by Ed Stafford
Instantly, and increasingly characteristically, I then changed my mind and decided to head back over the top of the island instead. Surely this would be a better use of my time as I could ensure that I could navigate across the interior of the island from both directions.
I scanned the back of the camp for signs of paths into the interior and quickly came across some saplings that had been cut with a machete. One led to another and I slowly crept away from the shore up the hill following a series of old crude markings. As I went I broke branches to show further signs of the path I had taken – I dragged obstructions like fallen branches out of the way. The path was twisting and hard to follow and eventually I just had to use my best guess as to which direction would lead me up to the benevolent Faraway Tree.
Doubt crept in as I started to lose height again. That wasn’t meant to happen. Hang on – there is a clearing ahead and a snapped branch here. What?! My confidence tumbled as I realised I was back at the rear of Lemon Camp.
I had committed the classic mistake of blindly following signs of a path and believing (because I wanted it to) that it would lead me where I wanted to go. That had taken me another forty minutes or so.
So which way to go? I stared at the path I had taken almost three-quarters of an hour earlier with absolutely no confidence that if I tried again I would get any different outcome. The sun was blocked by the hill in front of me now and there were no shadows to use to navigate in the late afternoon on this eastern side of the island. Bugger. The one thing I did know for sure was that I could get back if I followed the coast. So I bottled a second attempt at finding the Highlands, hit the beach and turned left. On the way home I resolved to draw myself a map in the sand to properly ensure I understood where things were in relation to each other.
When I passed the seep I stopped for an evening slurp of fresh water after my adventure but once again the shallow rock bowl was almost empty. The straw was still there and no sign of goat tracks but I was confused that, once again, the water hadn’t continued to fill up the rock bowl during the afternoon.
The low, looping flight of a kingfisher attracted my attention as it settled on a rock about ten metres in front of me. The familiarity of the distinctive black mask and white collar comforted me for a moment before my primal survival instinct came crashing in through the back door. Could I catch it and eat it? I’d heard of people leaving fishing lines with baited hooks on rocks to trap birds. The trouble was I didn’t have any hooks or line. I considered improvising hooks with bone or thorns and joining many strands of beach hibiscus together but I knew that if I managed to get something like this constructed I’d want to catch some fish with it! For the moment I let it go.
I turned on the camera and a loud mechanical groaning noise announced the end of its life – never to work again. Day three and one of my two cameras was broken already.
The sun was now very low in the sky and golden light made my beach glow with warmth and tranquillity. Since I’d skinned a dead goat today and smeared sun cream made out of goat shit all over me, and I felt minging, I reckoned I deserved a bath. I unclipped my radio mic from my waist belt, tossed the scratchy sporran up the beach like a dead cat, and turned towards the rows of advancing waves. The sky was shades of pink and orange and the white water sparkled. I’d never considered myself a spiritual person but you do have to marvel at such incredible beauty – billions of years of colliding stars, cosmic dust, gravitational forces all combining to produce something so captivating, so calm and so alive.
Feeling indulgent and childish I ran naked into the waves, allowing them to trip me up and plunge me head first into the cool salty water. As my head went under the peace of being submerged swept up my entire body as if a switch had been turned off in my head. The sensation of being cleansed, not just of sweat and dirt, but of worries and fears, was unmistakable and I surfaced with the most innocent of wide grins on my face. Guilt at the extravagance of giving myself time to wash was carried away by the waves as I soaked up the power of investing some time in myself, of turning the cameras off and just lying in the ocean and splashing about. Of singing U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’ at the top of my voice and finally allowing myself to be joyful and happy.
