by David Yeadon
What emerged from this morass much later was a mud-covered Paleozoic monster, stinking and miserable. Peter’s laughter from the boat was now reaching the point of wild hysteria. “What the hell are you doing?” he yelled.
I daren’t shout anything back in case some of the goo dribbled down from my caked forehead and into my mouth. Another extremely vulgar finger sign sufficed as a response as I lumbered across the beach and flung myself into the ocean to scour my body of the odious slime.
I would not be defeated. There had to be another way into the forest.
I walked farther up the beach, keeping well away from the moss mounds, until I came to a spine of smooth gray rock that rose up from the morass like the back of an enormous hippo and ended a couple of hundred feet away at the treeline. That would do it. And it did. I strolled easily along its arched profile and at last eased between wind-broken trees into the darkness of the forest.
All was silence. Even after just a few yards in, the splash of the waves and seething of breezes along the shore vanished as if I’d closed a door behind me. But as I moved farther into the gloom I became aware of a sound I’d rarely heard before. As if something were breathing. Something large that seemed to be all around me among the twisted trunks and tangled branches of this strange place.
I eased deeper in. The forest floor was a pulpy carpet of moss-shrouded limbs and decayed trunks from which new growth emerged in tendriled profusion. Broken branches writhed like pythons, sheened in moisture from the mists that constantly crept under the canopy, wraithlike, from the fjord. Vines and tentacled fronds brushed and clutched at me like living things; roots wound out of the damp earth in tortured convulsions before disappearing between cracked boulders; rare strands of sunlight at first glowed green and then broody-bronze through the tall ferns. I walked deeper into the gloomy hollowness under the thick roof of leaves. Within minutes I was scoured with branch scratches and tacky with torn spiders’ webs. It was warm—a thick and porridgey heat—and glints of dim light flared in swampy patches.
But for all the discomfort, I sensed a pleasure, a rich joy somewhere deep inside. I felt I had entered a sanctuary—a throbbing place full of life and that endless cycle of re-creation. I moved more easily now as if in a sacred place, burying my feet in the softness of the forest floor, touching the moist branches and feeling their life and—hardest to explain of all—feeling them somehow touching me back, embracing me, welcoming me as a distinct entity in their quiet place. I was not alone here. I was part of its mystery, having come with no intention other than to look, to touch, and to sense its wonder. And that breathing came again. That slow steady rhythm which I now realized must be collective movement of the canopy high above in breezes I couldn’t feel. But it felt like much more than that. It was the primeval forest itself—growing, dying, changing, and yet hardly changing at all. Just being. Alive and eternal in this remotest of remote places barely known to man. Complete and whole within itself. Needing nothing other than what it had always possessed among the icebound peaks and shadowed ravines of these fjords.
After an hour or so of slow walking uphill through the forest, the trees thinned out and I emerged on grass-and rock-strewn slopes with the black granite walls of the mountains towering above me. Thankfully the only moss I found now was mere delicate ground cover between lichen-flecked boulders. The goo was gone and I was happy as I found a sheltered ledge and paused to look around at the immensity of the vista.
Far, far below was little Christine reflected in the still purple water of the fjord. She looked fragile and delicate, such a vulnerable thing against the rigors of the williwaws and waves of the Gulf of Penas.
Across the narrow cleft of fjord the striated forest-strewn slopes rose into an enormous rock bowl edged by jagged ridges and laced with a filigree of waterfalls. And higher up, the crisp white cliffs of ice and blue-sheened glaciers culminated in sparkling peaks and domes against a cloud-flecked evening sky.
I wished I’d brought my sleeping bag to spend a night up here. It was too beautiful and majestic to leave—it seemed to be inviting me to stay and, once again, I sensed a silent communion with this place that was revealing more of itself to me with every minute I spent here.
When I finally returned slowly through the forest to the pebbly beach, it was almost dark. Peter had turned on the lights in the galley; reflections of gold dazzled across the rippling water of our cove. At first I heard nothing; then came the occasional clink and clang of pans.
Oh, God! He’s cooking!
