Kamikaze Kangaroos!

by Tony James Slater

It’s an environment that bites back alright.

  And that’s even before we consider the wildlife.

  But it is beautiful.

  It was dark by the time we reached Geraldton, but we were delighted to discover that this particular dot on the map belonged to a real town – and the first supermarket since Perth. To celebrate, we bought an entire tub of ice cream, a bottle of caramel sauce, and some ‘Tim Tams’ – delicious, chocolate-coated biscuits that were set to become my newest addiction. The girls had a tradition, established on their trips around America and Europe, called ‘Ice Cream Wednesday’. They used it both as a reward, and as a way to mark the passing of the weeks. Weekends can cease to have meaning when you aren’t working, and endless days of long-term travel have a way of blending into one another. I’ve lost count of the number of times someone’s asked me what day it is, only to watch me glance around for any clues, and come up with nothing. So Wednesday became the new Sunday, with the consumption of ice cream as our chosen mechanism for marking it. I tell you what, it beats the snot out of going to church!

  Perhaps in response to this blasphemy, the heavens opened, and as we sat in Rusty eating huge bowls of ice cream we decided not to bother pitching the tent. We found a campsite, drove right up to the kitchen, and de-boxed just enough stuff to cook a nice chicken korma.

  By which I mean, three bowls, three spoons, and an industrial-sized tin of microwavable chicken korma.

  Then we settled down to spend our first night in the van.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever slept in the back of a car or not.

  I have, for several reasons, ranging from poorly-anticipated poverty, to extreme stupidity, to accidents involving me having a mouth the size of the Rift Valley. What I will say about it, is this: cars are not designed for sleeping in.

  Well, except the ones that are designed for sleeping in. And even those ones are bloody uncomfortable.

  Sleeping in Rusty was like some kind of Chinese torture. At first, it seemed quite inviting; with the seats all flattened out and Gill’s psychedelic dolphin curtains at every window. With the low-drain strip light (helpfully fitted by Roo’s Dad) glowing, and our sleeping bags disguising the contours of the back-seat-cum-bed, Rusty looked quite cosy.

  But Rusty, as we were already starting to realise, had a spiteful streak.

  For starters, he was too narrow. The middle row of seats, where three pairs of legs wriggled and writhed, were full width; not so the back row of seats, which coincided with our shoulders. At the broadest part of us, Rusty was only two seats wide – and those seats were tilted steeply upwards, because all our worldly possessions were crammed underneath them.

  Seatbelt holders, reclining levers, arm rests – all these things, so convenient whilst driving, dug into the soft, fleshy parts of us. The seats undulated in exactly the opposite way to my spine – so that, no matter which side I lay on, it felt like I was being folded in half. It was hot and it was cramped, and we couldn’t open the windows for fear of a full-scale mosquito invasion. Sweat ran down my legs. Condensation dripped on me from the seal above the side window. And every time I tried to squirm into a more comfortable position, something hard and unyielding jabbed me somewhere delicate and tender.

  If there’s a less pleasant place in the world to sleep, I have yet to discover it.

  All three of us lay awake for hours.

  At about 4am the rain stopped, and I realised I’d been listening intently to something else that was going on outside. It had grown, from background noise to a deafening shriek; magnified by my mind, perhaps, but drowning out any further chance of rest.

  “What the hell is that noise?” I moaned. “I can hear the cicadas, but that other sound? It’s high-pitched, like a police whistle?”

  “Oh, that’s the frogs,” Roo said.

  “But why are they whistling?”

  “Because they’re frogs,” she explained, “that’s the sound they make.”

  “Eh? No, that can’t be right. We have plenty of frogs in England. Frogs croak.”

  “Frogs don’t croak! How stupid is that? Birds croak.”

  “No, no! It’s frogs! Everyone knows that. Like in that cartoon with the frog and the chicken in a library. And the chicken goes ‘Book, book, book,’ and the frog goes ‘Readit, readit, readit.’ You know?”

