With Every Step

by Cadigan, Neil;

  He made it to a rest area at the Buntine Highway junction and camped for the night, but a group of locals pulled up next to him and made enough noise, including a constantly barking dog, to render sleeping almost impossible.

  After a 53-kilometre day, Andrew admitted he could no longer back up with a second tough day walking, especially with his knee paining from his first steps which saw him needing to pump painkillers into his system. ‘I feel okay after a day or two off and feel like I’m up for smashing it again, but I just can’t back it up anymore. It’s a world apart from my Nullarbor run or my smash up to Broome.’

  He had several people stop for a chat during a day when Cad was not up for talking. One was yet another of the many who, after bailing him up and learning what his charity walk was about, talked about how they had thought for a while about doing some sort of marathon walk, run or ride, yet had not. ‘If I had a dollar for every old dreamer that had been playing with the idea of doing a walk or ride, I’d be rich. They have all been probably taking about it for years’. It wasn’t a sign of his intolerance but just an insight into how Andrew ticked a little differently – if you say it, especially to others, why don’t you do it?

  Twice during the day the old blue ute that had run out of petrol the previous day drove past, all passengers waving at Andrew. He was comforted to know that they all survived.

  DAY 363, CHRISTMAS EVE, 24 DECEMBER 2011

  TOWARDS KATHERINE (48 KM)

  Cad had spent the past few days throwing unneeded food and clothes that had become rancid into bins at rest areas, lightening the load as he was struggling so much; he knew he’d have to buy new clothes in Darwin. He kept his water supplies low too to drop weight, replenishing from water tanks at the rest areas that were every 30 to 50 kilometres.

  A lovely moment came when an old couple who he’d met at Victoria River passed on their way back to Katherine and stopped to give him a small plum pudding and Christmas fruitcake, the woman giving him a warm hug despite Cad being hot and sweaty. He really was grateful for her spending a moment to transfer some Christmas spirit.

  However, his spirits didn’t stay high for long when he thought about how he would be spending Christmas Day walking at least until early afternoon. He recorded an extended video blog (in two takes) that he was not able to post until Boxing Day in Darwin but which best sum up his demeanour as he confronted that he was going to experience a lonely Christmas; the task he had set himself a year earlier, to complete the trek in twelve months, was naïve thinking. Anyone who watches this can sense his larrikin character but underneath he was struggling, and extremely so.

  ‘Day 363. It’s Christmas Eve, late arvie. Still have about 50 to 55 kays to get into Katherine – hopefully I’ll get there tomorrow afternoon at a reasonable hour. It wasn’t exactly how I wanted to be spending my Christmas but I’d only be sitting around on my own, pulling my “pud”, so I may as well be walking. I just dropped in to tell everyone I’m having an extended break. I’m going to hole up and wait out the wet season and I’ll resume the walk on the first of March. I feel really guilty about having a big break, for some reason. I know a lot of you probably think I’m taking the piss but I just don’t care, to be honest. I just don’t care at all about this walk anymore, I’m that over it. I totally underestimated it, I called fifteen months at the start and there is no way on God’s earth – I don’t believe in God, no way on Santa’s earth – we’ll fit into this time of year.’

  The second recording began: ‘I do care about honouring my promise to walk home for Simmo, which I’ll do whether it kills me or not, and I’m still keen-as to raise some money for the Leukaemia Foundation so I’m into it again next year. I don’t know why I feel I have to justify myself but some of you probably think I’m having a good holiday out here, but there is nothing that even resembles a holiday about getting up before the sun, packing up your tent, walking for twelve hours, putting your tent back up, sleeping on the ground, eating shit out of a can. I mean, ah, groundhog day, twelve hours a day, I’m lucky if I have a day off a week. And if I do get a day off, and I’ve only had five in the last six weeks, I’m cooking, cleaning, admin, maintenance, all the garbage I don’t want to be doing. So I’ve lost my mojo somewhere along the way. Hopefully I’ll have a smile on my face when I come back on the first [of March]. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, hooroo.’

