Thinking outside the box

After recovering from the Friday night following the three preceding days, most of the Uluru/Kings Canyon group had gone off to new destinations at some point on the Saturday. I was left twiddling my thumbs and waiting for another early start on the Sunday, to start a six-day tour up to Darwin and around Kakadu National Park. It was either that or try and get booked onto the once-weekly train, if the tracks had been repaired.

So at 5am I got up and ready to be picked up by the next bus, on which the driver/guide was also called Jess. Must be a common name for tour guides in this part of the world. It must be said that the journey between Alice Springs and Katherine does contain an awful lot of not much, but such is the life when traversing a continent. A lot of the group on the bus seemed to have already travelled together, but Jess initiated a “speed-dating” system whereby everyone sat next to someone they hadn’t spoken to and talked to them until she sounded the horn. There was the usual mix of German and Dutch (both outnumbered by the Danes, unusually), Maltese, Portugese, Canadian [coincidentally, Nicole was one of the Canadian girls on the Ghan I mentioned in this nonsense a couple of weeks ago], Welsh, English… I think that covers everyone, apologies if I’ve missed any out.

During these initial conversations, Alison (English) warned me that Fred*, the man from Malta (who has lived in Melbourne for decades), was a little bit… strange. Nice guy, but tells everyone about energy and beliefs and his healing abilities and so on. I said that it might not be an idea for me to speak to him while I was sleep-deprived and in a bad mood. I did, however, talk to him on the bus. He’s a man somewhere in his 50s, wears long sleeves and trousers all the time (all the better to discourage mosquitos) and has a multi-coloured handkerchief draped over his bald head, held in place by a mesh baseball cap. When he talks to you, he has a nervous twitch and blinks his eyes in an exaggerated manner as he stares into your soul.

The Devil’s Marbles are massive almost-spherical granite baubles sitting on the ground and each other, dyed red (like much of the rock in Australia) by the iron oxide in the sand. Quite otherworldly things. Some of them have cracked open like massive eggs. I don’t want to think about what hatched from them. Anyway, Fred asked Jess if they were the same kind of rock as Uluru. Jess didn’t know, but I’d already read the information boards and was able to tell him that they were in fact made of granite.

To make conversation with my Maltese friend, I casually mentioned that granite is slightly more radioactive than many other rocks, and that Aberdeen in Scotland (the city of my forebears and my further education) has a lot of granite buildings and consequently has a higher level of background radiation than other places in the UK.

“There’s radiation? Oh, so there are a lot of problems, then, isn’t it?” he replied.

“No, it’s just background radiation. There is radiation everywhere, there’s just slightly more of it in Aberdeen.”

“Or is that what they tell you because they want to keep the business?”

So there you have it, Aberdeen City Council is the nexus of a vast conspiracy to deny the existence of damaging radiation in order to promote business. For God’s sake, nobody tell any of the oil companies. Or Donald Trump.

That evening, we stayed in permanent tents. Fairly hefty constructions with a metal frame and wooden floor, with heavy beds in them. The campsite had a dining room and kitchen with electricity, so we ate and had a few beers on the verandah and watched the rain approaching in the distance, huge curtains of falling water coloured bright red by the sunset. The lightning and thunder started soon after the sun disappeared. When the rain arrived at the camp, it was accompanied by a single huge gust of wind which blew over the tent two along from mine (and partially destroyed the tent next to mine).

During the shower, Fred and I discussed some things. He’s big on the power of belief, and if you believe in anything strongly enough then it will come true. Also that we live on a planet of abundance, that animals want to be eaten, and that people should be able to do whatever they want. He rarely eats in the evenings. Like a lot of people who continually try and force their bizarre beliefs on others, he hates organised religion for doing the same – although in his case, he also blames it for polluting human minds with the concept of guilt, which is an artificial emotion.

