How A Meat Pie and a few Fish Changed My Life.

I am now in beautiful Port Douglas! And i sort of wish that i came here directly and skipped right over Cairns. Not that Cairns isn't a cool town but Port Douglas is exactly my kind of town, and it's way more beautiful than Cairns. I think anyway. Plus i like the more quiet and laid back atmosphere of Port Douglas because i spent too much money at the pubs in Cairns...... hey it was my birthday......week. I didn't even go half as crazy as most of the backpackers do, i don't even know how they do it especially with how much booze costs and how little money most of them seem to have. But that's Cairns for you.

BUT YESTERDAY I WENT SNORKELING ON THE GREAT BARRIER REEF. I never thought that i would see something that trumps the night sky at Delmore Downs but seeing the reef just smashed that with a cinderblock and then broke the cinderblock with its fist. Jumping off the boat  for the first time it takes you a second to get the idea of what is going on (keep in mind i'm a good swimmer but i've never snorkeled before). This concept of having your head under the water AND breathing normally just doesn't add up with your instincts. So there is a second of fumbling with the waves and sucking in water and then you get your head under. I didn't take many pictures because truth be told there really isn't a lot to see from above the water. The water is a nice color of blue and you can kind of see that there are rock like things coming up from below, but really it just looks like water with rocks under it. Then you put your head under and the lysergic kaleidoscope mind trip begins. Swimming over the reef really feels like some sort of dream because everything is so alien, crazy colors and huge fish abound in even bigger schools. Really the coral is pretty but the star of the show in my book is the fish. The parrotfish covered in stripes and dot patterns of crazy colors and fish with all sorts of weird protrusions on them are everywhere. My favorite part was this huge school of these little electric blue fish that all seemed somehow linked up. They would all be facing one direction and flowing like a slow cloud then all of a sudden they would all turn in the other direction in perfect synchronicity. I could have watched that for hours. That was definitely one of the most amazing things i have ever seen. No question.

Also i spent today searching for people to go see Mossman Gorge and the Daintree rainforest with me and i stopped into a pie shop for lunch. I may have mentioned pies before but Australia being of british origin features a wide variety of savory pies. But Mocka's Pies in Port Douglas have the best pies i have ever had. The kangaroo pie i ate nearly brought me to tears it was so good. It put me in such a good mood i couldn't stop laughing. To tell the truth i'm not really sure what they put in their pies to make me react this way . . . anyway they are delicious. And it had a little doughy cutout of a kangaroo shape baked right on top! I need to learn how to make them so that i can have meat pies when i go back to the states. Which isn't too long now.....GASP!!!

6 Day Roadventure to CAIRNS.

And so I met up with a 64 year old Tasmanian farmer who had had some financial trouble and decided to go traveling around instead of fretting about it and an English musician and an irish guy, and we four made way for Darwin. I had to skip over Kakadu as I mentioned due to time constraints but I will make my way to see the Daintree Rainforest to make up for it. As we passed by Kakadu and Litchfeild national parks it seemed that everything was blackened and on fire anyway due to it being the dry season.

We got off to a slow start inching our way from beautiful waterfall to hotsprings to the next beautiful waterfall down the stuart highway. It was nice to have the time to stop and take our time to see all the sights and have no pressure on when we got to Cairns.

The waterfalls are very beautiful in the Northern Territory and we stopped at one called Edith falls just in time for sunset. It was a bit cold for swimming but that was best saved for the hot springs. In my experience, when you come to a creek in the middle of the forest and you decide to get in, you had best prepare yourself to inch in and take your time acclimating to the freezing water. Not here. The water in some places was boiling out of the ground and steam was coming off of the water in big clouds. It felt like we were being turned into soup. The water is hot because there is a lava chamber deep under ground next to the water that heats it up and sends it to the surface to bubble up and burn unsuspecting bathers. But not all of the hot springs were boiling. The best one we went to was bitter springs near Mataranka the worlds most unassuming waterfall. They were deep enough to actually swim in and the water was kept just nice and warm like a bath. That was very refreshing after a few days of not having a shower or anything.

