of fire-twirling poi, a bottle of face-wash and the few sticks of make-up she’d permitted herself.
“What are you sending home?” I asked Roo.
“My so-called waterproof pants,” she said vehemently. “I sweat so much wearing them that the inside gets wetter than the outside!”
“Ha! Great. Score one more for the technical gear. Anything else?”
“Just these…” she pulled out a deck of cards from her bag. And another one. And then a third.
“What the hell are you doing with three packs of cards?”
“I thought maybe we’d meet a big group of people, and they’d all want to play.”
“But Roo – none of us can even play cards!”
“I know. That’s why I brought these.”
And she pulled out a deck of Uno cards.
“You are fucking kidding me.”
The pharmacy was the next stop. Both Roo and Gill were suffering terribly with blisters – blisters on top of blisters in fact, so many that our limited first-aid kit hadn’t been able to keep up.
Bursting them had become our nightly social activity.
Next we headed to the supermarket, and spent an hour agonizing over all the delicious foodstuffs on offer – not one of which we could take with us. In the end we bought identical supplies to the ones we’d started out with – only substantially more of them. The next hour was spent sitting on a bench outside the supermarket, opening every packet, box and tin, and repacking their contents in more appropriate containers. Tuna we bought for protein and variety; it went into a zip-lock bag inside another zip-lock bag, a lesson we’d learnt the hard way when our first meal of tuna had erupted all over Gill’s backpack. We’d have lost the lot – except we were so damn hungry, we scooped it out and ate it anyway! Gill’s backpack, unfortunately, retained a certain ambiance after this incident.
Then, when everything that had to be done was done, we could finally relax. Back to the hotel, where we peeled off clothing thick with mud, disturbingly moist and reeking of sweat. We piled them in the furthest corner of the room while we took turns experiencing that ultimate luxury – a long, hot shower each – and then we forced ourselves back outside to find some dinner.
In our pyjamas.
Walking without the bags was a truly strange experience. We felt bouncy, lighter than air, as though we were strolling across the surface of the moon. It still hurt like buggery of course, because of the torment we’d been subjecting our bodies to over the last few weeks – but it was painful and easy, instead of painful and hard.
Sometimes you have to be grateful for the small things…
And what do you know? Right there, next to the take-away, was a bottle-o!
It was as though someone up there was smiling on us, rewarding all our efforts. We nipped in while waiting for our pizzas, and bought a cask of goon for $10.
This was going to be a night to remember!
We bounced home in much higher spirits, anticipating the joyous revelry to come. Climbing the stairs to our rooms was a massive effort, but what a reward was waiting! Warmth and food and soft, soft blankets…
None of which mattered, because I fell asleep on the floor.
In my pizza.
We never even opened the wine.
The next morning dawned on three equally horrib
le revelations.
The first was, quite obviously, that we had to leave. To pack our shit and hike out of that haven of comfort and luxury, and back onto the sodden forest trails.
The second was that, because we’d been too tired to do anything about them, our clothes were every bit as soaked and stinking as they’d been when we took them off the night before; we had no choice but to put them on, and walk off in them.
And the third, was that there were four litres of wine, sitting in a box right in front of us, and we were going to have to leave it all behind.
Unless…
And so it was that we hiked out of Collie with our water bottles full of sweet white wine. It wasn’t the most sensible choice we made on the Track, but it was one of the most entertaining! For the rest of that morning, whenever we paused for breath, we got a little more inebriated. By the time we got to lunch we were pissed as farts, singing and panting as we staggered along and collapsing at our chosen picnic spot in fits of giggles.
For this, I blame the authors of the guidebook.
Faced with a rather bland and unending procession of forest, they’d taken to describing many of the plants they considered to be prominent landmarks. ‘To the left, about a kilometre past the wooden bridge, you will see a dense thicket of Daftus Namus Extremus, a lovely flowering vine that is common along this section of the track.’
I dunno. Maybe I’m doing the authors a disservice? Maybe there really are people that counted their steps from the bridge, and cast about for a glimpse of this particularly elegant plant. That grows everywhere. To us, it seemed like a bloody stupid way to mark the distance – rather like saying ‘the large brown tree’. Which, as it happened, was in there too. But not for another kilometre.
“We’re in a fucking forest!” I howled, as Roo read aloud the description. “It’s full of fucking trees! Look – there’s one! And another…”
“Drink!” said Gill. She’d been the first to notice how ridiculously redundant the plant-based reference points were. She’d voiced her opinion that they were blatant fabrications designed to fill space in the book, and had decreed that we turn them into a drinking game.
So it was her fault that by the time we finished our sandwiches, we couldn’t stand up.
As we were repacking the tubs of jam and butter, I noticed something odd in the top of Roo’s bag.
“Roo, what the hell is that?”
“Duh! It’s my fairy tutu.”
She said it in a way that suggested it was perfectly normal to be hiking with a tutu. Which for Roo, I guess it was. It may only have weighed as much as a Mars bar, but I couldn’t let it slide. I mean, hello? Mars bar!
“I thought you were going to send that home.”
“What? Are you out of your mind? Why on earth would I send this home?”
“I dunno. We were cutting down on weight, so…”
“But it’s a tutu, Tony! It’s essential! How crazy would it be to hike the entire track and not bring a tutu?”
“I. I…?”
“Exactly! Listen to yourself. Listen how crazy you sound.”
