An old couple, Jack and Fran, who days earlier had stopped and given him a leg of ham and tomatoes, pulled over and took him from his painful seclusion, although they were oblivious to what he was going through. He liked Jack on account of him being the one much older person he’d met who swore more than Cad and his mates did.
As he hit the five kilometres to Madura marker at 5 pm, Andrew pushed harder, inspired that the end was so close. His newfound zest was smashed when he was confronted by a hill he didn’t think he had enough in him to conquer: the Madura Pass through the Hampton Tablelands, with blowholes and wonderful scenery nearby, but he wasn’t in any frame of mind to explore it. He pulled out his iPod, put on the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’ (I’m as surprised as anyone!) and powered forward.
He stopped under a streetlight in Madura, which at that moment was like being in the bright lights of Las Vegas after having won big on the roulette wheel, to do the final scene of his video blog. It was sixteen hours and two minutes since he’d set off (which made it an average of 6.2 kilometres per hour that day). He let out a huge, ‘Yes, I did it!’ and signed off with, ‘That’s one for you, Simmo – rest in peace, mate.’ He wrote: ‘I don’t believe in an afterlife but I know he would be stoked if he knew.’
You would have thought Andrew might have a day off to recover, for the first time on the Nullarbor stretch, and look around at what many regard as the best stop on the highway. But no; not Cad. There was no stopping now.
DAYS 154–157, 29 MAY–1 JUNE 2011
MADURA TO PAST CAIGUNA (172 KM)
After fourteen hours’ sleep, Cad woke up in the same position he had been in when he entered his sleeping bag. He was devastated that the video clip he had been planning all the previous day to be shown at Simmo’s fundraiser wasn’t going to happen because he had no phone reception. After a quick breakfast and a shave of his bushy beard, he was back onto the bitumen on a sunny day with the temperature in the mid-twenties. He knocked out 30 kilometres before retiring to a parking bay, but there was little sleep because of the mice trying to infiltrate his food all night, even after he brought all his food (now secure in plastic containers) inside the tent.
Next day the alarm went off at 5 am but it took Cad a while to get on the road. ‘I had totally lost my mojo and my left knee was the worst it had been since I could remember. The flies were driving me crazy from the get-go and I had to wear my fly net all day. It was blowing a gusty north-westerner and the road turned hilly and windy … I kept stopping and having breaks. I’d just sit there staring into space, yawning with a blank mind, staring like a zombie.’ He gave up at 4.30 pm after 35 kilometres.
A woman named Joy pulled her campervan over and had a chat with Cad the next day, telling him that Mike Pauly had advised her to look out for a young bloke who was trying to catch him, which Andrew found hilarious: he had been sending messages with travellers to tell Mike he was coming for him. ‘She was concerned about him, she said he was doing it tough. I’m not surprised – I’m doing it tough and he’s seventy-one. She said he was doing 40 kilometres a day and has been getting blurred vision, so she made him promise to see a doctor in Norseman and he is in a lot of pain from arthritis. He is trying to get home to Fremantle to meet the mayor on 26 June but Joy thinks he’ll kill himself, in the state he is in.’
Andrew made it from Madura to the Caiguna roadhouse, 150 kilometres, in three and a half days. But two kilometres before the roadhouse he experienced something like a scene from a horror movie when he had to walk through a thick blanket of locusts. ‘There were thousands of them, thick and fast, whipping into Redge and me and covering the road in a blanket. They all went jumping wildly into the air like a sea parting as I walked through. It didn’t last long, then it turned into just hundreds and hundreds, with the odd one bouncing off my head.’
After picking up his food parcel he looked at the sign ahead that said ‘90 mile straight, Australia’s longest straight road’ and set off for the 180 kilometres to the next roadhouse, knowing he would have to rely on travellers to supplement his water supply (he filled up his two 1.5-litre bottles from the bathroom tap).
At 7 pm he was exhausted and left the road to find a camp spot in the dark when, as he skull-dragged Redge through the dirt, the main axle bolt snapped and the weight dropped to the ground. Fortunately, he had bought spare bolts in Augusta and was able to fix it, although a large bird or bat kept swooping on him in the dark.