  Apparently she didn’t know, which resulted in me spending the next ten minutes gurgling in my throat, trying to create an adequate frog noise.

  You should try it, next time it’s 4am and you can’t sleep because you’re lying in a padded oven with two other people. It gives everyone a good laugh, especially when you choke on your own spit and segue into a coughing fit.

  There passed another of those mutually-agreed sleep attempts, where everyone tries really hard to get to sleep, only to have the bugger next to them turn over and knee them in the back just when they were drifting off.

  It was no use. With the door open briefly to exchange the air, another peculiar noise was coming to my attention.

  “Roo, what the hell is that, then?”

  “Is what?” she yawned.

  “That… pinging noise. It’s all around us. It goes like: Boing! BAUung. Bong! It sounds like a midnight ukulele convention. Are there red-necks in the bush? We’re not going to get raped, are we?”

  “I keep telling you, that’s the frogs!”

  “You said the whistling was the frogs.”

  She sighed, and started speaking more slowly. I think my intelligence had just dropped a notch in her estimation. “The whistling frogs are whistling. That’s why they’re called whistling frogs.”

  “Right.”

  “And the ones that sound like a banjo string being plucked – those ones are the banjo frogs.”

  “You are absolutely shitting me right now.”

  “No, not at all! I can’t believe you haven’t heard them before. Do you know about motorbike frogs then?”

  “Motorbike frogs? No! What do they sound like?”

  “Well, like a…” she paused. “You’re taking the piss out of me, aren’t you?”

  “A little.”

  “Then you can bugger off, with your stupid croaking frogs!”

  “Go on, do an impression! Please?”

  “No. You’ll hear them, soon enough.”

  Around us, the banjo chorus continued.

  Roo rolled onto her side, squirming in a futile bid to find a comfortable position.

  “So frogs don’t whistle at all in England,” she muttered to herself. “How weird is that?”

  Happy Returns

  The next morning there was cause for celebration – for me, at least.

  It was my birthday! Somehow, more by luck than by design, I had achieved the ripe old age of twenty-eight.

  That’s a good age. A responsible age. People I knew back home had started families already, had good jobs with potential for career-progression, and mortgages to match.

  Whereas I had… what exactly? Freedom? Happiness, certainly. Hell, I had a rucksack full of that.

  And not a whole lot else.

  And as for responsibility…

  Making sure the ice packs were frozen before we left the campsite was mine.

  And that was about it. But, you know, ice packs can be important.

  Buried in Rusty’s boot, we had what Australians call an ‘Esky’. It’s a brand name which is used to refer to any type of portable cold-storage unit.

  In Oz, they have perfected this technology – either because their environment is so unforgiving that access to cold water can mean the difference between life and death – or because they place a similar importance on keeping their beers cold. I’ll leave you to decide which is more likely.

  So any decent camping store stocks a whole range of options, from lowly insulated picnic bags to diesel-powered, climate-controlled mobile fridge/freezers. The Esky Roo’s dad had lent us fell somewhere between these extremes, and was the kind of hamper-sized plastic cool box that mo
st Brits would be familiar with. They don’t work too badly either – in England.

  Out here, after spending the morning baking in Rusty, it was no match for the searing daytime heat.

  “The ice cream is a bit, um…” Roo said, stirring it with her finger.

  “It’ll still taste the same,” said Gill.

  “Maybe it will. Only it’s warm.”

  We’d spent the morning raiding the two-dollar shops, which were oddly abundant in Geraldton. Now we were sitting down for a celebratory birthday lunch in the park, under the shade of a single stunted tree.

  On the menu, we had left-over curry – on sandwiches. We washed this down with a bowl each of warm liquid ice cream – with caramel sauce, of course! And then, the pièce de résistance: a donut.

  This one was all for me.