Now Peter had left most of the cooking to me (when it was possible to do any) because he was, as he’d explained at the start, the world’s worst chef, hardly capable—no, correction—incapable of boiling a pot of beans without reducing them to popping cinders.
I swam back to the boat, dreading the worst. He heard me hoisting myself up the side and appeared at the top of the galley steps looking very morose, with grease stains across his arms and forehead.
“Listen, Pete,” I began. “I told you I’d do the cooking—”
“David,” he replied in his “Now, let’s be real serious” tone. “I’ve got bad news and I’ve got badder news.”
“Okay. Bad news first.”
“The bad news is that dinner is ruined.”
“You surprise me!”
“There’s no need to get all pommish!” (He’d recognized my British accent back in Puerto Montt and reminded me every once in a while that the British were occasionally known as “pommiebastards” back in Aussieland.)
“And the badder news?”
“The badder news is that we aren’t going to make it down to Punta Arenas. It’s another five hundred miles and the steering gear’s a mess, plus there’s a crack in the—”
“We’ve got to go back? To Puerto Montt?”
“’Fraid so, mate. And even that’s going to be a bugger if we get much more of that williwaw crap.”
There was a long silence. At first I felt angry, even betrayed. But then I realized he must be feeling much worse. His planned sail of the Strait of Magellan was to be one of the grand climaxes of his around-the-world voyage.
“Hell, Pete—I’m sorry. That’s lousy luck for you.”
“And for you too, mate.”
“Well—at least I’ve seen some of this country. I can always come back.”
“Maybe when I get it all fixed—shouldn’t take more’n a week or so, with luck—maybe you want to try again?”
“Maybe. Let’s just make sure we get back to Montt first!”
“Yeah. It’ll be tricky. No bull.”
More silence. We were both feeling very dejected.
“Pete, listen—you’re in no rush, right? A day or two doesn’t make any difference?”
“Heck—no. I’ve got no cash, not much of a boat at the moment. But time I’ve got. What d’you want to do?”
“I want to stay here, if the weather holds.”
“Here?”
“Yes. I think there’re a few more things I can learn. Y’know, just walking around and watching?”
I could tell he was uncertain. The weather was good and he seemed anxious to make it back before his poor Christine got battered again by those coastal storms.
I think he was about to say no, but then something very odd happened. An old albatross with the broadest wingspan I’d seen yet circled us slowly, then gently landed on the bow and stood looking at the two of us with quizzical eyes.
“Hey,” I whispered. “Isn’t that an omen or something?”
Peter chuckled. He was a hard-nosed Aussie. He didn’t believe in that kind of stuff. But then he started looking around—staring at the forests and the dark granite walls of the fjords, the blue-purple glint of the high ice fields, and the crimson-tinged tips of the Andean peaks, and that vast evening sky. The whole wonderful totality of this magic place.
“One day do you?” he asked.
“One day’s fine,” I said. “Just fine.”
We made i
t back to Puerto Montt without any more dramatic incidents or major storms. We were lucky too. His boat was in worse shape than I’d realized—it was going to take much longer than a week to fix. I decided to continue on in search of my next lost world, vowing to return one day soon to this amazing region. The last I heard from Peter, he’d postponed his journey through the Strait of Magellan and gone off sailing with a girl through the Galapagos Islands.
Best of luck—mate. Wherever you are.
7. NORTHWEST AUSTRALIA
Bungle Bungle and the Never-Nevers
“Hey!” I shouted.
I had no choice. The whine, roar, and wind blast of the helicopter rotor blades made any kind of decorous conversation difficult. Something in my brain suggested I forget the formalities and cut, as they say, to the chase.
“Where’s the doors?” I shouted into the maelstrom.
Colin, the young, frisky-eyed pilot, turned, smiled, and mouthed a big Australian “Whaddayasay, mate?”
I bawled out the question again. Actually more of a screamed plea. He continued smiling. One of those cocky Crocodile Dundee “born in the bush and proud of it” kind of smiles.
“No doors, mate. Fasten the belt and stick your foot outside on the skid.”
