Sticks And Bones

I moved on to the town of Katherine, a few hours south of Darwin. Plan A hadn't worked out - hanging around to find someone to give me a lift - so it was back on the Greyhound coaches. I wasn’t too disappointed when I found that the driver for the journey had the same voice as Harold from Steptoe and Son.
"Good morning, my name's Michael and I am your dwiver,” he started in a cockney accent from the 1950s that was unable to pronounce it’s ‘R’s. He inevitably began the speech about the toilet facilities.
“At the wear of the coach is the toilet. When it is occupied the sign will be illuminated. On the back unit is the flush that is opewated by firmly pushing down. No smoking is allowed anywhere on this coach, including the toilet which has a smoke alarm fitted for your safety…”
And so on.
After the information on the toilet he then decided to point out some of the points of interest in the landscape, I couldn’t decide if this was so that we might learn something or just to keep us amused by his voice for a little while longer. Either way, he was the first driver that I’d ever had on a Greyhound to do such a running commentary.
"On your wight is the wailway line where the fweight twains wun... On the left you'll see the wemains of the bush fires, lit duwing the dwy season so that we can more easily contwol any fires that may happen in the wet."
After awival... sorry arrival in Katherine, I went for a quick walk around town. Again the Aboriginal population was more significant and as I made my way along a quiet street one came up to me.
"Hey mate, where you from?" he asked as he fell into stride next to me. He was a big guy and obviously drunk. Memories of the Coffs Harbour mugger came flooding back and I started looking for 'exits' again.
"Sydney," I lied, trying not to look like a tourist and putting on an awful Aussie accent.
“Oh yeah. You up here on holiday?”
"Na mate, I'm doing some work up here,”
“Yeah? How long you been here?”
“I’ve been here for a couple of months now." I said. What the hell did he want? Was he looking for a chance to mug me?
“My name’s Barry,” he said extending his hand for a handshake as we walked along. What could I do? I shook his hand, keeping a wary eye on his body language. The handshake and his body posture were relaxed - he didn’t seem to be a potential assailant. He spoke with pride about the tribe that he was from, declaring it the biggest in Australia whilst all the time I was thinking up excuses to cross the street. He left me alone at the end of the block as I made to take the road crossing. He bid me a farewell and didn’t even ask for money as we went our separate ways. I was honestly relieved to see him disappearing down the side street but then felt guilty, why was my natural reaction to feel so threatened? Barry had been perfectly polite and though a little worse for wear he’d given no reason for me to fear him.
I was staying at the Palm Court Backpackers YHA, a converted motel that wouldn’t have looked out of place as a stop on a road trip across America. As such, the rooms had ensuite bathrooms and the free pancakes in the morning and friendly social atmosphere around the pool area was a welcome break from the rough edges of the town itself.
On the journey from Darwin I'd got talking to Philip, a more mature traveller from Belgium. He was a short, very slightly built man - all sticks and bones - with a calm manner and a very softly spoken voice. The grey in his short hair made him look older then the late-thirties figure he admitted to me. It was refreshing to talk with him on politics rather then the usual conversations about beer and partying that I would have had with the typical backpacker I’d so far come across in Australia. We found that the two of us had similar schedules down to Alice Springs and so would no doubt enjoy each other’s company for some time ahead.
It was interesting to hear a European perspective on my own home country as we chatted about the perceptions of and from our countries and the goings on in Europe. There seems to be so much that we don't hear about due to the UK media's almost xenophobic attitude toward the rest of Europe and we don't realise what we get out of it. I've always been pro Europe, but travelling and meeting different people had shown me the relative peace and prosperity enjoyed by our continent, an equilibrium that has taken hundreds of years and countless wars and feuds to arrive at that we take for granted. Maybe something could be learnt by the rest of the world from the history books of Europe about the need for diplomacy and the futility of military conflict.
There was a second Barry at the hostel. An American, he questioned me on the number one singles in the UK since 1956. He'd memorised the lot for the UK, US, Australia and was currently working on Canada’s. Though he had no idea who the Crazy Frog was. He must have been in his late forties and said he had travelled to 175 countries. I didn't even know that there were 175 countries. The last country he’d been to before his return to Australia had been Iran. He told us that he had to practically denounce George W. Bush and American foreign policy to persuade them to let him in. He certainly liked to travel and was prepared to do just about anything to get where he wanted to go, including travelling out of the U.S. and through central America just to find a way to get into Cuba. The little jaunt that I was doing seemed pretty lame in comparison to the travelling that Barry had done.
In the morning I caught a bus out to Nitmiluk National Park, home to the collection of 13 gorges more commonly known as Katherine Gorge. The park is owned and managed by the Jawoyn people and they are a constant theme, with hundreds of rock art galleries throughout and exhibits at the visitor centre. There are land and water options to see the gorge including canoeing, boat cruises or the chance to cool off with a dip, though fresh water crocodiles inhibit the waters. Said to be more intelligent then their saltwater counterpart, they know that humans are not natural prey but they will attack if provoked. I wish I'd decided to take a swim with the freshies, the hiking trail I took was hard going. It's a shame that the trails don't run along the gorge, as a hiker you only get the odd lookout to appreciate the gorge before being sent back inland where the temperature could be as much as ten degrees Celsius hotter then on the water. At the visitor centre, the maximum recorded on the day was 40 degrees Celsius. No wonder the moderate eight kilometre Windolf Walk I elected on was such a struggle.
Part of the trail itself was actually a riverbed during the wet season. At some parts the orange markers that indicated the trail were hard to follow and I needed to double back on more then one occasion. I arrived at Pat’s Lookout, a point on the gorge rim with fantastic views over to the opposite cliff face over a beach directly below. The trail split off to a more difficult one that headed down to this beach and I picked my way over boulders, down the narrow and steep gorge face. The beach made for a nice peaceful spot that I had all to myself.
Rejuvenated, I made my way back upward. Going down had been much easier, then it had been pretty intuitive to know where to go and gravity was on my side. The climb back up was strength sapping though, and it wasn’t obvious where the link to the main trail was. The orange markers were too infrequently spaced and I must have missed the one that pointed the way back. I continued climbing and found myself back at the gorge rim level but without the rim in sight, just empty rocky sandstone plains in all directions and no noticeable pathway. I wasn’t too worried, the rim couldn’t be too far away and I thought I knew which direction it was in – once I found it I’d be able to follow it back to the trail so I gave little thought to turning back and retracing my steps.
The terrain was largely uneven, with huge outcrops of rock and thick knee high bush acting as obstacles. In traversing such things and with the length of time I was walking I began to worry. Was I losing my way? The sun was directly overhead and so not much help as a guide. The landscape gave no clues as to where I should head or even where I had been. Panic was setting in as I became more and more flustered in the heat.
I climbed up one large outcrop of rock in the hope of spotting the gorge. All I could see was more hazy rust coloured scenery. I wasn’t sure what to do. I scanned back and forth deciding if I should push on or go back in the hope of finding the canyon that led to the beach. And then something caught my eye, an unnatural glint of orange. It was a trail marker. I was saved.