  DAY 364, CHRISTMAS DAY, 25 DECEMBER 2011

  TO KATHERINE (34 KM), THEN COACH TO DARWIN

  What a way to spend Christmas Day. Cad felt lonely, and he was, except for the flies that were driving him mad and causing him to scream at them ‘like a psychopath’. Only two cars passed in the first two hours.

  He had had no phone coverage for days and family were trying to contact him all morning to send their season’s greetings and hopefully chirp him up, as we knew how tough it must have been out there. Chris and I were in Brisbane at Nicole and Glenn’s (they’d moved there just under a year earlier from the Central Coast), having Christmas away from our greater family for a rare time. When Andrew found reception there was a flood of voice messages and he was going through them when I finally got onto him. He sounded exhausted and very down when he answered.

  Here is how he recorded his Christmas: ‘I was listening to my voice-mails when dad called. I spoke to him and Mum and Nicole and I felt bad because I was short, I couldn’t stop yawning. They asked me if I’d just got up, I said no, I’m exhausted. I think it was unhappy they could detect in my voice, not tired. It made me feel shit. Here I was sitting out here in this shit when I should be on my way to getting drunk with family. Dad said, you know, “Just come back after Thailand, no one will think any less of you.” He just doesn’t get it. I couldn’t give a fuck what people think anymore. This is about me and Simmo and that’s it, and the {Leukaemia] Foundation.

  ‘I turned my phone off, I didn’t want to talk to anyone else. I thought, “I’ll call them tomorrow.” An hour or two later I decided to stop being a Christmas scrooge and rang Aunty Al and Gran, she put a smile on my face. I heard Al say, “Andrew’s on the phone,” and her voice lit up, “Oh, it’s Andrew.” I rang about a dozen people, friends and family. It was actually good for me and cheered me up and passed the day, I was on the phone for hours, and then I was there {in Katherine].’

  I was relieved when I heard that my mother, sister and his cousins had spoken to him later in the day, as I felt so helpless that there was nothing I could do to lift his spirits or ease the burden of what he was putting himself through. As on many other occasions over the previous few months, I was very concerned about his health and how it was affected by the heat and isolation.

  He went straight to a camping ground and arranged to have a shower – his first for six days – and headed into the town centre but everything was closed, which left him gutted as he’d dreamed all day about having a barbeque chicken for Christmas. Two roadhouses were open, though, and he plonked himself outside one with a cardboard sign that read ‘Darwin for Xmas, walked from Sydney’.

  Two hours later he was still there, so he walked inside and booked on a Greyhound coach to Darwin, which was leaving in an hour.

  DAYS 365–367, 26–28 DECEMBER 2011

  IN DARWIN

  He’d contacted a mate from the Central Coast, Adam Manks, who had moved to Darwin and said he’d put Andrew up for a few nights when he got there, and a big Boxing Day barbeque had been planned. Cad at first felt like being by himself in a hostel but changed his mind. His last diary entry for 2011, written while on the bus to Darwin, read like this:

  ‘I just wanted to sit at the hostel by myself until I leave [for Thailand] but it is amazing how much my state of mind has changed in a few hours. It will do me good to hang out with crew. I feel better already knowing I’m away from all the shit for a couple of months. It’s like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Bring on Thailand, I’m hangin’.’

  Cad seemed a different person when he posted, three days later, one final v
ideo blog for the year on his website, his hair freshly cropped close. ‘Day 367, just doing the tourist thing around Darwin today. My mate Manksey has given me a ‘bit of a tour of the town, we’re in the World War II oil storage tunnels at the moment, doing the tourist thing and enjoying my time off. So I finished the year with 10,400 kays and 45,000 bucks raised for the Cancer Council and Leukeamia Foundation, so thanks to all those who donated and who have been keeping track of my journey and … I’ll see you in the New Year.’

  I was relieved – I’d had a couple of phone conversations with him before then – and so glad he was getting away and having a break, although it meant he was further from home and harder to keep in contact with. What would 2012 bring? I had no idea, but I knew Andrew wouldn’t come home unless it was on foot. He was talking about that being in September.

  Who could have imagined what was to happen? He would finish his trek two months earlier than planned, having pushed himself to a new level – he went from Darwin to Sydney, over 5000 kilometres, in three and a half months. That’s half the distance he walked in the whole of 2011.