I tried to smile back, but the grin got stuck in a grimace. No bloody doors? Foot outside on the skid? A seat belt that looked like an old piece of frayed rope? You’ve got to be joking. This is some kind of macho measuring test, right? Some weird form of outback initiation rite before I become a fully participating member of the beer ’n’ barbie club, a fair dinkum, roustabouting, good ole g’day-ing, good-on-yer-boyo-of-the-bush, ready to down his stubbies and steaks with the rest of the lads at the pub, admiring attractive “sheilas” and talking of nothing but cattle, cars, and carousing escapades.
Apparently not. This was no initiation.
“Hang on!”
Colin’s voice was lost in the screech of rotors and tornadoes of red dust that whirled around us as we lifted—no, that’s not the right word—catapulted ourselves into the air, at a force that placed my stomach somewhere between my feet, and my brain where my stomach once was.
And then the turn. No—wrong word again. More like a somersault as he banked the tiny doorless glass bubble and sent us, virtually at right angles to the ground, skimming over the scraggy tops of the eucalyptus trees, over the dry creek beds, over the spotty desert spinifex scrub and the thorn trees.
My leg (the one resting outside on the skid) turned to jelly as the wind roared past, trying to disengage my tenuous toehold on a hollow tube of metal less than an inch in diameter.
I’m going to fall…any second now, I’m going to fall right out of this damned thing. I saw a body tumbling…spinning rapidly earthward, leaving behind a frayed seat belt and a shiny spot on the skid where its foot had been, and a pilot smiling his outback grin and mouthing such traditional Aussie inanities as “She’ll be right, mate, she’ll be right.”
Ten minutes later I felt as if I’d been riding helicopters all my life. The fear was gone. Colin, who spent much of his time rounding up steers on Australia’s vast cattle stations, skimming the scrub tops, going under the lower branches of trees and missing desert boulders by heart-stopping inches (or so he told me), had given me a comprehensive display of his acrobatic skills. And I was still intact, leg on the skid, seat belt still miraculously fastened, and head and stomach comfortably back in their appropriate positions. I decided that a combination of fairground-thrill centrifugal forces and the benevolent watchfulness of higher powers had determined that I would live to fly another day. And so I relaxed and began to enjoy the experience and the scenery….
Once again I seem to be using the wrong words. “Scenery” hardly does justice to the Bungle Bungle—a unique, only recently discovered region of western Australia that contains some of the most remarkable and otherworldly rock formations on earth. We dallied awhile over the western flanks of this enormous twenty-by fifteen-mile red sandstone massif somewhere on the outer eastern edge of the Kimberley Ranges. I peered down into canyons, hundreds of feet deep, incised in the soft red rock. In some places they were a quarter of a mile wide, with palm trees and small spring-fed ponds reflecting the purpling evening sky. Elsewhere they were mere cracks, maybe a couple of yards across, that vanished into deep shadowy depths.
The top of the massif was basically a worn plateau, undulating in places, scoured and etched by the storms that scream across the barren plains of northwestern Australia. In crevasses and wind-carved bowls, a few hardy trees and bushes grew, their roots radiating like restless serpents seeking hidden pockets of moisture. Elsewhere was just more rock, rust-red sandstone, easing out in all directions before ending abruptly in enormous cliffs and crags, where birds circled on the updrafts and the summit dropped away suddenly to the dun-colored desert floor far below.
“Fantastic!” I shouted.
Colin turned and, giving me a “Y’aint seen nothing yet” smile, veered off abruptly to the eastern edges of the massif, where eroded formations, previously hidden, slowly emerged in the dusk light.
“They call ’em the Beehives,” he said nonchalantly as we hovered above a most amazing sight—hundreds upon hundreds of interlocking pinnacles, ridges, and domes, perfectly rounded and smoothed to beehive-shaped formations, rising from gently curling stream beds that gave a jigsaw-puzzle appearance to their intricate patterning. Each pinnacle was striated with evenly layered horizontal strata ranging in color from the lightest ocher to the darkest of bronzes and blood reds, as if some master artist had carefully painted every one with exacting precision over the long centuries of slow rounding down.
