Pissing on Dingoes

My next Australian excursion was a one-day snorkeling trip to the Great Barrier Reef aboard a big red catamaran. As the boat sailed out from Cairns to the outer, less visited area of the reef, I blinkered myself from the world above the waves. Yes there were plenty of people I could have talked to aboard the boat, but I didn’t want my memories of that day to be of the conversations I had. I wanted to spend every possible moment I could beneath the waves, taking-in what I saw, and not forgetting a moment of it. To get myself in to the zone, to clear my mind of the superfluous, and to build my sense of anticipation, I laid on the front of the boat on the cargo-netting between the two hulls. As the boat was going straight in to the wind, it had no choice but to ride through the oncoming waves. Laying where I was, steadily getting rocked up and down, It was easy to let the tickley feeling in the pit of my stomach transcend to butterflies.

The boat moored off a cay (a small sandbar island) home to thousands of nesting birds. The other passengers and I were ferried to the cay, where the crew proceeded to give a talk about the birds. Normally I would have listened with interest and taken a few photographs; but not on that day. Instead I strapped on flippers and waddled backwards in to the water. In my first five minutes, I saw nearly every type of life I had previously encountered in the tropical waters of Thailand and Vietnam. Everybody was there for the party, even a few blue spotted stingray. After I had said hello to my old friends, I began to notice the more distinguished guests. The most senior by far, comfortably sat on the seabed, were the century-old giant clams. At over two metres long, and unlike their younger relatives, they had no reason to close their shells when I neared them. Instead they just sat their displaying their slightly erotic, and very alien innards. A part of me wanted to stroke their fluorescent-green labia. The other part of me knew that if I did I wouldn’t get my hand back. As usual the parrot fish, with their telltale coral-crunching, were the noisiest creatures on the reef. An unfamiliar deep crunching sound led me to a parrot fish slightly bigger than me; the deeper the crunch the bigger the fish. In contrast, it was easy to miss the quietest and most gentile of the reef dwellers; the turtles. Having never seen them before in the wild, my heart skipped a beat as I noticed the first giant mottled shell laying in the sand. Probably due to the pesky snorkelers, a few of the turtles I saw were using their flippers to throw sand over their shells and bury themselves in the seabed. Although I must have seen half a dozen that day, I’m sure I missed many more in hiding near by. However when I did manage to notice them, and get close enough to touch them, I was pleased to be greeted with indifference rather than fear. Compared to the neurotic, ever-moving fish, they were and absolute pleasure to photograph. The stingray for instance were more than happy to show their tales and gliding wings as they swam away from me, but were reluctant to pose for their close-up head shots. After pursuing one for five minutes for such a photograph, I found myself in much deeper water. As the stingray made its final bolt in to the blue abyss, something else caught my attention; a cuttlefish. At first it was blue and pink, then, when it felt my presence, it changed its colour to match the chalky white coral. As it hovered in the water, probably thinking I couldn’t see it, I managed to get very close to it. Unlike its body, its flanks rippled through colours I had never seen before; many at the extremity of my sights gamut. No video or photograph could ever do this animal justice; the granularity of its pigmentation to finer than any pixel, pulsations and flashes faster than any frame-rate. Once again, something in the periphery of my vision distracted me. A shoal of squid was swimming alongside me in almost symmetrical formation. While their cousin, the cuttlefish, may have had superior camouflage, the squid, with their perfectly streamlined bodies were built for speed. I was welcome to swim with them provided I kept out of their way; too close and they would propel themselves like bullets to a safe distance. Just as I was trying to determine exactly how far this distance was, and how close I could get to take a photograph, I started to hear a whirring sound. For the first time in three hours, I looked above the water to see one of the catamarans dinghy’s coming towards me. The woman driving the dinghy was calling back to the boat; I was along way from both the cay and the boat, and also it was time to come back for lunch.

What I saw in the water that morning filled my mind with images, questions and ideas. I would have been content to spend the rest of the day sat on deck, swimming in my thoughts. However, as promised, and after a very welcome buffet lunch, there was a second dive in the afternoon. From where the boat where the boat was now moored, out of sight of land, I didn’t imagine there could have been much going on beneath the water surface. In fact it seemed like quite a strange place to be; the water looked deep and dark, and the waves were big and choppy. Of course beneath the waves it was a different story. After a short swim, I found myself hovering over a steep ledge in the seabed. This geological formation, and the effect it had on the water currents, had turned the area in to a meeting point and feeding area for thousands of fish and other, more microscopic, life. Each section of the ledge was dominated by a different species or played its own role in the local food chain. Out of curiosity of what existed further down the ledge, I found myself free-diving deeper and deeper. At about 8 metres, and after equalising four times, the water surface started to look like a long way up. I was as deep as I could possibly go with no end to the ledge face in sight. Along with learning to drive, and figuring out how to cook a number of dishes from around the world, the list of things I want to learn inspired by my travels now includes one more item; scuba diving.