I knelt in the shallows with the sand under my knees and the water lapping at my back. In this state I was utterly grateful for everything that was happening. Out loud I thanked Amanda for her love, understanding and support – I could feel her still holding my hand; I thanked the kids for their pure, untainted love and their sacrifice of letting me go away; and I thanked my two Aboriginal friends, Jeremy and Harold, whose advice I was leaning upon so heavily at the moment. Not a religious man at all – in fact quite anti-religion in an argument – I also thanked God. Not an old bearded man on a cloud deciding my fate, not a second-hand God from a dusty book, but an all-encompassing energy that ran through me and connected me to everyone and everything. A sum of all the parts − and the spaces in between. A God based on my understanding of how everything seems to fit together and magically work. Whoever – whatever – my smile radiated pure gratitude and love into the water in front of me. I was a part of everything and I had nothing to fear. Crikey, three days in and I’d become a lentil-munching hippy.
Post-wash I examined my thighs and saw that they were chafed by the coarse grass sporran that I’d been using to protect my modesty. I needed to make a proper grass skirt to avoid getting sores on my thighs. With my soul accessed and my brain waiting dutifully silent, this was a clear and easy task that I would do tomorrow without drama.
And then, suddenly, I felt a desperate need to defecate and was concerned by a very runny stream of diarrhoea flowing on to the beach. Communing with the universe was at an end. To put it bluntly, how much water and nutrition was I losing out of my bottom?
Back in the cave I sat and contemplated my situation. My slow progress caused me constantly to question my own abilities, requiring me to soothe my own doubts and coach myself back to a place of calm. ‘Little by little, Ed – you’re chipping away at a mammoth task. You got through the day by eating thirty snails. That’s great!’ I told myself approvingly. ‘But I have to admit surviving with nothing, caveman-style (says me in my cave!), is hard work. It’s really hard work.’ I whined a little into the camera, hoping it would offer me sympathy.
The dark new moon announced a new phase. The black nights of the dead moon were over and I was comforted that nights would get lighter from now on.
I dreamed of going for a meal with Amanda on the King’s Road in Chelsea, and having a glass of red wine. Then going home and crawling between the sheets and sleeping with the comfort of her warm body close to mine. Then I stopped taunting myself as I knew that this was not going to happen for a very long time, so I just lay on the fast-cooling grit and hoped that sleep would release me from my jail.
The sun lit up the cave, unwelcome as the bright morning light to a chronic drunk. That was a truly bad night’s sleep. I had the runs in the night – twice. Because it was so dark, and I had feared slipping on the rocks outside, I had gone in the corner of the cave and wiped my bottom with the grass bedding. The result was that my cave now also smelt of human poo. Is that a step up or a step down from goat? Let me assure you it’s a step down, and I chastised myself for such uncivilised behaviour. I lay still under my itchy blanket, not wanting to face the world.
But today was a new day and it looked like it might be a nice one.
I had to do some admin: take a still shot of myself to monitor my weight loss; send my daily ‘I’m OK’ message via Spot tracking device; mark a fourth white line on the wall of the cave.
The main administrational event today was to visit the dropbox twice, once to drop off dead batteries, used CF cards and a broken camera – then, later in the day, to pick up the replacements. Diarrhoea would not be good news – it could make me very weak if it continued and make everything ten times harder. I crept down the b
each and felt the waves of cramp rippling through my intestines. I squatted at the water’s edge and had three big bursts. This is the body’s equivalent of Scotty on the Starship Enterprise telling the captain ‘the dilithium crystals cannae take it’. I was cramping up. I groaned at the energy that was leaking out of my body. It’s important to be able to distance yourself from your symptoms. Yes, I felt like crap, but I had to decide what kind of crap. Life-threatening? Probably not immediately. Food poisoning? I noted that I had no nausea or vomiting. Could it be too much sun yesterday? It was possible – I knew I sometimes reacted badly to excess sun.
At home I’d have curled up on the sofa feeling sorry for myself. No chance of that here. I had to get on with things.
As predicted, the tide was too high for me to walk around the island so I had no option but to go over the hill to do the drop. I stuffed down some coconut and snails without incident. I’d never before been in a situation where just staying alive was so boring. Coconut tasted like whale blubber, snails like gritty balls of phlegm. ‘I think your body knows what it needs and wants and mine is saying stop eating bloody coconut,’ I said to the camera for posterity.