“But… you never wear it.”
“Honestly! Not when it’s raining. But if you’re going to be like that about it, I’ll put it on right now.”
So she did.
“And I’ll wear it every single day, from now until we finish the Track.”
And you know what? She did that, too.
Drunk in a forest is a grand place to be – so long as you don’t have twenty-five kilometres to walk before dark, and a bag the size of a whale shark on your back.
It was a very sorry, if still rather sozzled group that rocked up to the shelter that evening. We were dangerously dehydrated, but at least our raging hangovers helped mask the pain from the rest of our bodies.
And ironically, the night after we’d posted our tent home, we arrived to find the shelter had been completely occupied by a Scout troop.
Bugger.
But to be honest, we were too pissed to care.
The Scouts thought we were awesome – maybe because we were hiking the entire Track, or possibly because we were doing it drunk – so without being asked, all twelve of them squashed onto one of the sleeping platforms, leaving the other free for us.
What a lovely bunch of kids!
“We could have a great night,” Roo said, “if only we had a couple of decks of cards…”
And that night, despite the lack of soft beds and duvets, we slept like the dead.
Halfway Home
The mid-point of the Bibbulmun Track is a place called Donnelly River Village.
Donnelly River Ghost Town might be more appropriate – or would be, if there was a town. Hell, there wasn’t even a village.
Donnelly River Ghost Post Office, I shall name the place – because apart from an abandoned petrol station and the crumbling ruins of what used to be a school, there was absolutely sod all else.
You may notice that I’ve cunningly glossed over several weeks of arduous walking here. I figured it was an endless, gruelling slog – pretty much the opposite of what a book should be – so I spared you the details.
I do these things so you don’t have to, folks!
That might become my new motto.
Although, the lazier part of me is leaning towards, ‘other people do this shit so I don’t have to!’
Hm. Maybe I’ll get to that in a decade or two.
The ‘DRGPO’ doubled as the world’s most specialised shop. It sold one thing; hiking food, to one group of people; those who were a) stupid enough to set off on a two-month hike, and b) tough enough to make it this far.
A well-creased old fellow showed up after we’d been poking around the shop for about ten minutes. He was good enough to sell us supplies for the next week, even though it pretty much emptied his shelves to do so. We had to make a few compromises, and almost had a collective heart-attack when we heard the price. No wonder this place managed to survive on such a tiny client base.
“You can camp in the school,” the old bloke told us, “it’s the only place around here, unless you’ve got tents.”
And as far as we could tell, there was no-one else living in Donnelly River Village.
We spread out our sleeping bags on the rickety boards of a classroom floor, and went to poke around the rest of school. It was almost entirely empty; in one room we found a wooden desk with an old electric kettle on it.
“Doesn’t work,” Gill confirmed, flipping the switch on and off. “I wonder what’s in there, though?”
She pulled a large cardboard box from under the table. And discovered…
“Coffee!”
The box was filled with single-serving sachets. Roo rolled her eyes in disgust as Gill and I unpacked the stove and fired it up. The zip-lock bag of coffee I’d started out with had long since run out, and at upwards of $12 a jar, it simply wasn’t in the budget to buy more.
“Ahhh!” Gill and I exchanged satisfied grins over our steaming mugs. “This is nice coffee, actually!”
“It is,” I agreed. “Damn nice. Upsettingly nice, even. Like, almost a shame to leave it here…”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
So we spent the next two hours sitting on the floor, ripping open hundreds of sachets and pouring the contents, one cup’s worth at time, into my empty coffee bag. We were at it so long it went dark around us – but we didn’t run out of coffee again for the rest of the hike.
Result!
In the morning, we had another chore; no visit to Donnelly was complete without feeding the kangaroos. They were everywhere, roaming around town as though they owned the place – which in the absence of any humans, I guess they did. The old bloke at the post office sold us a few bags of pellets which the kangaroos went nuts over. I held up a handful and was instantly surrounded, mobbed by roos of all sizes. They had an appealing habit of holding onto my hand with their forepaws, while their velvety noses snuffled around for the grub.
/> “It’s Kangaroo Happy Hour,” I said to the girls, as even more roos rounded the post office and bounded straight towards me.
But Roo (the girl) was giving me a peculiar look. “Ah, Tony, that big bloke you’re feeding?”
“The one in the middle?”
“Yeah. I think he likes you.”
“How so?”
“Because he’s got a massive erection!”
“WHAT?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing, but he’s definitely enjoying it.”
“I’m not doing anything! Honest!”
“Wow,” said Gill, taking a peek, “it really is Kangaroo Happy Hour!”
It was a pleasant afternoon’s walk to the next shelter, and even though we’d resupplied with a full week of provisions we managed to set a decent pace. Despite our all-noodle diet, we were clearly getting stronger.
Staying in the shelter that night was a stick-thin young Aussie bloke called Shawn, with some of the strangest gear we’d come across so far. As we boiled water full of instant noodles, Shawn was measuring out cupfuls of dried lentils from a burlap sack, and proudly displaying his collection of herbs and spices to Gill.
“I even collect some as I go,” he explained, “some Dandelion, which is great for tea, and some Chickweed which has kind of a nutty taste…”
Gill was rapt.
She spent the entire evening in deep discussion with Shawn, covering their various spiritual inclinations, his vegan lifestyle, a shared love of nature and many other things besides.
Kamikaze Kangaroos! Page 24