  12

  RESTED AND HOMEWARD BOUND

  Andrew was a different person when he resumed his walk on 2 March 2012 after just under two months living in Pattaya Beach, Thailand. He was 12 kilograms heavier than when he jumped on the Greyhound coach to Darwin on Christmas Day, and he was also happier, healthier and mentally stronger.

  I can’t give a lot of detail about Cad’s time in Thailand, but I know that in order to gain such weight and to achieve his long-desired larger chiselled frame, he lifted weights daily in the gymnasium, maxed-out on supplements, stuck to a prescribed high-protein diet almost religiously, and undertook a course of the steroids that are readily available in some parts of Thailand. We had several conversations about his use of steroids, me warning him of the dangers and begging him not to indulge in such a practice, and Cad telling me his usage was controlled and only brief (six weeks). Typically, if he was determined to do it, nothing would stop him. And he was so conscious of the muscle tone and weight he had lost, from a combination of no longer working on the tools as a carpenter or home renovating and the bulk he had lost from walking endless hours in the heat. When he returned he was proud of his new-look frame.

  He chose Pattaya over Phuket (which he disliked) as he had some contacts there through friends on the Central Coast. He also met a Thai bar girl, Choli, who moved in with him for much of his time there, and he had fun. Contact with her via Skype and phone continued through the rest of his walk. While there, he travelled into Cambodia for three days so he could renew his Thai visa, and he saw many parts of Thailand.

  By now Cad had also become a regular coffee drinker for the first time in his life, something which was magnified further for the next three months of walking as he began to rely on excessive daily dosages of caffeine to get him ‘up’ for the task of keeping going while his body wanted to rest. I could never remember seeing him have a coffee before; one of his goals as soon as he finished the walk, which he achieved, was to wean himself off his reliance on caffeine.

  He knew he would still be bombarded with rain and energysapping heat and humidity for a short period when he embarked on part two of his trek from Darwin, with just a day and a half to prepare and acclimatise. But all he wanted to do at that point was reach the finish line as quickly as possible, and to honour his commitment to himself, Chris Simpson and the Leukaemia Foundation.

  When I calculated the statistics of his mileage while compiling this book, it only confirmed how strong his will was to get home as soon as humanly possible. From when he walked out of Darwin on the homeward leg, he covered 2357.6 kilometres in eighty days of walking, an incredible average of a tick under 60 kilometres a day. He allowed himself just nine days off en route, not including six days on the Central Coast to attend a fundraiser in honour of Chris Simpson and sort out storage of the possessions of his that were housed at our home, which we were selling. It was an astonishing physical triumph.

  His vow was still strong in his mind: ‘Simmo and me, together, all the way.’

  DAY 430, 29 FEBRUARY 2012

  GETTING READY IN DARWIN

  After leaving for the airport in Thailand at 5.30 am on 28 February, Cad arrived in Darwin at 4.30 pm the next day following a ten-hour stopover in Singapore. He arrived at Adam Manks’ place a couple of hours later to find his gear had gone mouldy and rusty, despite being under cover for the two months. He bought a new mattress, and Adam ran him around to stock up on food and pick up other gear that had been posted to him (including new shoes to walk in – his eighth pair).

  A reporter from the NT News, Megan Palin (the daughter of my cousin Anne), met Cad for an interview, and the paper ran a story the next day, plus an extensive online interview in which you could see his new body shape.

  Over the next couple of days he also did a television and two radio interviews, which raised public awareness of his walk to the highest level of the trip and were the catalyst for on-the-road donations lifting to a very healthy level.

  He didn’t get to sleep until 1 am, making it a marathon period since his last snooze. But lack of sleep had rarely slowed him up before, and it didn’t this time.

  DAYS 431–434, 1–4 MARCH 2012

  DARWIN TO ADELAIDE RIVER (105 KM)

  As Cad put it, it was Murphy’s Law that it would be raining the morning he returned to Oz On Foot life after that February being one of the driest the Top End had had for many years. And by the time he’d cleared the outer suburbs of Darwin and was back on the Stuart Highway, he had severe chafing around his groin, which had broken the skin. The good news was that after hundreds of ‘beeps’ from drivers going in the same direction, obviously aware of his mission after hearing it on the radio or reading about it in the newspaper, two people pulled over and donated $100 each (with many others donating smaller amounts).