I argued that there seemed to be a need for the concept of guilt, to prevent people doing something which would be detrimental to the survival of their tribe/species/whatever. I was in a bad mood and couldn’t be bothered with all this bullshit, and surprised myself with how extreme and confrontational my example was – I said that if (purely hypothetically) I decided I wanted to kill him, his philosophy meant that I could do just that and should feel no guilt afterwards. To his credit, he took it in good spirit, but said something woolly about the conventions of the tribe, or something, and that if I did indeed kill him then he was obviously attracting this energy and he deserved it.

After this, our conversation moved to his efforts in the last couple of years to convert water into fuel by separating the hydrogen and oxygen. I was intrigued by how he was attempting to do this, and mentioned the first law of thermodynamics – broadly, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to the other; if you burn hydrogen it combines with oxygen to create water and releases a lot of energy. If you want to reverse this process, you need to put an equal amount of energy back in.

“No, no, no, no, no,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, “you have to throw all that away and think outside the box.”

As far as I could tell, his efforts to turn water into fuel had not been successful. Even if they had been, however, he would probably have been murdered by scientists who wanted to keep his breakthrough secret. I questioned the way he apparently embraces selective ignorance as a virtue (why blithely discard one of the basic laws of physics, and yet still happily accept that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen rather than magic pixie dust?) but his answer to that is that we humans instinctively know the truth, and science distracts from it. He used to be able to make people numb by holding his hands over their flesh, but apparently he lost that ability a few years ago for some reason.

I resolved not to get into any more discussions of that nature with him. And to be fair, we did get on fine when I shut him down any time he tried to raise the subject of his beliefs with me. I just kept telling him I wasn’t in the mood for a debate.

Our other entertaining stops involved a short stay in Daly Waters, the fastest growing town in Australia. Its population has increased by 50% in the last six months, three more people moved there. There’s a pub, the Northern Territory’s first international airport (from WWII) and the old jail. One of the nine locals gave us a tour, beer in hand. He also showed us a couple of bower bird nests. One of the birds favoured green glass to attract women, the other nest was deserted but had a silver colour scheme. Girls like emeralds, I guess.

We also had a chance to swim in a hot spring, which was at the end of a ten-minute walk through a forest full of bats. Hundreds of thousands of bats. That was another thing which was quite special to walk through, although they were accompanied by hundreds of thousands of mosquitos, and the hot spring itself was colder than the water from the cold taps in that part of the world.

There was a boat cruise up Katherine Gorge, and thanks to all the recent rain it had plenty of seasonal waterfalls which only exist for a short time every year. The gorge itself is stunning, the sheer rock walls interrupted by mini-rainforests surviving in their own microclimate in the gaps. The rains hadn’t been as bad as they were in 1998, when the town of Katherine was under several metres of water and was taken over by man-eating salt-water crocodiles. Having passed through Katherine, I can only imagine that was an improvement.

After the boat cruise, we had lunch next to a swimming pool. Fred and I had a discussion about body parts – it started when I said that if a crocodile ate my legs, I’d have them replaced by kangaroo legs and would be able to win gold at the Olympic hurdles. He asked if there was any other animal body part I would like, and I answered that yes, there was: the nictating membrane, the transparent eyelid some animals have which enables them to protect their eyes and see underwater. Fred told me that if I believed in it strongly enough, I could evolve and grow them in my lifetime. I replied that I used to believe I could do things like that when I was a small child, but then I grew up, and that perhaps my mind had been corrupted by the adult world.

After lunch, Fred approached me. “You know what you said about how you used to believe things like that as a child?” Yes, I replied. “That’s how I want to think. Like a child.” There was a deep sadness in his eyes. I can’t help but think that something horrible has happened to him. It would explain a lot.

In the afternoon we stopped at Adelaide Waters, and met Charlie. Charlie is the water buffalo that Michael J “Crocodile” Dundee tamed in the road in the first film. He was a pet in the pub, and the tradition was that if anyone bought a beer, they had to buy one for Charlie as well, and he would down it in a fraction of a second. Eventually, for some reason, the alcoholic buffalo died. He was frozen and shipped to America to be stuffed. When he was defrosted, all his hair fell out, and had to be replaced at a cost of $10 000. When he was returned to sit on the bar in Adelaide Waters, his horns got in the way of the fans on the ceiling, so the locals cut the lower parts off his legs and stitched his feet onto his knee stumps. He seems happy now.