  At some point one of the girls must have scurried off to a different two-dollar store, and bought a packet of birthday candles. We couldn’t get enough candles on top because of the extremely limited surface area of donuts (and because, in my extreme old age, I had crossed a certain threshold and was now nearly two packets old). And when three people try simultaneously to light birthday candles on the ground in strong wind, all you tend to achieve is the loss of a few eyebrows. We stood considerably more chance of lighting the donut to be honest, so eventually I waved the girls off and claimed my prize. It was gooey and jam-filled and partially blackened from some over-enthusiastic lighter-action. Mmm! Singed donut. Just how I like ‘em.

  Then Gill held out her hand to me and opened it. “Happy birthday, Tony!”

  “Gill, I don’t know what to say! It’s… it’s a plastic… fish.”

  “It is! And you can’t actually have him, because he’s mine. But I wanted to have something to give you. So – say hello to our newest travelling companion!”

  “Is he an air freshener? From the two-dollar shop?”

  “He is! And he’s spradoingey!” For proof Gill flicked the fish, making it bobble around on its spring.

  I thought about the kinds of presents other people my age would be receiving. A couple of X-Box games perhaps. Or an actual X-Box. A new helmet to wear when riding their motorbike. A new set of speakers for the home cinema…

  But they do say you should be grateful for the little things in life.

  I bet whoever coined that phrase had never been given a spradoingey plastic fish for their birthday.

  It redefines the boundaries of little things.

  But I loved him all the same. Even if he wasn’t mine.

  The girls also bought me a t-shirt, possibly because I’d been wearing the same two t-shirts since we started the trip, and alternating them rather than washing them on the grounds that they were ‘okay again’ after a certain length of time away from my body.

  Both girls strongly disagreed with this philosophy.

  In fairness, Rusty was a mobile oven, and within minutes of climbing inside him we were all dripping with sweat. Even on the coolest days, the sheer amount of glass turned the inside of the car into a hot box, and apparently opening the windows only helped to circulate any smells developing in the back.

  Sigh.

  There were advantages to traveling with two attractive women. The street cred, mostly. Being constantly reminded to wash more often wasn’t one of them.

  I promised them that I would shower and put on the clean t-shirt as soon as we got to the next campsite.

  My last birthday present came from Frieda, Roo’s Mum – she’d sent it along with us for me to open on the right day. It was a black baseball cap with ‘Australia’ proudly emblazoned across it. I loved it, and wore it almost constantly. In fact I only took the thing off for sleeping – and whenever I was wearing my new t-shirt, which coincidentally also had ‘Australia’ written across it.

  Don’t want to look too much like a tourist, I thought, as I climbed back into our multi-coloured, hand-print-covered van.

  That evening, a hundred miles further north, we sat around a camp fire, eating fish and chips, drinking goon, and discussing our plans. We’d been lucky enough to arrive just as the supermarket was closing, and we’d bought all the sandwiches they were about to throw away for next to nothing. That sealed it – our intention for tomorrow was to drive into the nearby national park, take our packed lunches, and do a spot of hiking.

  I sat up late that night, watching the stars twinkle brightly in the absence of other light. I was in a philosophical mood, either due to the significance of the day, or more likely the significant amount of cheap wine I’d consumed.

  A year ago I’d been in England, desperate to be anywhere else; now here I was, on the other side of the world. Just achieving that much felt like a victory; the fact that I was fulfilling a long-held dream of traveling Australia – and doing it in such style – that was an unexpected bonus.

  The icing on the cake, you might say.

  Or the donut.

  I decided that, no matter what happened from here on in, on future birthdays I would remember this moment. How happy I could be living so simply, and how grateful I felt to be so completely and utterly responsibility-free.

  I owned almost nothing. I owed nothing to anyone – well, unless you counted the credit card company – and I wanted nothing more than what I already had.

  Although, a hot naked woman waiting for me in my sleeping bag wouldn’t have gone amiss. Perhaps I’ll ask for one of those next year.

  It didn’t seem terribly likely, given my current living situation, but then that was the exciting part; literally anything could happen in the next three-hundred and sixty-five days. I was looking forward to every single one of them.