He ended his diary with this, showing how physically tough the Nullarbor had been: ‘I had two massive blisters on the sole of my heel on my right foot buried under a layer of calloused skin. I got back out and grabbed and lanced it, hurt like hell and a stream of red puss came oozing out and I followed up the pain with a good splash of surgical peroxide. It brought a tear to my eye and it throbbed for the next hour. Diary and light off at ten. What a day – oh, and I couldn’t walk with my head torch on because there is some other bug in plague proportions.’
DAY 158, 2 JUNE 2011
STOPPED WEST OF CAIGUNA (5 KM)
Cad hit the wall, and that was no wonder. He had not had a day off since leaving Ceduna, which meant he had walked 850 kilometres in sixteen days, most of it into a torturous headwind. He’d been smashed by flies, gone through locust plagues, his left knee was in pain before he started each day but he pushed himself through for one reason only: he wanted to reach Norseman and end this challenging, desolate leg as quickly as possible.
He walked just two kilometres into a wind that had become a due westerly and then pulled to the side of the highway, sitting there bouncing rocks off the tyres of his pram. He shook himself into going on but managed just three more kilometres before he saw one of the Telstra huts that had been spaced every 50 kilometres or so along the highway. They were about six by three metres and provided a windbreak that he could not pass up. He pulled out his chair and sat, staring and thinking. He made the unusual decision of pitching his tent and inflating his mattress so he could have a day nap. He stripped down to his underpants on the windward side of the hut and dozed off, only to wake thirty minutes later in a lather of sweat and was violently sick. His choices were to lie in the tent, which was too hot in the sun but out of the wind, or outside with his flannelette shirt and long pants on, with other clothes over his hands to guard them from the relentless flies; he took the latter option.
He was starving but couldn’t bring himself to eat the same bland foodstuffs he’d been having for the past two weeks. Then he remembered he had an unopened jar of Vegemite (but no bread), and he ate one and a half packets of crackers with Vegemite; it felt like a luxury because it was a taste he hadn’t experienced since Adelaide. For the rest of the day he lay in his tent (by then the sun was under cloud) listening to music, watching every blog for the first 80 days of his walk until he was sick of his own voice and depressed by how much older he looked in less than three months.
‘I think I’m going too hard,’ he wrote. ‘I feel like I am burning the candle at both ends and look like I’m going to run out of wick if I keep this up.’ He studied his map and calculated it was 1400 kilometres from Norseman to Perth via Esperance and Albany. He had planned to get a tattoo in Perth, party with his good mate Kane Foley, leave on 25 July and head north, trying to reach Darwin by about 6 November so he could fly to Fiji to attend his cousin Luke’s wedding. ‘But that means smashing it non-stop and I don’t think I have it in me.’ He decided he’d just walk as far as he could until the big wet in the Top End began and sit it out in Darwin. ‘But that means I wouldn’t get home until the end of next year and I don’t want it to take that long – all this thinking is hurting my head.’
As dark approached it was joined by light rain, so he cooked and retreated to his little tent, realising he had enough fuel to cook one more meal and enough water for one and a half days. With that thought, he fell asleep about 7 pm.
DAYS 159–161, 2–5 JUNE 2011
CAIGUNA TO BALLADONIA (153 KM)
When you are
exhausted, in pain and numbed by the solitude of endless pacing across a treeless plain on a dead-straight road, what to others would be the smallest of incidents can widely shift your mood. Andrew was evidence of this today.
First, an older couple pulled over and satisfied Cad’s pet hate of taking a photograph of him without asking. Soon after came his second pet hate – someone starting a conversation thinking he was Mike Pauly. ‘Did you get your phone fixed?’ a woman asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I heard you on Macca saying you had a problem with your phone.’
(Incidentally, I had contacted the program to see if they were interested in an interview with Andrew but received no reply.)
‘That would be Mike – he’s seventy-one years old and walking across Australia for arthritis. I’m thirty years old and walking all the way around Australia for cancer.’ Later in the day another couple mistook him for Mike.
