At midnight we left them to it, because they were discussing internet sites that sold piano sheet music, and to be honest I needed sleep far more than I needed to hear that conversation.
“He’s travelling with lentils,” I whispered to Roo, as we snuggled up on the far side of the shelter.
“I know! What the fuck? That’s got to be the least practical food I can think of. Don’t you have to, like, boil them for hours, before their even edible?”
“I think so.”
“And herbs and spices for flavouring…”
“Yup. He’s gonna die out here for sure.”
Now, there’s an inexplicable habit amongst hikers which we came to call the Early Hiker Phenomenon. It seemed to infect everyone who walked the Bibbulmun Track – except us.
Every morning without fail, at about 5:30am they’d start to stir. It was as if they were receiving radio signals from some atomic clock that told them dawn was only minutes away. I’d wake to hear them stumbling around the shelter in the darkness, struggling to roll up sleeping bags, or light the burner on their stove with frozen fingers. They would talk – and curse – in stage whispers, as though there was any possibility of not waking everyone up with the clanging of pots and pans as they made their breakfast.
Cooking and eating would be achieved in the semi-darkness before the sun made its first appearance. I’m fairly sure it was more difficult this way, but that never seemed to occur to any of them.
Then, fully packed and breakfasted, they would stride off into the frigid gloom, leaving just as the first rays of light made the ground start to steam.
Doesn’t it all sound picturesque?
Well, I have one thing to say to that: Bollocks to it.
When those overly-keen nut jobs finally buggered off, we would drift back to sleep, snuggling down into our sleeping bags to ward off the cold. Sleep in the shelters was never of the best quality – mostly because we were lying on planks of wood – so we tried to make up for that with some good old-fashioned quantity.
About half-past nine, with the world ablaze in sunlight, we dared to venture from our nests. It would still be cold in the shelter – it was always cold in the shelters – but nothing a bit of exercise wouldn’t cure. A trip to the long-drop loo, for example, was usually enough of a wake-up call to get the blood pumping. You just can’t remain half-asleep on the toilet when dozens of creepy-crawlies are straining to cross the gap between the cold plastic seat and your warm, inviting buttocks.
Especially when every one of the little buggers wants to bite a piece out of them.
So. Suitably adrenalized by the early morning brush with wildlife, we made a leisurely breakfast without the need to whisper and huddle. We packed our gear whilst alternately laughing and moaning about the route ahead, using the guidebook to identify a suitable stopping point for chocolate o’ clock, and for lunch.
By the time we set off, the temperature was almost civilised!
It was warm. It was light. It was 11am, but then who cared? We had only one deadline: darkness. Get into the next camp – or possibly even the one after that – before day turned to night. And that was it.
Our fellow hikers, with all their admirable motivation, tended to machine through their day’s hike and be done and dusted by lunchtime.
All power to them.
Then, with sod all else to do in a three-sided wooden shelter, they must have sat around eye-balling each other for the next five hours.
Just before dusk we would rock up, make our dinner straight away, and lay out our sleeping bags with the last of the light. That warm, wearied feeling of a hot meal after a long, hard day, was just the ticket for getting to sleep in less-than-ideal circumstances – and we generally managed it not long after our arrival.
Perfect!
And then it would be 5:30am again, and the whole show began anew. We laughed at them, as we walked. What the hell was wrong with these people?
“It’s a beautiful thing, dawn in the bush,” one of them told me once.
“Mmm,” I agreed, without conviction.
So the next morning we got up and looked at the dawn, as it broke across the wooded valley we were camped in. Mist rose up quickly all around us, turning the trees into ghostly statues and imbuing a simple trip to the toilet with all the eerie atmosphere of a Stephen King novel. Fragments of sunlight burned through gaps in the ever-shifting fog, reaching out in swirling shafts like the fingers of God, grasping towards his creation.
It was absolutely magnificent.
Utterly breath-taking.
But it was also bloody cold, so we went straight back to bed afterwards.
5:30am is a fairly magical time the world over; almost everything is quiet, like the calm before the storm; nothing seems the same, caught in the half-light of dawn, and devoid of the chaos normally associated with the waking world.
But I’ve seen all that shit.
And I’d still rather be in bed.
Shawn was one of those frightfully early-risers; he managed to pack, cook, eat and leave without waking any of us. The only evidence he ever existed was a folded piece of paper torn from his notebook, on which he’d jotted down the addresses of some websites that sold sheet music. He’d left it on Gill’s rucksack for her, and she was secretly a little heart-broken that that was all he’d left.
Gill is one the nicest, friendliest, funniest people in the world, but she had a terribly low opinion of herself. I knew that deep down, in a place my reassurances couldn’t reach, Gill firmly believed she wasn’t good enough for a guy like Shawn.
It wasn’t true, and it was holding her back from meeting someone, but it was something I’d never managed to help her with, even after all this time travelling together.
Maybe that’s part of it, I mused. Maybe I’m holding her back? Hanging around with me and Roo 24/7 has got to be cramping her style…
I tried not to think too much about that, but on this kind of walk, all you can do is think. And the mind goes where it will, with nothing to interrupt its deliberation for hours and hours at a time. The germ of that thought grew, as yet unspoken, until it became a certainty.