As for sleeping we just drove until about 6:30 and then wherever we were we just pulled off at the side of the road and camped right there. The first night we camped in a swamp under a bridge and then in the desert for a few days and then suddenly we were in the rainforest. Even though we were driving just about all day everyday, it still took us five days to get from Darwin to Cairns. After we drove back down the stuart highway and saw all the sights, after we turned east at Tennant Creek it quickly became apparent just how big and empty Austraila really is. Not that there aren’t cool things to see here but we drove for two days across the Table lands east of Tennant creek and saw nothing but flat land and brown grass dotted with the occasional cow. We decided that if we were going to drive all this way we would at least have to make the most of our location and we turned north. Rather than keep going east along the barkley highway and then north along the coast to Cairns we decided to go north from Mt. Isa in the middle and head up to the Gulf of Carpentaria. This is a very remote area and although it makes up a large part of the northern coastline there is only one beach accessible by a sealed road. So we drove up to a small town called Karumba and had fresh caught fish and chips. (they just swim around pre-fried) and watched the sunset over a beach that seemed to be made of concrete. (I still though it was pretty. Also apparently Karumba is where the biggest crocodile ever shot was found. There is a statue of the 5 meter giant in the nearby town of Normanton. We camped on the beach and despite the dangers I still have not seen a crocodile in all my time in Australia. I keep hearing about them but I’m beginning to wonder if they really exist at all.

From here we drove east again across more empty but increasingly interesting land until we got to the Atherton Tablelands. Suddenly I blinked and I was back in Virginia. I swear the little towns with farmland on the green rolling hills back dropped by mountains could have been Luray or Roanoke or any other town in western Virginia and I never would have known the difference if it were not for the ever present weird bird calls and driving on the left side of the road. Of course the farmer said it looked just like Tasmania, the English guy said it looked just like the English country side and the irish guy said the same of Ireland. But still it was nice to see some familiar territory. (and beautiful at that)

Then as we passed over the foothills I suddenly noticed a line of thick massive clouds gathering in a line at the tops of the mountains. And here we entered the rainforest. The trees were giant, everything was dripping and green and the weird bird noises were as loud and weird as ever. But the views out of the window as we drove on the mountain roads were spectacular. On our last day of driving we stopped at several places to see the Curtain Fig Rainforest reserve, (only 2% of which is left due to deforestation) where you can see a giant fig tree that for all you Virginia people looks just like a tree version of the Marine Corps Museum in Occoquan. Here I also saw several bush turkeys in the forest which I promptly shook my fist at.

   
this was my attempt to get all of this massive tree in one picture. it took 6.

After a long and harrowing drive down the very windy other side of the mountain range we arrived on the beautiful eastern coast and into Cairns. Our group said our goodbyes after nearly a week of hiding from the police (did I mention that we had more people in the van than we were supposed to?) and campfire songs and then drunken campfire songs and just generally living on the road. Actually speaking of the police we managed to get the whole way from Darwin to Cairns and avoid being caught with more people in the van than were supposed to be and as soon as we get within 2 kilometers of Cairns we get pulled over because I have my arm out the window. Also because our driver was driving in two lanes at once but I was surprised when the officer came over to my side and told me that I could get a big fine just for having my arm propped on the open window. But luck was on our side, the cops neither gave us a ticket for anything NOR checked in the back of the car to find two guys riding around without seatbelts on. PHEW. Don’t try this at home kids. . . .  anyway I am now safely in Cairns enjoying the vibrant nightlife here (especially on my birthday hahaha) and spending the day at the waterfront drawing people and just generally hanging out.

However the internet is REALLY expensive here, 1 dollar for fifteen minutes! And all I really want to do most times is just check my email. At least I am used to going without now and can just deal with it until I go north to Port Douglas in the next few days.  Thank you to everybody that wished me a happy birthday! For reasons mentioned above I have been very brief and sparse in my use of the computer but I did get your messages and thank you!

Dear Screaming Masses of Adoring Fans:

Just letting you know that i am now in Cairns and i have many tales to tell of my adventures on the way here. BUT. Using the internet is 1 dollar for every 15 minutes and i can't use my own computer so it makes more sense if i just wait until i get to port douglas in a few days. But i had an excellent birthday last night. . . . from which i am still recovering . . . . . Australians are VERY generous with their Tequila . . . . but i should have even more to tell in a few days after snorkelling on the great barrier reef and hiking through the beautiful Daintree rainforest.