He fumed as he walked on, only to have his mood simmered by Norm and Julie, towing a caravan, who politely asked for a photo with him, made a donation and offered him some beef stew on toast and a cup of tea, which Cad struggled to hold because his fingers were numb from walking in the biting wind and rain. He wrote: ‘Norm was Sri Lankan born but more Ozzie than most. He had a contagious laugh and had my frown turned upside down. He could see I was cold so gave me a flanno shift to put on instead of my wet shirt. Julie made me stew on toast then more toast and another cuppa. It stopped raining and I could feel my hands again so I made a move. It was hard work putting my wet clothes back on and wet shoes and socks and getting out of their nice little caravan. I took a pic of them before I left, and they will never know how much they made my day.’
The next day he had another experience that lifted his spirits – a giggly Japanese woman. The interaction went like this:
‘You walking where?’
‘Around Oz.’
(Squeal and laugh.) ‘How long you walk?’
‘One hundred and sixty days.’
(Squeal.) ‘Where you start?’
‘Sydney.’
(Squeal.) ‘Where you finish?’
‘Sydney.’
(Squeal.) ‘Can I take picture?’
‘No worries.’
(Squeal.) ‘I give you Japanese candy.’ She then pointed Cad to the banged-up front left of her car. ‘Kangaroo.’ (Laugh.) Then she pointed to the right side. ‘Two kangaroos.’
Cad was left pissing himself laughing after she drove off. Andrew encountered his own foe soon after, a large hawk that twice swooped within two metres of him and hovered above before flying away.
DAYS 162–167, 6–10 JUNE 2011 (DAY 167 DAY OFF)
BALLADONIA TO NORSEMAN (192 KM), THEN A REST DAY
Andrew reached Fraser Range Station on Day 163, the day after had his first full rest day in more than three weeks. He was walking in driving rain, his numb fingers cupped around his testicles for kilometres, such was the pain from chafing. He tried to apply his trusty 3B cream but his fingers were too frozen and powerless to open the lid, which stunned him, so he almost gave up. Finally it opened but he couldn’t squeeze out the cream.
‘I finally got it open but it was nearly empty so it needed a squeeze,’ he wrote. ‘I could go through the motion of squeezing but didn’t have enough strength to pull it off – I lost it and dropped to my knees. This was single-handedly the worst moment of the trip. Physically and mentally exhausted, I felt a tidal wave of emotion flood over me. I thought I was about to start bawling my eyes out. I scrunched my face up, and fuck knows why or how but I started laughing out aloud in hysterics like a mad man – I wanted to cry, I had the scrunched up face but there I was laughing – I scared myself. I thought I truly was losing it. I stood on the tube and there was a big line of 3B across the road. I rolled my pants down and wiped it off the road and onto my nuts, still laughing.
‘I headed down the road, and what seemed like 5 kilometres later I saw the sign “Fraser Range 1 kilometre” pointing down a dirt track. Another fucking kilometre! I screamed into the howling wind and ran for what seemed like ten minutes. My throat was burning from all the yelling, every step was like I had lead shoes on. I was getting bogged and kept screaming the whole time. I kept going to cry but was laughing instead like a delusional crazy mental health patient. I stopped to kick a tree until my foot hurt. I just wanted to lie down and die.’
Then he saw another sign that said it was still 800 metres to the station. ‘I didn’t have any energy for anger, just a silly whimpering laugh. It was like I had smashed my funny bone.’
He arrived at the station mid-afternoon; it was still raining heavily. After a prolonged shower to get his body temperature up (even though the water was lukewarm at best), a seat by the fire in the camp kitchen and a bowl of soup, he slept like a baby, deciding that if it was still raining the next day he was not going anywhere. It rained and he didn’t.
Most of the next day he lounged around his cabin reflecting, thinking how he had gone ‘from hero to zero’ in a couple of days. ‘It seems like yesterday I was writing how much of a good soldier I would be but yesterday I was a useless bag of shit.’ He decided there would be no more rushing; if he missed Perth and catching up with his mate Toady, who was visiting Kane, well, that was bad luck; maybe he would have to miss Luke and Kristal’s wedding in Fiji too, and perhaps he might sit out the wet season in Bali or Thailand, where it would be cheaper to live than Darwin and he could get more tattooing done cheaper too.