The Faraway Tree gave me an opportunity to pause and catch my breath in the still of the celestial Highlands. My feet were starting to get very sore so I was taking it slowly as I walked over the island. I quickly picked up my trail of broken branches again on the descent.
Halfway down the slope I picked up the sound of an outboard motor. Without a watch I didn’t know what time it was but I knew I had to be quick if I was to make the drop before they arrived. I hurried down through the last palms to the box.
As I entered the clearing the boat was disappearing into the distance. I’d missed the drop − bugger. Inside the cool box was a new ‘InReach’ messaging device to replace the apparently faulty Spot. There were fresh batteries, and there was also a note saying, ‘Drop missed. We will return mid-afternoon.’ I put the broken Spot and the defunct camera in the box with my used CF cards and dead batteries and sealed the whole thing up.
On the fringe of the camp I found a tree with some very slim nuts inside a husk the size of a peach. The flat nuts were very small but I was happy to have some nut fats and proteins complementing my diet – even if there was only a handful of them.
I was underwhelmed to find a spoon amongst the camp’s litter as I felt a million miles off eating anything that required cutlery. I took it anyway. ‘That’ll be good for eating with,’ I commented without a trace of a smile.
I took the opportunity to look for tuberous roots among the vines but the ground was very hard and digging using a long stick as a trowel was slow. It was also disconcerting to be expending energy on something that I didn’t know would reap any rewards. It was like digging for buried treasure without ever having seen the treasure map. I could be digging for half an hour and there would be no edible root. As indeed was the case. Zilch.
Once more I heard bleating and looked up. The goats had come right down to the camp to eat foliage and were calling to each other. A larger male goat with big horns and a thick black stripe down the centre of its grey back looked me straight in the eye.
I stood up in slow motion without disturbing any of the animals. Black Stripe lost interest, too, and looked away and resumed eating leaves in front of him. As a test I slowly moved as close as I could towards the alpha male. Seven metres, six metres, five, four . . . His ears pricked up and he shot an annoyed glance at me before sounding the alarm and starting out on to the black rocky beach with his family.
Alone again, I found an old fire pit and some charred bits of wood. I remembered that charcoal could be used to clean teeth so I ground a small brick of it into a fine powder on a smooth rock, licked my finger and dabbed the pad into the black, glittery powder. Even with my blunt finger I could feel how good this was at removing the built-up layers of plaque. It was immediately apparent that the charcoal was abrasive enough to clean properly but soft enough not to do any damage.
The return journey yesterday had been a circular farce but I had to try again in order to rebuild my own navigational self-respect. It would be easier this morning as the sun would still be directly behind me as I walked. Following my own shadow I edged up the hill snapping branches as I went. As the hill flattened out, the Faraway Tree appeared in the distance to my right.
On approaching my multi-rooted cathedral I looked for the exit trail that I’d followed only that morning but couldn’t find it. There were no signs of a path going in the direction away from the tree that I’d just come from. This was eerie – I now began to doubt whether it was the same tree at all. I was disoriented; the direct sun had magically vanished. The sky was grey and cast no shadows. The tree seemed more mysterious than ever. Was it a double?
There were stones everywhere but they weren’t really in the circle that I’d been so struck by before. This was like something from a nasty dream – or a horror film. These are the thoughts that start going through your head when you’re alone. Was this some supernatural weirdness? How was I so confused once again?
I held my finger vertical on one of the lighter coloured rocks and could just make out a faint shadow. ‘OK – sun’s over there.’ I collected myself. ‘I need to go this way to camp and keep it behind me.’
I plunged down the hill with no confidence about where I would end up. But the first things I recognised were the plastics that I’d piled up yesterday and I registered that I could see the woodland beside my cave. I had been in the Highlands after all. So why hadn’t I been able to pick up my own tracks?