Darwin = Turkeys+Explosions+Beautiful People - Crocodiles

Yep Darwin. Its a pretty cool place all in all. I do think i wouldn't mind living here if i lived in Australia. Although i don't know how many places i could find good art jobs. Nevertheless i have had a very relaxing week of opening bank accounts and walking around and mailing stuff across the planet and walking around and other normal things. Its like i'm a part of society again! And about the video yes meri keeps chickens in the backyard of his not so suburban house. Free range baby! Of course his roommates ravenous dog kept eating all of the english muffin i was trying to feed to the chickens.

OH AND THE BUSH TURKIES.

Behold. The face of my NEMISIS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_vG7O3iHqg

This is the most annoying bird on the face of the planet. Known as the Orange Footed Scrub Fowl, or more commonly the bush turkey, i guarantee it is most foul indeed. Not only does it set up a GIANT pile of dirt in your back yard as its PERMANENT nest, but it is nocturnal. Imagine hearing that noise they make in the video twenty times louder and for half an hour intervals at 2AM. Not only that but if you listen they aren't just making that noise for their own amusement. Some other bush turkey far off in someone else's backyard calls back with the same noise. OVER AND OVER AND OVER. I have a small pile of rocks which i keep next to my tent so i can scare them away in the middle of the night. They always come back. Meri dug a big hole out of the side of their nest and used it as fertilizer for his garden so they spend all day scratching away trying to fill it back up. So if they spend all day scratching and all night squawking, when do they sleep?

Also in addition to bird calls all night long fireworks are very popular in Darwin. I mean really popular. People all over seem to set them off any time of day without occasion. I am not complaining i think that's totally awesome, but it can be a little unnerving to hear what sounds like gun shots all night long coming from not to far off in the neighborhood.

Other than the ongoing fight against the bush turkey scourge, life is pretty laid back in Darwin. We have gone to some barbecues and parties, gone fishing in a beach tributary and in the pool of an abandoned house (apparently there is a baby barramundi in there) and just generally hung out. Oh and i got to play banjo with a band in front of a whole party of people, that was cool. The banjo was missing a string but it was still awesome to get up there and do it.

Also all this craziness about crocodiles in Darwin is a bunch of crock. Much like the bats in Austin i think they are just a hoax put out there by the corporate tourism machine. . . . . maybe not, but I have been to the beach every day, gone swimming, and have seen no crocodiles. I don't think crocodiles even prefer to hunt on beaches. they are more of the wait-in-still-murky-swamps-or-rivers type. Ocean beaches are a bit too exposed for crocs i think. Apparently you can't swim here in the wet season because there are thousands of extremely deadly box jellyfish in the water but i am not too worried about being eaten by a 5 meter crocodile. maybe in kakadu or fishing in the mangroves but not at the beach like everyone keeps telling me.

OH and AMERICA, I have discovered my purpose in life. Like Marco Polo before me i am returning to my homeland to revolutionize the food world; throw your maple syrup away because in Australia they eat their pancakes with lime juice and brown sugar. i thought it sounded weird at first but i will never eat my pancakes with syrup again. apparently lemon is also acceptable. If all goes according to plan in three years time everyone in Europe will be eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and i will be able to order my pancakes at ihop with lime juice and brown sugar. Muahhahahaha.

As nice as my stay in Darwin has been i am off tomorrow for Cairns. I will be leaving in a relocation van with a british musician from Liverpool ( . . . . Paul Mccartney?) an irish guy and a retired farmer from Tasmania. I haven't met the other two but the farmer is quite a nice guy and has some very interesting life tales to tell. Unfortunately i did not get to make it to Kakadu on this trip. I was trying to find a ride but i had too much business with the bank account to set up and other stuff so i ran out of time. i only have a few more weeks here in australia and i need to get over to the east coast ASAP. So i think i will be seeing the Daintree rainforest instead. The worlds oldest tropical rainforest bordered by a pristine white sand beach. yep it exists.

http://www.tropicwings.com.au/images/gallery/Cape%20Tribulation.jpg

So if all goes according to plan i should be spending my birthday with a stiff drink on the beach in Port Douglas or Cairns then head up and see cool trees and stuff in the rainforest. Preceded by four days of driving across thousands of kilometers of boring tablelands.

Ah but it's spaghetti time and i'm starving!

