Hey....g'day there to all of you...even those who don't read this silly stuff!! For those who do read it but keep that fact secret - I understand. For those who don't read it because you think it to be boring - you win the prize for best thinkers. For those who read the stuff and also reply, with sillier stuff, or with smart-arse comments, or with sensible suggestions, or insightfull recounts of your own experiences, or warnings of dire consequences if foot put wrong, or just some friendly encouragements - to all of you I say, "Thank you - and please keep up the emails, consistent with your own personality and culture and religion, of course".
To my surprise I have had many - yes, many - emails from WWTC friends. I love it!!! So - here we go with another little report:
G'day friends all...I hope the beginning of winter finds you all warm and well. For me and Adam, the oncoming of winter has meant several very very cold nights in hugging the ground in pup tents in desert nights. The skies crystal with clarity, cold and philosophy! Not that we are complaining...a trial of choice. For poor young Adam I'm not sure about the choice bit..poor bugger has to put up with the dust, dirt, unpleasantness and discomfort of the ride AS WELL AS my tangled maze of spaghettied theories of beginnings and ends, of religions and politics. Enuff to send a young'un barmy, but being a polite sort of Lad..a born again Christian in fact...he gives me a gentle ladle full of his own boiling theories and takes his aching brain to tent - early - and listens to his MP3 or watches a feckin' flick on his whizz-bang IT doozie whattie thingie!! Arrggghhhh....the young!! Why cannot they be like us - simple, hard-working, productive, sporting? The buggers...it'd be much easier to critize if they didn't KNOW SO BLOODY MUCH!!! However that does not diminish the tribulations experienced by this rapidly ageing 63 year old. Cold is cold. Bluddie cold is bluddie cold. Memories of spooned wife and warming cuddles help little...flamin' useless in fact!! Tents and desert floors produce aches and stiffness I cannot ever remember achieving on a football field, or even in political washing machine.
In fact, for me - 2 weeks on the road has resulted in soreness, fatigue, aches - but lots and lots of satisfaction. A bit like some of my friends describe the church attendance schedule.Well, I think I emailed you from Alice a week ago. We have now arrived in Halls Creek - safely and without further breakages to body or bike. This was the centre piece of my trip. I woke up one morning a year or so ago - thoroughly pissed off with my apparently useless Ph D - and thought of greater things. I will ride my bike through the Red Centre says I to I. Right through the guts I said silently to me, with just a little screaming bravado. When one tries to convert such a sillie-dillie drongo thought into some practical exercise [a life's work for me] one's eye is drawn to a map. My first maps saw no road, track or trail across "the guts" and it wasn't until I 'netted ExlorOz.com that I managed to find the Tanami Track joining Alice to Halls Creek. Bingo!!!Oh, dear!!! The Tanami Track was, this last weeek.....sooooooo rough and soooo hard going that this wonderful bike, despite its great engineering and continuing staying power, lost [a] a mudguard [b] a side light [c] a rear flicker light [d] the protection grid for the headlights. All of them either fell off or broke under the strain of the relentless battle with corrugations, gibbers, sand, bull-dust....oh, what a feeeling he jibberished through teeth still clacking from racking. We were told at Tillmouth Well [200 kms from Alice and 870 kms from Halls Creek] that it was going to rain for 2 days in one days time. Huh!! What would these bluddie red-necks know?? Huh? I looked at the weather map that night and determined that it could not be so. Big "high" over Australia...wind from the east....all low systems being pushed south and east. No wurries!! So - we rode on to Rabbit Flat [420 kms] and camped the night. Next morning we had a good guffaw at the yokel from Tillmouth who had said it was gunna rain..and we hit the road again for Halls Creek. We had planned to stop over for the night at Wolfe Creek Meteorite Crater but with a few miles to go I asked a group of trail bikers who had just been in there what the going was like and they said that it was deep with sand and yuk...and that one of them had gone over, most of them had nearly gone over - so I judged that the track was beyond my skills loaded up as I am with heavy gear, and a little [quite a bit] short of the BMX skills required for deep and lengthy sections of sand. So - Adam stripped his bike of all his gear, left me keeping the Tanami ants, lizards and snakes company, and dusted off in a cloud down the road towards the Crater - even then he said he nearly came off...and that there was no chance I would have made it fully l oaded and that he doubted he could have made it fully loaded. So - I waited at the main road for 80 minutes while he haired it into the Crater, walked a cuppla hundred metres, took a photo, and returned - which left us just enuff time, with some hard riding to arrive in Halls Creek just on night fall. We stayed overnight in a motel and, guess what [?????] when we woke this morning? Yep - pissing down rain - so, if we had gone into the Crater and camped as we had planned we would now be stuck in the middle of nowhere with God Knows how long to get out!! Instead, we are snoring together in a comfy motel room. I wonder when those yokels will LEARN!!?
Tomorrow we had planned to do Purnululu National Park [Bungle Bungle] but the 53 kms road in is heavy with sand apparently - so we have agreed to share a 4WD which we pick up tomorrow morning at 7:00 and drive, with all our camping gear stacked in the car, the 160 kms to one end of the Bungles by 10:00 and do the walk, then drive to the other end to camp the night so we can do the other walk the 2nd day. All good - except that the all-up cost of the 4WD will be around $600 for the 2 days.....ahhhhh well....that has to be offset agains the petrol for the bikes and two days accomodation...so it'll be a bit less than that, and I cannot see that we will be back this way again very soon.After the Bungles, we plan to head west to Derby, Broome and get some local knowledge about roads...we may still do the Dampier Peninsula....maybe in another 4 WD....but, in any event, we have decided [against my bettter judgement] that we will give the Gibb River Road a 'go'. Who knows how I'll get through that lot, but we'll have a lash anyway!!Wow - this country is so feckin' big - and it can be beautiful and dangerously brutal all at the one time. The endlessness of everything has got me asking myself all the same questions I did at college, and at Uni, and during my first marriage...and then the second..oh, and the third....questions also about what we have done to our indigenes that so many of them are so completely...what do we do about these things? Gawd.....it's enuff to turn one to....ah, dearrie me, dearrie me....Hmm, well thats about it - I'd better go - got a little bike fixing to do.
All the best.....Van 6 June 2008