I didn’t see much of Darwin itself, we arrived in the evening and left early the next morning. There was time for a few drinks and a free meal, and some stupid games for the benefit of the tourists. I volunteered for one, along with a couple of locals and Nicole, Alison and Louise (Welsh) from the bus. It turned out to be a “so you think you can dance” competition, and everyone had about 30 seconds of a particular style of music to dance to. The winner would be chosen by the cheers of everyone else in the pub. I was given 50′s/60′s pop, and for reasons I still can’t fathom, I won. Two jugs of beer, though, not to be sniffed at.

We had a relatively leisurely start the next morning, meeting the bus at 6:20am. Most of the group was the same, although we lost a few people and gained some – including a Dutch couple, an Australian couple, and Fred’s wife. I had been looking forward to meeting her, having come to the conclusion that Fred is actually quite a sweet bloke. They spent most of the next couple of days bickering with each other.

The guide for this leg of the journey was not, in fact, called Jess. It wasn’t even a woman! It was a Kiwi named Carl. We went to Litchfield National Park and jumped in and out of rock pools for a couple of hours, before going for a crocodile cruise. This involved sitting in a boat while the driver dangled a hunk of meat on a stick for salt water crocodiles to leap out of the water and grab. These things can fair jump, they propel themselves out of the water with such force that well over half their body is pointing upwards above the surface, with a huge pair of gaping jaws at the business end. The warning about not sticking your arm over the side of the boat was heeded by all.

The next two days were spent in Kakadu National Park, visiting rock art sites and playing in more rock pools and waterfalls. Kakadu has a lot of plains and rocky hills with a variety of flora and fauna to see/hear, and is quite wonderful. Motorcar falls was the highlight for me, a clear pool with handholds in the waterfall. It’s possible to climb into the rushing water and sit or stand in the waterfall, and I spent most of the time trying to get higher up.

In the afternoon we went to a smaller rock pool with a little waterfall, and I tried to get close to it but didn’t think it was possible. At that point, Carl swam up and said “hey, are the snakes still there?” Apparently he’d climbed in behind the waterfall the previous week, and then a German guy had done the same, and then a Dutch girl had followed. She then jumped out screaming that there were two snakes behind the waterfall. “It’s OK, they’re about a metre away from you,” Carl reassured me. Getting behind the waterfall involved lying down on the rock, reaching through to grab any handhold you could find and pulling yourself in. I was a little reluctant to go grabbing around blindly, but eventually did so (and so did quite a few others in our group, I’m not claiming to be especially brave or anything). There was indeed a crack in the rock with a couple of dozy snakes lying there, very close to where I was standing. I decided to leave them to it.

After that, a long drive back to Darwin (via Adelaide Springs again, to say hello to Charlie) and a late flight for me. I have managed to beat my Australia travel plans back into shape after the pain with the trains, but it did mean that I had to get from one end of the continent to the other reasonably quickly.

I had arranged to meet Lilly and Beth (who I’d gone to the Ghibli museum in Tokyo with) in Canberra the following day, and got a cheap flight on the Friday night. Lilly’s mum and dad kindly put me up on the sofa bed, and I took full advantage of their hospitality to sleep for twelve hours straight. I also had a chance to see Lilly and her dad performing with their big band (she on keyboards, he on saxophone) in a soundcheck for a corporate do in the Hyatt hotel. On the Sunday, we went to the Moon Rock cafe to eat a microwaved sausage roll and see some big satellite dishes before heading to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, where we saw a platypus – a rare sighting, not one that had occurred to me to put on my list of “Australian animals to see in the wild” but a nice one to cross off.

All I need to see in the wild now is a koala and a wombat, and I think I’ve got the full set.

* Fred is not his real name, by the way. I only changed it on here because we didn’t exchange contact details, and he has no idea I’m talking about him on the internet.

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