  He had to walk south to cover the route to Katherine, which he had travelled in the reverse direction by coach on Christmas Day 2011; he could manage just over 20 kilometres after an early-afternoon start and was so exhausted that he was asleep by 7 pm – and stayed that way for fifteen hours.

  His solar panel was not working and he could not work out why, so he had no power for his phone or iPod. A woman called Maureen pulled over to offer him a bed at Acacia Hills, about a third of the way to Adelaide River. By afternoon Cad had been confronted with his first ‘scary’ tropical storm, with the thunder and lightning so close it shook the ground, and to make matters worse, he had a flat tyre midstorm. His chafing had drawn blood, which ran down his legs, and his trusty 3B cream brought tears to his eyes as he applied it. Welcome back to life on the road.

  Maureen met him at a turn-off and said her neighbours Ian and his Thai wife, Tou, wanted to put him up. He had an enjoyable overnight stay and breakfast with them, talking with Tou about Thai culture and Ian about mango farming and the fascinating story of how he met the well-educated Tou and of their life since, which involved building the farm from nothing twenty years earlier to the very successful Tou’s Garden, 35,000 mango trees on 1000 hectares. He found Ian an interesting character; in his twenties he’d worked with the Gadafi regime in Libya (on a government operation to set up wheat farming). He’d also worked in Thailand for many years, marketing the supply of wheat and barley.

  Andrew was hobbling badly when he went through the small but pretty settlement of Adelaide River, 113 kilometres south of Darwin midway through his fourth day back on the road, even though he hadn’t been able to contend with more than 25 kilometres a day for the previous three days (he did 35 kilometres on the fourth). He was greeted warmly by the locals (less than 250 of them are recorded), taking his donations to $700 in just four days. Peter, the general manager of Territory Iron, told Cad he’d organise a bed for him at Pine Creek, a further 113 kilometres on.

  It was raining again as Cad trooped out of Adelaide River and he came across his first crocodile, only metres off the sid
e of the road. ‘It must have been huge, it made an almighty splash as it scrambled into a pond in the middle of the long reeds just on the side of the road. It scared me; there were thick head-height reeds looming above me on each side of the road out of the low-level swampy plains. I thought there could be a croc lurking on the side of the road anywhere along here. I shifted over and started walking near the middle [of the highway]. I was glad to reach some hills because I was freaking out that I’d have to try to sleep in the swampy shit … but on account that I’d seen more than my share of fresh dead snakes I wasn’t keen to trudge in and make a clearing.’

  He finally found a dirt road leading to a farm and camped there, bursting the blisters on most of his toes before he went to sleep without eating. It was the first time he seriously considered cheating and jumping a few kilometres just to end his agony early. At that stage he was still planning on walking all the way south to Alice Springs then hitching back up north of Tennant Creek to the Barkly Highway junction that headed east to Queensland, just to ensure his walk would be recorded by the Guinness Book of Records; he had been told he’d have to walk to Alice and also to Cairns for the feat to be ‘official’, although it seems illogical to me that going as far as Alice was regarded as part of working ‘around’ the country. Cad aborted that plan in the next couple of weeks.

  DAYS 435–439, 5–9 MARCH 2012

  ADELAIDE RIVER TO KATHERINE (189 KM)

  Not long into the day a Wicked campervan pulled up and a big Dutch guy offered, ‘Wow, you’re walking!’ in a voice of amazement. Next thing Andrew was sitting in the van eating fruitcake and drinking coffee with the pair, exchanging tales. The Dutchman, Edward, gave Cad an army-issue blanket, which came in very handy later. Andrew learned that the tourist was a soldier who said he had experienced four tours of Afghanistan and was taking time out to spend five months driving Australia and New Zealand. After earlier coming across several others who were riding pushbikes around the country, he was in awe of Cad for undertaking the journey by foot alone. ‘I thought it was funny but it actually meant a lot to me that a bloke who had done four tours of Afghanistan thought I was hardcore. It made my day.’