Johnny PBnJ Generalizes About the People of Katherine And Harbors French Fugitives.

And in the blink of an eye (two days) i am now in Darwin.

Darwin . . . . oops I mean Darwin is biggest city i have seen for a long time. There was actually a traffic jam on my way in! Wow what a rare treat, just like old times. So my plan was to leave Alice by Saturday . . . today . . . and be in Darwin by Monday. I went about it in the usual backpacker way; by leaving a post-it note with my name and room number on the board in the hostel. But i wasn't entirely convinced that that was going to work so i went back to my room to put an ad on Gumtree (like craigslist) for travel partners to Darwin. Not five minutes later there is a girl knocking on my door saying that they are leaving for Darwin in 15 minutes. It was because of the post-it note not gumtree but i will employ both tactics in my attempt to get to Cairns. anyway so we left Alice at about 4:30 PM, a bit strange i know but they wanted to stay at a campsite for free rather than pay a hostel. So we drove an hour up the Stuart Highway (The ONLY road going north or south through the NT) and camped our first night on the road to Darwin. Here is a timeline i drew of my first night out:

WOW HOLY $&@* PICTURES UPLOAD SO FAST IN THE REAL WORLD!

Anyway yeah, it was alright for the first few hours but i woke up in the middle of the night FREEZING no thanks to the summer weight backpacking tent that i brought. Of course i love my tent but i may only be camping in it while i am up north here. But yeah, it was cold that first night. Especially because i couldn't have a fire. Leaving in 15 minutes i didn't have time to buy matches and the campsite had been scavenged clean by grey nomads. AHHH yes the grey nomads they are a new player in this story. Grey Nomads are people who are retired, whose kids have all grown up and left and they have sold their house and bought a Caravan and just live on the road. They will take months between cities just going from campsite to campsite trading stories about gas milage and cheap tourist parks with other grey nomads. And there are A LOT of them. i would say that at least 60 to 70 percent of the people at all the campsites were grey nomads. It sounds like a fun thing to live and a great way to finally see all of your big open country. But say what you will about their touristy frumpines and bathrobes, they are by far the nicest people you will meet in Australia, and that is saying a lot because Australians are generally very nice people. The next morning seeing that my breakfast was locked in the car with the german girls i was riding up with one guy offered me a spanish omelet with chorizo and a cup of tea, then later that night at the next campsite i was making my instant noodles with sausage over the campfire and this scottish expat comes over and dumps the remainder of his homecooked curry sauce in my noodles and offers me a beer! The generosity of Bill the Scottish expat goes even further but we will get into that just after i describe how freaking big Australia is. It was like my plane flight over here except in a car. It was cool to watch the scenery subtly change from the desert scrub of Alice to more green with bright white gum trees everywhere that usually only grow in creeks in Alice. Then there were these big rock formations around the Devil's Marbles then yesterday it started to get more and more green and palm trees showed up and NATURAL STANDING WATER WOW. It instantly and probably instinctually caught my eye the first time i saw it, a creek that actually had water in it. It was just a little bit mind you but it wasn't just being sucked right back into the ground or evaporating. Then later there were mountains and an actual river. 

But we drove all of that first day from early morning to late and stopped at a campsite just north of Elliot. The campsite was bigger and more accommodating that the town itself. And Bill offered me his curry sauce and a beer and then i noticed this guy and girl asking around pretty desperately about going to Darwin. I wasn't sure if we had space but i offered them a ride anyway. It turns out that they had been traveling with 5 other people in a van when they stopped for petrol in Elliot and the gas station attendant called the police for them having too many people in one car. The police were less than helpful about giving them options for getting north and just dropped them at the campsite without a tent or a blanket or any idea of how to get anywhere. Which seems unfair given that later the rest of their group showed up and these two seemed like the nicest people out of the bunch. But we offered them a ride in our car and Bill in his infinite generosity let them sleep in his car for the night. 