It was my fault. I was holding her back.
But what could I do about that? How could I set her free?
I was pondering exactly that dilemma several weeks and several thousand miles later, halfway across the desert between Perth and Sydney. We’d made a stop for petrol, and as Gill got out to pay for it her journal fell out too. She picked it up, and narrowly missed leaving Shawn’s note on the forecourt. Reaching down for the scrap of paper, she noticed for the first time that there was something written on the inside. She unfolded it, held it up to the light, and read;
Gillian,
Very much enjoyed our conversation last night, and events seemed to continue into my Dreams.
All the best
- Shawn
And his phone number was scrawled across the bottom.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said, dropping the note onto her seat.
I took a quick peak. “Woah, no way! And he’s probably back in Perth by now…”
“And we’re halfway to Sydney. I can’t believe it.”
“Sorry, dude.”
“It’s just my luck! I meet one of the hottest guys in the world, and he likes me too. So what if we were going opposite ways on a two-month hike? I could have worked with that. But why do I have to meet the only bloke on the planet who still writes in fucking pencil?”
The Memory of Trees
I’ve always loved climbing trees, so when the Track passed right by one of Australia’s biggest it was impossible to resist.
The 72m (236ft) tall Gloucester Tree had been used as a fire look-out in the days before helicopters, and it still survives as a tourist attraction. Ditching our rucksacks at the base – safe in the knowledge that only a professional bodybuilder could steal one and expect to get away with it – we set off, up a spiral of steel rungs driven into the trunk of the tree. R
ound and round we went, climbing ever higher, until we emerged from the forest canopy to a breath-taking three-hundred and sixty degree view.
Of trees.
It was incredible though, looking out over hundreds of square miles of old-growth woodland; just enough to take our minds off the twin facts that a) we were ridiculously exposed, insanely high up and supported only by a single tree, and b) we were going to have to climb back down…
The steel viewing platform was nice and secure, even if it did weave quite a bit in the wind. On the safety railing someone had scratched out the best line of graffiti I’d seen in years: ‘Zeppelins leave every half hour’, it said.
When our feet hit terra firma, we noticed the same people were still hanging around the bottom – trying to get their courage up to make the climb.
According to the guidebook, more than three quarters of the people who try it never make the top.
The forest we’d been treated to an aerial view of, and were currently slogging our way through on foot, was comprised mostly of karri trees. They gave us another fascinating insight into Australia’s fire-governed ecosystem; the trees, many of them true giants, were often hollow. What we might think of as the heartwood burns away in the dozens, or even hundreds of fires such a tree would experience in its lifetime. Only the outermost layers of wood remained, conducting moisture skywards and somehow supporting the immense bulk of the tree above. We took turns standing inside the hollow, living trees, but a camera doesn’t do them justice; there is one, still living, with a blackened hole in its base big enough to park a car in.
The more immediate effects of fire were to be seen on a section of Track that was technically closed due to a controlled burn in progress. Signs were posted, and the trees beyond them were a smoking, smouldering mess. The alternative route suggested by the signs involved a two-day detour along the road, which none of us were in the mood for. In the end, Roo called it; “Looks like they’ve done all the burning they need to do,” she guessed, and we hiked on into a forest of standing charcoal. Like the bigger karri trees, these ones were perfectly okay beneath their protective layers of charred wood; the undergrowth, however, had been decimated, reduced to knee-deep drifts of ash and enough airborne flakes that it looked like it was snowing.
Unsurprisingly, there was no-one else in the hut that night.
All three of us slept fitfully, and woke at every noise. The shelter wouldn’t have been targeted directly of course, but it was slap bang in the middle of the burn area, in a clearing less than twenty metres across; and (as Roo pointed out) aerial fire-bombs aren’t famed for their accuracy.
Needless to say, we woke early that morning – as far as the signs said, the fire-bombing was set to continue for the next few days, and trusting we’d be okay because we were in an area that had already been burned was possibly one of the stupidest choices we made.
But we survived!
Chalk another one down to dumb luck.
Just when we thought the Track had nothing new left to throw at us, we hit a section delightfully named ‘Dog Pool’ – and spent the next two days wading through a swamp.
This was one of those ‘challenges’ Jim had been talking about, when we first mentioned we were hiking in winter.
We’d been using flip-flops (sorry, ‘thongs’) as our ‘indoor’ shoes, so now they did double-duty protecting our feet from the rough ground underwater.
They did little to protect against the ‘yabbies’ though – small, lobster-like crayfish that inhabited the swamps, and loved nothing more than nipping the occasional exposed toe with their pincers.
And nothing – but nothing – could protect against the mosquitoes. The first night we camped in a shelter on a hillock, surrounded on all sides by the swamp. It was alive with insects, and we drew our sleeping bags as tightly closed as possible; only the barest trace of flesh was open to the elements.
And that’s exactly where the little buggers bit us; Gill on the forehead, Roo on the eyelid, and me lip. All three bites swelled immensely, turning us into grotesque caricatures, like cartoon mutants – man, those were some potent mozzies! We were tremendously glad when our feet hit the start of a wooden boardwalk, leading us up and out of the stinking swamp at last.