  I’ll remind myself, wherever I am next year, that life is for living, I thought. If I’m not in the middle of some crazy adventure, that will be my wake-up call – to get out there and have some fun, to live a little. Before I get to the point where I lose the option.

  For now though, the closest I would get to adventure was a stumble through the darkness to the toilet block, followed by bed.

  Tomorrow was a new day, and it glistened with promise.

  It was going to be one hell of an interesting year.

  Parklife

  I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the roads had dwindled since Perth. Not only in number, but in size. In the UK our major cities are connected by huge, six-lane motorways – it’s only when we reach those cities that we sit in gridlock, amidst networks of tiny medieval streets governed by countless traffic lights and archaic one-way systems.

  And punctuated by those hell-spawned mini-roundabouts.

  In Perth, the biggest, widest roads ran right through the city. Freeways led to every different area, and even the streets of the central business district were several lanes deep. Conversely, once we got out into the open, the solitary road between Perth and the cities further north was a narrow ribbon of tarmac; a single carriageway in each direction with no crash barriers, no hard-shoulder – not even fences to keep livestock off it. The crumbling edges of the road blended seamlessly into the rocky red dirt, and the vast majority of the junctions – the few that we saw – were wide swathes of dust and gravel, where unsealed tracks branched off into the wilderness.

  It was down one of these dubious tracks that we turned Rusty, heading into Kalbarri National Park on a route which can only be described as off-road.

  We regretted it almost instantly.

  The action of the wind, and an endless succession of four-wheel-drives ploughing up and down, had sculpted the surface of the road into millions of ridges, like miniature speed-bumps less than two-inches apart. It was like driving on a corrugated tin roof.

  For fifteen miles.

  Noisy doesn’t even come close.

  Rusty started shaking the second we left the tarmac. Really shaking I mean, like a knackered washing machine on the spin cycle.

  It made my teeth chatter so hard I was worried about chipping them.

  It made Rusty’s bodywork and innards vibrate so ha
rd they became a blur.

  And every knife, fork, spoon, pot, pan, plate, tent pole, tent peg, food can, drink can and gas can, chattered and clattered like an earthquake in a tambourine factory.

  A succession of big four-wheel-drives cruised past, each effortlessly chewing up the road and engulfing us in their dust trail.

  ‘Tryy speeedingg uup?” I suggested. “Mayybe itss eeeasierrr att speeeed…”

  Roo pushed a quivering foot onto the accelerator and Rusty leapt forward as though he’d been stung.

  The rattling grew to a deafening roar. I was sure there were pieces falling off the car. Rusty drifted as he shook, the loose dirt under his tyres behaving more like ice than gravel.

  “ARRRRRRR!” I cried.

  “ARRRRRRRRRRRR!” cried Gill.

  “ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!” cried Roo (which was more worrying, as she was driving).

  “SSShHIT! SSSSssssLlllowwW DdDooOWwn!”

  Dust billowed around us, blocking the road from view as we skipped and skidded along it. When Roo brought Rusty under control again, we agreed that the speed theory had been adequately tested. We renamed it the Certain Death theory, and decided to take full advantage of having lived through it by never, ever repeating it.

  Eight miles an hour was the most we could manage. Even at that speed, Rusty was shaking himself apart. It felt like we’d replaced his wheels with square ones.

  “W-w-we sh-should t-t-turn b-back,” I stammered, managing to bite the tip of my tongue twice in one sentence.

  “We c-can’t,” replied Roo. “N-n-nearly there!”

  She was lying.

  It took us two hours to reach the car park.

  By the time we got to the end of the corrugated road, we’d discovered our first casualty. The spradoingey fish had been shaken up so much that scented gel was leaking out of his gills, making a sticky pile of smelly pink fish-innards on the dashboard. Gill declared the little fella dead on arrival, and I soothed her grief by pointing out that he was the lucky one; he’d escaped.

  We had to make the same trip back.

  If you’ve ever tried to walk after being on a boat for a long time, you might have experienced land-sickness – the feeling that you’re still moving, and that the ground under you is heaving and swelling.