Night number two was much nicer, being 782 kilometers further north. The night was a little chilly but completely bearable and i slept through most of the night which was good. Then more driving and driving and driving until we ended up in the town of Katherine for lunch and to stock up on supplies at the grocery store. Of course i had been sleeping in the car on the way there and when i got out in the parking lot i wasn't quite looking and hit the car next to us with the door as i was opening it. A gentle series of taps but it left a little mark. All of a sudden the lady who owned the car came over and started giving a loud and public commentary on the height of my intelligence. I said sorry and that it was an accident and she kept going on so i said "Woah, chill out lady it was an accident and i apologized." Of course this didn't help anything and she got her boyfriend involved. After all was said and done i gave the guy 20 bucks to leave me alone and go buff his precious car. Which i would have done anyway so they didn't have to get all persnickety about it and cause a big fuss. And they didn't leave a very good first impression of the people of Katherine on a traveling stranger. But no harm no foul, i went inside and got some bread and peanut butter and jam and continued my good work. My good work being spreading the gospel of PBnJ. It seems that although peanut butter is sold all across the world, no one buys or eats it except for in the united states. So all through this trip of mine i have been getting people from across europe and australia to try peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and so far they have all enjoyed them. So if peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches suddenly become popular in Denmark, France, Germany and England, I can safely say it was my doing. 

But here i sit in Darwin; I have my tent set up underneath the house of one of the aforementioned utopian permacultureists and am thoroughly enjoying some much needed time off. We had a barbeque last night and then this morning we all went to go see Batman. It's like i live in a city again doing all these city things! I took a walk to see the Darwin waterfront. . . . and i saw it. It was definitely a waterfront. I was there. But thats about it. I am more looking forward to Kakadu National Park that should be good fun. And city slicker stuff here in Darwin as well. 

Adios Hermanos.

Yesterday i almost blew up a generator, a ute, my boss, all my friends, at least 100 cattle, brand new yards and almost started a bush fire across an entire property in one foul swoop. . . . . and it was my last day at delmore to boot. I finally secured a ride to Alice with my bosses son who had to catch a flight today (tuesday). So yesterday i was needed to help with drafting the 800 + cattle that had been mustered into the shiny new Dnieper yards, with their shiny new pneumatic crush and drafting system. basically a crush with air driven doors that open with the flick of a switch, yeah really handy. We spent the morning going really well and sorting about half the cattle before taking a brake and then we came back and started sorting again. At this point we needed to turn the air compressor back on which had run out of petrol. That was my job alone, of course what everyone forgot is that pumping fuel is a two person job here. One person to get up on the back of the ute and pump the fuel out of the drum and one person to hold the hose into the fuel tank and to check how full it is getting. I didn't know how to start the motor without a pull chain and Don came over and showed me much to his verbal dismay. Unfortunately i ALONE had been tasked with filling up the generator. And this is my part of the mistake; instead of asking for help before going ahead, i performed a complicated maneuver involving me holding the hose in the tank with my foot and reaching behind and above me to turn the pump in the back of the ute. It got the fuel out of the tank well enough, but i couldn't see how much was coming out of the hose. Too much. The fuel tank overflowed spilling petrol all over the radiator that was still hot from running all day before. 

WHOOSH.

Instantly half the generator and the fuel pump hose was on fire and i turned and ran. The only thing that was going through my mind was "get away the ute is going to explode." and then i realized "oh yeah, the ute is going to explode and kill everyone" so i turned around and got into the ute and drove it to the road 20 meters away fuel pump still on fire. By this point the tall grass that surrounded the compressor was all aflame and spreading slowly (thankfully) in the lack of wind. We got the 20 litre tanks of water off the utes and poured them over the flames (burning off my arm hairs and some eyelashes in the process) but the petrol was still spilling out of the fuel line and it just spread the flames even more. Then all the pressure blew out of the compressor and everyone ran as fast as they could. We are really lucky that no one was hurt or anything destroyed except for the generator. Luckily even the air compressor was fine, but that was still the dumbest mistake i have ever made. 

A lot can be said about Don's . . . attitude towards his staff but one of his finer aspects is that he is very quick to forgive for even huge mistakes. I'm sure that it's a product of having grown up in an environment where everything that can possibly go wrong eventually does. Part of why i think i was so promptly forgiven was that while Don drove off to find another generator for the compressor, the rest of us continued drafting the old fashioned and more "hands-on" way WITHOUT the pneumatic race. AND we finished it all, who needs all that modern technology anyway? But we eventually got the thing up and running again and had a much less eventful day tagging and branding calves. Although i spent the rest of the day pretty shaken up. 