I’d never seen a sight like this before. I was entranced by the swirling complexity of the shapes and the unity and colors of the grouped forms. We floated over and between them like an eagle buoyed by thermals. I was no longer aware of Colin’s doubtlessly clever looping antics. The magic and mystery of this place, only officially “discovered” in 1983 and still not accurately mapped, enveloped me. I had come a long, long way to be here, and it was everything that the world wanderers’ grapevine had said it would be. A true lost world, offering its power and its beauty to only a fortunate few who had sought to learn its secrets.
The Bungle Bungle—or, to give it the correct Aboriginal name, Purnululu—has been known to only a handful of secretive outbackers since 1879. However, following Roger Garwood’s photographic assignment in 1981 for the Western Australian Department of Tourism to “find additional places of interest around the Kimberley region” and a special TV documentary on the area in 1983, the Bungle Bungle was acclaimed as “one of the most fascinating sights in the undiscovered northwest.”
This vast maze of multihued sandstone domes and incised canyons is indeed one of nature’s most spectacular masterpieces. Occupied on the fringes by the Purnululu Aborigines for over twenty thousand years, the region emerged initially over three hundred and fifty million years ago as the Kimberley Ranges to the west were eroded by streams that carried the sand and quartz sediment eastward into the vast Hardman Basin. What began as a huge depository plateau was gradually striated by sudden and torrential rains and streams that dissolved the binding quartz and quickly cut down through the soft sandstone. Had it not been for the coating action of quartz, iron ore grains, and lichen that created a protective “skin” over the soft sandstone, the region may already have been eroded down to an ignominious peneplain.
The vicious scouring action of sudden floods created canyons sometimes more than three hundred feet deep but in places less than four feet wide. Hundreds of rounded “beehive” pillars were left as the canyons on the southern and eastern extremities were broadened to form today’s fantasy-land jigsaw shapes, ribbed with bands of gray and iron-red strata.
Altogether one of the most unusual landscapes in the world.
My long Australian outback odyssey began in Sydney on a bright cool October day on the cusp of the Southern Hemisphere’s su
mmer. I’d only paused for a brief stopover in the city to recover from the long—far too long—flight from Los Angeles. But when I took a cab into the city from the airport, I decided to stay awhile longer.
“Do y’wanna bit of a tour, mate? Won’t cost y’much.”
“Sure.”
It didn’t cost much and I was entranced.
A city magazine masthead boasts “Sydney—best address on earth,” and I quickly began to understand the immodest claim.
The 1778 birthplace of Australia is today a cutting-edge colossus of almost four million hurry-scurry inhabitants (more than a quarter of the entire population of the country!). From its gleaming downtown towers and booming waterfront extravaganzas, its endlessly varied ethnic restaurants, its iconoclastic wing-roofed opera house, and its burly landmark harbor bridge, to the delicate brick rowhouses (still with red tin roofs), huge swaths of gum-tree-shaded parks, and the erotic delights of King’s Cross, Sydney (known as “The Big Smoke”) booms and swings and shimmers and shows off its charms with all the wild exuberance of Tina Turner struttin’ her stuff at a bacchanalian birthday ball. Despite the decorous undertones of a city proud of its long history, its cultural institutions, its palatial waterside homes, and its intellectual underpinnings, the place is a frenetic flavor-of-the-month enclave. It has “party time!” plastered all over it and you can’t help but go with its vivacious flow, from brilliant golden dawns across the harbor to nighttime frolics at rock clubs and waterside pubs and along the funky surfside hub of Bondi Beach. Sydney is a place you don’t forget—a place that entices you to stay on, to live there awhile, in style, in its brilliant clean light, riding the roller coaster of the new Australia, with its nouveau riche hero-entrepreneurs (Kerry Packer, Alan Bond, et al.); its new melting pot ethnic ethos; its cultural renaissance sparked in good Aussie movies, the landscape paintings of Sidney Nolan, the novels of Patrick White, the poems of Ian Mudie, even the sexy sassiness of Olivia Newton-John—and its wholehearted celebration of leisure and blithe-life living.