Ever proud of my ‘exemplary’ pass in navigation on my Mountain Leader Assessment, I was shaken by being disoriented in this way. The cloud cover kept occurring at just the wrong times and I realised that, once again, I was actively destroying my own confidence by being too hard on myself. I had to remember to trust my own judgement and experience and not second-guess myself all the time. Combined with the malnutrition, dehydration, lack of sleep and chronic diarrhoea I was becoming overwhelmed and confused by the entire situation and had to regain control.
I always took pride in my ability to get my bearings quickly and easily, so back up the hill I went so as not to be beaten. At the Faraway Tree I did indeed find the path that I’d marked by breaking twigs and I quickly established that my routes going down to, and back from, Lemon Camp had joined at the tree from completely different directions. That was why I’d been thrown out. That finally sorted, and maintaining my altitude on high ground, I stuck to the coast in an attempt to find the vast rocky headland that was so dominant on my beach. In a world in which I felt out of control in so many areas, getting to grips with the topography of the island seemed vital.
‘Wow – that’s phenomenal!’ I reported to the camera as I broke out of the tree line on to the scorched summit of the rocky outcrop. I was on a spur of rock that crested out from the forest canopy below me like the hump back of a fossilised whale. It was the first time I’d been able to get a decent view of the reef that circled the island and the protected lagoon within. From this new perspective I could see that, at its closest, directly in front of me, the reef’s limit was perhaps 900 metres from the beach but as you followed the perimeter fence either way it expanded and penned in a vast expanse of turquoise shallows.
The feature I stood on was about thirty metres high and dropped vertically from its tip to the sea. As I looked out towards the sea I had my beach, Alpha Beach, to my right and what I now decided to call Bravo Beach, the cuter sister beach, on my left. It was absolutely stunning – huge expanses of golden sand and palm trees – and I was reminded how lucky I was to be spending time in such an untouched place.
Back in camp I found another large washed-up flip-flop that fitted. I loved the fact that, like me, Fijians had massive feet. It was a refreshing change after months of walking in the Amazon in South American wellington boots that were one size too small and
crushed all my toes. With the repaired one that I’d already been using I would have a wearable pair of shoes – something that was becoming increasingly necessary as my feet were becoming tender and raw. I used hibiscus but the rubber was so perished that it crumbled at the tension now applied to it, rendering it useless.
I drew a map of the island in the sand on the beach in front of my cave. From where the sun had set the previous night I knew that due west was straight ahead from where I was sitting, through a rock buried in the beach and beyond. I also determined that it must be about midday and, as I was in the southern hemisphere, my shadow should be cast due south. Although it might not be exactly midday I could now draw the four compass points reasonably accurately in the sand.
From this I extrapolated that my beach ran north−south and I also knew I was almost on the northern tip of the island so must be between the ten or eleven o’clock points of the island if it were a clock face. I drew on the landmarks that I knew: the rocky headland, the various beaches, my cave, Snail Rock, Lemon Camp, the Highlands and the Faraway Tree. The interior of the south of the island was still fairly blank but I could improve on the detail as the days went by. It was important for me to log in my brain the aspect (direction of slope) of each side of the island so that I could navigate easier by the sun.
Back in Lemon Camp for the pick-up I found a stick insect on a tree. A stick insect is clearly an animal and so, with only a moment’s hesitation, I ate it. It tasted sour. I then washed it down with an unripe fruit that was inedible in its current state of ripeness and tasted like a combination of washing-up liquid and battery acid.
I stayed in Lemon Camp for the lowest tide because I wanted to check for alternative water sources on the beach. My theory was that there might be fresh water at the base of the rocky part of the beach running straight into the sea that would be exposed at low tide. Frustratingly, every flow that I dug out simply filled up with salt water. I became distracted by some washed-up bamboo that I split to use in making a fire. I stayed long enough to find that the tide had turned and the water was rising again. I’d not located anything like a fresh water source and my expectations that I ever would dropped another level.
