Frogbite (OB1)
Travel and danger seem to go together, like fish and chips, or Black and Decker. As soon as you leave that door, say the insurance brochures, a piano is liable to fall on your head, or a bloodless coup in Eastern Europe might cancel your raft trip.
Somehow I survived researching this offbeat guide, driving around Australia and dodging roadkills on the nation’s highways. Sunburn on my right arm – the one poking out the window – was possibly the worst of it.
Or maybe I’m glossing over those near-death experiences. Truth be told, the Grim Reaper missed his appointment with D Astle on four separate occasions during the Cassowary safari, five if you count the swooping magpie in Gunnedah, New South Wales.
The first near-miss was the standard kangaroo. It leapt out of nowhere, a big grey bloke with a kamikaze disposition. The road was a windy affair linking Biggenden to Maryborough on the Queensland coast. I didn’t know what hit me – or somehow didn’t hit me. The mad marsupial burst from the scrub and eluded my van by a nose-hair.
Okay, so maybe I wasn’t going to die, but I certainly thanked the God of Timing once I reached the coast intact. Doubtless the roo was talking up the episode to his joeys in the hills somewhere. Fact is we still write to each other. No doubt about it – that moment of shared salvation has fast-tracked our relationship.
Near-death moment #2 was a road train south of Leonora, in Western Australia. In a pique of lunacy I went to overtake the three long trailers, and the long prime mover, upwind, downhill, on a narrow stretch of the Kalgoorlie Highway, only to spot his equally long mate coming the other way. You’ve never seen a five-speed campervan jump back into its burrow quicker.
Brush #3, while writing Cassowary Crossing, was in the midair. The flight was a routine city-to-city job, a chance to listen to some gangsta funk on Channel 11, and study the liferaft diagram a third time, when the fuselage started jerking violently.
I spilt my coffee. (Don’t worry – it wasn’t hot.) And fastened my seatbelt. Tight. The rock and roll lasted five or six seconds, enough for a soul to start contemplating words like ‘soul’ and look among his neighbours for a spot of mutual confession.
As it happens, three seats across, my neighbour was Ian Chappell, a former Australian cricket captain and current voice of sanity on the Channel 9 team. And that bugged me.
How dare Mr Chappell, by all accounts a likeable man, hijack my sacred moment of death. If the carrier plunged into the plain, engines burning, smoke pluming, it would be the wretched end of FORMER CRICKET STAR, and not the 53 people around him, including some writer of some half-written travel-concept-thing. I was furious. It helped the nerves no end.
Stop the turbulence, I wanted to scream. We all deserved better, including Ian Chappell it must be said, who no doubt had his own pet scenarios for the last hurrah. On cue, the fuselage leveled. The cockpit apologized. My anger simmered, and we landed in one piece.
Which leaves me with the last of the near-ends – and the most mysterious. I was camping in a place called Ubirr, the perfect spot to see Kakadu rock art, and it was hot. Hot? How hot? It was so hot the chickens were laying boiled eggs. The park was a sauna. The air was glue. It was hot.
In Kakadu, round seven o’clock, the daily promise is a cinematic sunset. (You won’t see too many better, not inland anyway.) But for most of us sun-bashed daytrippers, the real promise was night, and a drop in the mercury.
Though the cool was slow to come. The air was thick and the mosquitoes innumerable. (I’m not doing a sterling job selling this especial corner am I?) So anyway: night, mozzies, hot. I’m stuck in my van tapping the day’s findings into my laptop. The cold beer from the minifridge isn’t that cold and outside the frog chorus is enough to send you troppo.
Time for a cold shower, I thought. The Ubirr campsite has pretty good facilities. (Think pit toilets versus brass towel racks.) But honestly, given the stress of my personal thermostat, I would have blown the family silver for cold five minutes in a cement cubicle – with or without the water.
No torch, no soap, dressed in towel and sandals, I stumbled through the dark towards the ablution block some 100 metres down the track. The frogs grew louder the closer I got. In the end I’m following their racket as much as the twitching fluoro above the entranceway.
Showering in the Top End, or visiting the loo for that matter, is seldom a solitary experience. Bugs, bats, numbats, newts are everywhere: you can’t ablute for native fauna. Just to strip and imagine I was in Tasmania, standing in a veil of subzero drizzle, meant ignoring the thirty pairs of eyes from all angles, and all phyla, scattered on the ceiling and floor around me.
I’m talking javelin frogs, dragonflies, millipedes, owls, quolls and 99 mosquitoes in a confined space. The Ubirr sheds are a landlocked ark with a modest en suite. SNAP. The timer shut off. The water shut off. I stood there, no longer hot, but wet and irascible. I dried off. I started the dark walk back.
First I didn’t feel a thing. I stumbled on, oblivious of the toxin I carried in my foot. I reached the van and piled inside. I shut the door. I started cooking – both the culinary and metabolic varieties. I started hurting. The pain began to swell.
Delirious perhaps, I blamed a frog for the mysterious bite on my foot. The reason was simple. Frogs are likable creatures, like Ian Chappell by all accounts, and I’d rather be bitten by a harmless frog, even a nasty one, compared to the alternatives. Do I need to name them?
Northern Australia is blessed with such lovelies as taipans, death adders and king browns, not to mention saltwater crocodiles and the cantankerous buffalo. Clearly no croc inflicted the bite on my instep, but the idea of a serious bite from a serious reptile was beginning to occur to me, as the billy boiled on the range. I didn’t panic, not outright, but I sweated that night, on top of the sweat I was already sweating.
The other reason to jump on the frog theory involves the doctor’s guess, a week later. Dragging my clubfoot around Kakadu National Park for a week, and offbeat parts south, the pain became too much. My boot became two sizes too small. The quack in Katharine took one look and said ‘wolf spider’ which isn’t as cute as a Northern Dwarf Tree Frog. Later, in Alice Springs Library, I looked the spider up (just a social call) and believe me, the culprit deserves its own horror movie and merchandise deal.
Fifty thousand kilometers, ten pairs of socks, eight torch batteries, three tyres and I somehow survived the adventure to write this flyweight column. Please note: to travel Terra Australis, you must know that road trains are long, roos are skittish, magpies are cunning, frogs have a dark side and Ian Chappell is a good man to have in a crisis.