He walked the 101 kilometres to Norseman over the next two days. About 25 kilometres from the town, he had reception for the first time in seventeen days and his phone went berserk with voice and text messages from people worried about him. ‘I sat there rolling my eyes in disbelief. I’d put a photo of my Nullarbor plan on Facebook at Ceduna saying twenty-eight days [to Norseman], so fair enough if it was thirty days or something.’
About 5 kilometres out of town, three girls who lived on Lord Howe Island stopped to donate money. They asked where he was walking to, and he said straight to the Norseman pub. One said she’d buy him a beer – thus Cad’s video blog comment about a date with a hot redhead. He’d also promised himself a pizza and a decent cabin rather than a campsite. Five beers later he had to skip the pizza and rush to the caravan park before the office closed.
A shower, a few rum and Cokes, a night socialising with the three girls and their mate, and Cad had settled back into civilisation. It was like all the trauma of the previous twenty-five days hadn’t happened.
7
NO WINTER WONDERLAND
The scenery along the Great Australian Bight on the southern West Australian coastline is spectacular in places – if you stop long enough to take it all in. I wish Andrew had. But typically, he was there at the absolute wrong time of the year, the depth of winter.
He only had himself to blame, of course, and during this stretch he actually wrote in his diary that maybe he should have walked anticlockwise. This would have put him in Queensland during the last month of summer, but he would have at least encountered much more favourable conditions across the Nullarbor and through Western Australia, the most telling being that the headwinds he had to battle would have been at his back!
Cad was warned by travellers on the Nullarbor that he’d picked the wrong time to go to Esperance then hug the coastline to Albany, where I planned to meet him for a night and day while having a break from some work in Perth. They were right; it was as tough a period on the road as any, with the biting wind, constant rain, low temperatures, heavy fog some mornings, and hill after hill.
He had little respite from the rain for the four and a half weeks it took him to walk from Norseman to Perth, including a detour to Margaret River and another to Busselton. This stretch certainly was a mix of the tough business of walking around the country, and the pleasure of catching up with friends new and old, which he did in earnest in Albany, Denmark, Margaret River, Busselton and Perth. This put him further behind his original sc
hedule but provided what in many ways were productive interruptions to the taxing existence his feet and mind were forced to endure on the bitumen.
DAYS 168–174, 12–18 JUNE 2011
NORSEMAN TO ESPERANCE (183 KM), THEN TWO REST DAYS
After a day off in Norseman, Cad was back on the highway heading due south to Esperance, on my recommendation as it boasts some of the most beautiful coastline and beaches Chris and I came across during our trip around Australia in 2006. He hadn’t been walking long when he came across a twenty-seven-year-old Chinese man named Richard Xutan, accompanied by a rather eccentric seventy-one-yearold American, ‘Hutch’ (F.A. Hutchinson), who had been cycling for six years and had met Richard in China four years earlier. They’d been riding together ever since, even taking on the Himalayas. They briefly shared stories and took snaps of each other and then went in opposite directions to continue their different, yet equally extraordinary, journeys.
Adam Mobbs, a mate whose family ran a coffee shop in Queensland, contacted Andrew the same day asking if he had any promotional posters he could use so he could take donations at the shop. This was the prompt for Cad to buy twenty plastic donation boxes to be installed at various locations. He asked me to organise posters to accompany them, which I did through a mate at Big League magazine, Craig Loughlin-Smith. Within weeks Cad had collection boxes in New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia through various contacts. He paid the costs himself.
On the day he wanted to walk 52 kilometres to reach Esperance before dark, Cad was greeted with a 40-kilometre-an-hour headwind after hardly sleeping all night due to the combination of his tent vibrating crazily in the wind and the full moon that was like a torchlight pointing at his eyes. He was having his morning ‘smoko’ break when a dear old girl called Trudy pulled over and gave Andrew a large umbrella. He was already carting a shotgun someone had given him, as a souvenir not a weapon to defend himself I hope (he’d decided to send it to his mate Kane Foley in Perth when he got to Esperance), and thought, ‘Great; more surplus items I’ll never need.’ Not fifteen minutes later it started raining and he pulled over, pointed Redge into the gusts, put the brolly on his lap, resting on the handlebars, then opened up a packet of biscuits and thought, ‘How good is this? Why didn’t I think of this earlier?’
With Every Step Page 11