After the Great Barrier Reef, the other most memorable Australian excursion was a 3-day self-drive trip to Fraser Island. Formed of sand, and with no roads as such, a four-wheel-drive vehicle is required to get around the island. With a long history of fatalities associated with such trips, I was not surprised to find out that they will soon be getting banned. I suppose I was fortunate to be doing the trip with a company that had a good safety record and provided a day of induction training. I was put in to a group of 8 and assigned to a Toyota Land Cruiser. Over the next day we were taught how to shatter the suspension, break in to the vehicle, and cause it to do 180° flips. Concerning the environment, we were advised how to deal with dingoes, tides, lakes, and what to do with our rubbish. At every stage the trainer had an anecdote of someone who had not followed the rules and ended-up paralyzed, writing-off the vehicle, or paying a hefty fine. After all these threats, when we set-off driving through the sand dunes, rivers and along the sandy beaches, it felt like we were on a military mission of sorts. Although I couldn’t have the pleasure of driving, the coordination of tide tables, maps and regulations was more than enough to keep me happy. Having followed our route and met all of our ETAs, we, and the other 7 groups, parked-up near the beach to set up camp for the night. Even then, racing against the setting sun to put up the tents and make dinner turned in to a military operation.

Thanks to all the cheap boxed wine we bought with us, it didn’t take long to unwind from the day. Like so often when I drink to excess, the night became a collection of dislocated dream-like scenes. In the first scene I’m sat on the ground in a circle of people. An Irish guy with a guitar is doing a great job of playing all the usual sing-a-long stuff. Unfortunately he’s singing in such a high pitch that when I or others in group try to sing too, we manage about 30 seconds of strained, high-pitch, out of key whining before we start to get embarrassed with our efforts and leave the circle. In the next scene I’m stood between two German guys with shovels. Under the powerful headlights of one of the Land Cruisers, they’re having some kind of digging competition. All around me sand is flying through the air and people are yelling “Schnell!”. Then, when it starts to rain, I find myself in the back of my vehicle looking for a drink in the cool box. Without me noticing, a cute German girl has sat herself down on my lap and wrapped her arms around me. She’s stroking my chest and my face, and put her lips to my ear. Breathing heavily, and squeezing me harder, she starts to whisper to me how much I remind her of her boyfriend. Too drunk to figure out how to play my part in the role play, she starts squirming on my lap. To both of our surprise, this has the undesired effect of pushing on my bladder. I pop her off my lap and scramble in to the dunes to urinate. Long after I finish, I carry on standing there looking up at the Milky Way and the unfamiliar stars of the southern hemisphere. With so little artificial light, and so many stars on display, I find it hard to pick out any constellations. My stargazing is interrupted when I hear something move in front of me. When I switch on my head torch I see that I’ve pissed inches away from a laying dingo. It doesn’t seem to be interested in me. It just stays there staring at the camp with a sad longing in its eyes; kind of like a pet dog that’s been banished from its home. The next thing I know I’m sat in the front of my vehicle smoking a spliff with a Dutch model. We’re listening to Ace Of Base, but when we realise that the Dutch girl and German guy in the back are now kissing, we figure some mood music is in order so put on 2 Become 1 by the Spice Girls. The last thing I see before slipping into darkness are the colourful light of the stereo and the dashboard. I wake up to find myself now in the driving seat slumped over the steering wheel. In the moment before I wipe the condensation off the windscreen, the feeling of panic starts to rise in my throat; had I been driving? No, we’re exactly where we parked the evening before. Unable to get back to sleep on the front seats, I go outside but don’t stop to look at the stars again; it’s far too cold. I crawl into a tent and, with no sleeping bag or bedding, I huddle and shiver myself to sleep. Every now and then the sound of the dingoes snarling, or twanging guide ropes wakes me up. And again I have to get warm before I can drift-off again.

Other than the odd night like that, during the trip to Fraser Island, and the subsequent sailing trip around the Whitsunday Islands, I began to feel slightly disillusioned with the way in which I socialising and meeting people. It wasn’t that I didn’t get to meet some lovely people, my problem was that every two or three days the slate got wiped clean. I would say goodbye to the people I had met and never see them again. I therefore began to feel that although the time I spent talking and getting to know people wasn’t wasted, it could have been better spent.

Australia’s natural beauty blew me away, humbled me and left me feeling freer than any other place on earth. I do not feel that the time I gave, or the way I traveled the small part of that very big country did it justice. When I do return, and I certain that I will, it will not only be for a lot longer than 3 weeks, but also behind the wheel of a camper van.