Is it EVEN a country road trip if you haven’t been flying down the bitumen surrounded by the many hues of red North West dirt singing your lungs out about Jolene stealing your man??
How BEAUTIFUL is our country!! First stop, Karijini! Spirituality? Magic? Whatever you choose to call it, this place restores your soul! It breathes new life into the simplest of things like the ceremony of preparing a pot of bush billy tea or a cast iron jaffle toastie. The gorges are spectacular and the chill of the water in some of them is indescribable. Rising before dawn each day, as the stars shared their last sparkle, we sat listening to the howls of the dingoes and realised that life doesn’t get much better than this!
Onto Coral Bay where backpacker life is certainly entertaining! The ‘clean’ towels smell like stale bodily fluid that I don’t even want to think about – luckily we brought our own – there’s fresh blood on my ‘fresh’ sheets that DOESN’T belong to me and there’s a black sludge pooling on the bottom shelf of the fridge and leaking onto the camp kitchen floor that is reminiscent of ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon’!
BUT there is also a melting pot of gorgeous, friendly folk from every corner of the globe who are happy to chat and share stories. Apparently I almost acquired a second husband – as if ONE isn’t trouble enough – without even trying! I was making a cuppa in the camp kitchen one night and a couple of salty old sea dog fishermen were cooking their dinner. Their leathery skin and crinkled eyes paid testimony to their years on the ocean. We were happily chatting away when talk turned to the VERY important topic of chip butties. When one of them said you had to have tomato sauce on your chip butties and I very firmly said that NO, chip butties were fresh bread, loads of butter and hot chips ONLY, my almost-future-husband sadly declared that our relationship had no future as the differences were just TOO great! Funny old bugger! I worried that the 2 young male teachers who were travelling with 16 indigenous boys from Port Headland were NEVER going to make their spag bol made with ONLY 2kgs of mince stretch to feed all those hungry mouths!
Try as we might, Poseidon point-blank refused to share any of his scaly bounty with us! Baillie’s language deteriorated in direct relation to the number of hours we spent fishing unsuccessfully.
If we can’t eat them, let’s join them! Sunlight dappled the water and illuminated hidden eyes. Fish roll and spin around each other. I don’t know if it’s a dance of love or a war dance but it’s hypnotic. There is nothing quite so peaceful as swimming with a school of fish- the ONLY school I’ve ever enjoyed! They don’t care that their new classmate is a tad larger and rather ungainly in comparison to them. I saw something I had never seen before which reminded me of the school bus scene from Finding Nemo. There were over 100 fish of all different sizes and species swimming in a line together in and out of the coral. It fascinated me and I thought, “How does it start? Can anyone just join in? Who decides when it has run it’s course? Is it like a fishy conga line and they’re all merrily singing sea shanties as they cruise through the reef?”
We’re a long time dead so we should do something that scares us as often as we can JUST so we feel ALIVE! With this in mind I decided to challenge myself to overcome my somewhat irrational fear of swimming off the reef and out over the foreboding darkness. With my heart beating faster I approached the edge of the reef and tentatively swam out. It is like I’ve fallen off the edge of the world into the deep, dark blue abyss of nothingness. Common sense tells me it’s not nothingness, though, and that there HAS to be something down there. It’s the ‘what?’ that makes my belly clench and my heart beat strong in my chest! As I peer down into the depths, the ‘kill’ scenes from every Jaws movie – well, ok, only the first 2 because, seriously, who watched past the second one – play in my mind like a staccato horror news reel and I am certain that at any moment a monster from the deep will launch itself from the void with mouth agape and jaws protruding! In reality, though, there is only peace and calmness and the sound of my own breath.
I faced my long time fear and lived to tell the tale! Now, what new adventures will tomorrow bring …….
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