* * *

I think some of the unfriendly people who worked in customer services in Darwin had all been moved to Tenant Creek.
Philip and I decided to rent a car between the two of us to get to the Devil's Marbles. On picking it up, we were served by a woman with a sense of humour by-pass.
"Are they easy to find?" asked Philip.
"Yes, you just drive south in a straight line for 100 kilometres. You can't miss it, there’s big signs showing the turn off." she replied.
"I don't know, I've got a pretty lousy sense of direction," I smirked, "And I am pretty drunk,"
She looked at me with a scowl. She didn’t appreciate the joke at all. "I'll pretend I didn't hear that," she said.
Driving in the outback is just about as dull as it gets. If the car had cruise control we could have sat in the back. Philip was not used to driving on the left-hand side of the road and so was happy to leave the driving to me. It didn’t really matter, outside of town there was very little traffic and as the Hyundai was an automatic I had little to do. It was exciting just to find a slower vehicle to overtake, or a treat negotiating around a bend. It was a good job that I loaded up on coffee before leaving as the sun bore down.
The journey was well worth it. Leaving the car we were struck by two things; 1) The wonder of the Devil’s Marbles themselves, strange rust coloured rocks, many of which were perfectly spherical and some perched on top of one another where they had no right to be. It's as if gravity didn't apply. 2) Millions of flies. The little bastards constantly molest the visitor, turning them into flapping lunatics in an attempt to swat them away as they go for the moisture in your eyes. But they were not enough to spoil things. I'd come expecting a few rocks, but they stretched on for a good mile or two, each formation unique in itself. Geologists credit water erosion, Aborigines the Rainbow Serpent - they certainly are baffling enough to give the impression that they could only have come about by design.
On our return to Tennant Creek, we made use of the car and took a quick look around one of the town’s old gold mines. Tennant Creek remains small and wild despite $4billion worth of gold having been mined there. The small Tourists Rest Hostel where we were staying was comfortable enough with all the required facilities needed and bizarrely, an aviary. During our stay, I never did see the elderly owner sober. He was a British ex-pat and seemed a friendly enough guy and we’d spent the first evening drinking a couple of beers with him and a few of the other guests in the outside patio area. He’d been in Australia for the best part of two decades and considered himself more Australian then British. Unfortunately, as he became more and more drunk, the prejudices he held surfaced and what had been such a sweet old man became an ugly, cynical twisted individual who’s view on people from parts of the world different to his own I couldn’t understand. He attacked the Aborigine, people from the middle east, the far east, Latino’s and America for no obvious reasons other then them being from a part of the world different to himself.
When we went and took the car back to the car hire place, a grumpy man who I guessed was the husband was with the grumpy woman. Oh what fun they must have. I could only assume that they had had a recent death in the family. We'd been told that all costs were included as part of a special Devil's Marbles deal that included the petrol but they insisted we went to fill it up. They got really aggressive when we protested and we eventually backed down. It put a dampener on a good day that left us brooding and in no mood for the nine-hour overnight bus trip that lay ahead to Alice Springs. To cheer ourselves up we headed out for a spectacular meal; the first traditional roast I’d had in months served all-you-can-eat buffet style for just $16. It was in what felt like an establishment for an old legion club, a bar and the buffet arranged on one side of a large hall with cheap and cheerful décor, the local olds there for their weekly night out.
There must have been something in the Tennant Creek water; the day was capped off with another grumpy sod that served us at the bus terminal. I’d had enough – I would register a complaint with the car hire company first thing in the morning for the rudeness of the couple.
That would show 'em.
We got to Alice Springs a couple of hours before the dawn. Neither Philip or I had managed to get any sleep on the Greyhound and so we arrived pretty exhausted and very cold. The drop in latitude from the distance covered and the desert night air caught us out as we trudged through the streets of Alice trying to find our hostel in the dark. Once we found the river it would be easy to figure out where we were, unlucky for us we had arrived during the part of the year that it had dried up, making our navigation slightly more challenging.
After a walk that seemed much further then it actually was, we arrived at the hostel. We’d been told there was no night reception, but that we could wander in and make use of the communal facilities until the morning. The cereal for the free breakfast and the futons that we came across in the common room could hardly have been more eagerly received.