After weeks of trees, and hillsides covered in trees, and occasional gaps in the trees through which we could see forested hillsides further down the track, we were eager for a change. We weren’t disappointed. Slowly the vegetation fell back, became more open and scrub-like, until the day we crested a heather-bound ridge and caught our first sight of the southern coastline. It was spectacular. Even from several kilometres away we could see the savagery of the surf. It foamed and spat as it drove into the rocks, crashing around them with violent glee. The wind had picked up dramatically and was making it hard work just to stay upright. All our efforts paid off when I tumbled down a sand dune onto our first beach. The sand was golden and untouched. Our footsteps alone marred the smooth, ageless expanse. As we strode along the water’s edge and looked back at the three lonely rows of indents, it was as if humans had never set foot here before.
We’d met so few people on the journey that we felt like explorers; pioneers in a new and uninhabited land. On one of the longest sections, we’d managed ten full days without seeing another person. Only the cheerful yellow triangles marking the Track gave us any indication that this was more than a deer trail. It had been at times a wide, leaf-strewn boulevard sweeping between rows of giant trees; at times so enclosed we had had tunnel-vision. The Track was maintained by volunteers, and some of them were obviously more dedicated than others; the last stretch of woodland had been so overgrown we could have done with a machete.
We’d scrambled over boulders, negotiated giant fallen trees, crossed rivers on logs (and occasionally had to wade in places where the logs had been washed away) – and all three of us, tree-huggers of the first degree, were thoroughly sick of the forest.
We wanted to see the sky, more than a narrow, patchy ribbon far above us, and here, at last, was our chance.
The immensity of the landscape was revealed to us along with the shape of the coast. In the trees we’d been able to see at the most a few hundred meters ahead of us, and the occasional mountain-top had offered spectacular views of the surrounding forests. None of it compared to the sight of the coast though, curving around a series of rocky headlands and tiny sandy bays, the furthest of which was still several days’ hike away. And to get there, we had a new type of problem to solve; estuary crossings.
The first one we came to was a bit like that riddle with the fox, the chicken and the sack of grain that you have to get across the river.
There was one canoe in a metal storage cage on our side, and presumably one or more tied up on the far bank. Each canoe could take two people and one bag, or one person and two bags. And at least one boat had to be left on each side – otherwise the next poor sod unlucky enough to turn up on the wrong side would be swimming…
So we tried to think logically, and solve the problem in the fastest, most efficient method possible. This is what we came up with:
Roo rowed across first, and came back towing an empty canoe. While she had a breather, Gill and I loaded the bags into the canoes and each paddled one over to the other side. There we unloaded the bags, and Gill stayed with them while I returned pulling her canoe. I left that one in the store-cage while Roo, sufficiently recovered, took the two of us back across in the remaining canoe.
Damn, we were good at that! Of course, I’m not mentioning the hour of debate it took us to come up with such an elegant scheme – but the point is, no-one got dunked, the bags stayed safe, and nothing got left on the wrong side of the river.
As far as we know, anyway.
We braced ourselves for a trickier crossing a few days later. We’d met an older couple hiking in the opposite direction, and they’d told horror stories of wading through chest-deep water with their rucksacks held above their heads. Not all the inlets were deemed
worthy of having canoes – or else, like this one, they were too close to a town to risk leaving a bunch of canoes tied up on the riverbank.
But we were saved from a dunking by an intense bout of laziness and gluttony; we slept in late and lingered in town for a delicious breakfast of pastries from the bakery. We reached the inlet to discover it was tidal – and midday was apparently low tide. So we pulled off our socks and boots, and strolled casually across through the ankle-deep water. Yet again, the 5:30am crew seemed oblivious to the torment they caused themselves.
Suckers.
The next week led through a sort of coastal heathland, with scrubby fern bushes bordering a sandy, snaking trail. The path was so narrow we had no choice but to walk single file, so with conversation cut to a minimum, I trudged along in the lead and let my thoughts run free.
Suddenly I heard a cry of alarm from Roo. I froze, scanning the way ahead, but saw nothing. So I turned carefully, to find that the girls weren’t behind me any more. They were several metres back, staring at the ground with wide eyes.
I followed Roo’s gaze to the middle of the path between us – and there, calmly sunbathing, was an enormous brown snake.
“SHIT!” I yelled.
“Shhh!” Roo pleaded. “Don’t wake him up!”
“Oh. Okay. What are we going to do?”
“You just walked right over the top of him, and he didn’t move. We could do the same…?” she didn’t sound too confident.
“Should I get a stick?”
“No!” Roo hissed.
I looked around anyway, but this was not a good place for it. The scrubby bushes stretched in both directions, lining the sandy path as far as the eye could see. Short of uprooting one of them, there was absolutely nothing with which I could tackle a snake of that size.
“We’re coming over,” Roo warned.
And they did. The big snake didn’t flinch, either too deeply asleep or quite likely not even remotely bothered by our presence. We quickly moved further down the path to regroup.
Kamikaze Kangaroos! Page 25