After an early night i got up and said my goodbyes and drove to town with Baden. And here i am feeling very out of place suddenly surrounded by "tons" of people and buildings. . . .  but more on that later. It's time for dome dinner....FROM THE GROCERY STORE!!!!!

Last Day No. 8

So here I am. STILL at Delmore. If it had a voice it would be saying "You thought you'd be rid of me so easily did you" I have been trying to leave Delmore ever since i missed the ride to Darwin with Meri and Tom but due to there being no available utes or enough people to spare to go to town here i sit. tomorrow will be day number 128 in the outback. That is a lot of days.
The past week has been fairly relaxed when compared with the rest of the time i have spent here; the last month or two specifically. There are several new people here whom i have spent time training to take over the art and where all the bores are and other loose end kind of stuff. But not a lot of action. To tell the truth the break has been much needed. I love working in the yards and living the cowboy life but you DO need at least one day off once in a while, so the break feels good. Being in limbo however is starting to get a little frustrating but i am sure that i will be moving on with my adventures shortly.

I may have mentioned this in my last post but i have decided that the rest of my trip will be dedicated to getting back into the art swing of things. i came to delmore to get my creative pilot light going again and i feel like i have accomplished that. Now that i will have the time and tools, i want to kick in the afterburners. There are a lot of unknowing people in coffee shops in australia just waiting for me to draw them. Muhuhahaha.

I am definitely ready to get back to civilization though. If not just for the ability to have control over what i have to eat. Flavoring for food is what brought our species out of the trees i think. Some chimp was sitting in a tree eating a tasteless mass of fruit mush when they spied a shining red strawberry glinting on a bush just down below. They jumped down and stood on two legs and roared out in triumph over the other species for having left sauceless noodles and over cooked meat up in the trees. Also i need some new pants. The knee section of my diesel soaked jeans have finally given out. i tried an emergency sewing procedure but it was to no avail. They just ripped even worse right along the other edge that i sewed them on. And the entire butt-section of my other pants completely blew out from sitting on the rails of the yards and jumping up and down for too long. So i will definitely be in the market for some new pants when i get back to the real world . . . . whenever that is.

Petrol Burps and Bovine Sneezes on the Day That Shouldn’t Have Been.

This is another double post. chronologically the last post comes before this one!

As it turns out I will be here at Delmore for one more week. The guys that I thought I’d be getting a ride had to push their plans forward a bit and it ended up not working out. Although, I will still be meeting them in Darwin and Sydney later on in my journey. I thought I’d be leaving with them this morning but I guess it didn’t work out. Oh well, I can do a lot with another weeks pay anyway.

So instead of having my first day off in a month, I started the day by trying to fix a bore that would only work for a minute before shutting off. I spilled petrol on my clothes filling up the engine, I soaked my arms in petrol while cleaning the air filter then worst of all I got a mouthful of petrol trying to siphon the bad fuel out of the tank. That was an awful experience that I will hopefully never have to repeat. I’m very lucky that I didn’t swallow any. . . I think. . . .  

Most of the guys went back to university last week so my week has been spent teaching the new guy Craig where all the bores are and how the intricate details of how to get them started. I’m sure that his skills will come quite in handy what with Delmore being run by unskilled backpackers up until now. A typical conversation may go . . .

Britt: “ This is Carmensita, the fuel line is too long and is bent on this one, so you have to hold it up when you are bleeding it in order to get all the air out.”

Craig: “Why don’t I just cut it shorter and reattach it the next time the tank is empty?”

Britt: “Oh yeah, I guess no one ever had time to think about that.”

He is a pretty cool guy and a plumber by trade, which when you think about it, most of what raising cattle in the desert amounts to is a giant plumbing job. Pumping water out of the ground then over thousands of kilometers of pipeline and keeping all the tanks full is 90% of raising the cattle. It’s only twice a year that you muster up the ones that are big enough to sell.

But despite his plumbing prowess, we spent the better part of two days zooming around Dnieper trying to figure out why water was not pumping from the dam next to the Dnieper homestead, to the yards a K away. And after driving, tap switching, on-foot-pipeline following, two burst pipes and a half a day spent hauling a trailer over some of the worst roads in the property we finally got it pumping. Of course then as soon as the water started flowing into the yards the thirsty cattle rushed over and broke the floaters off of the troughs and messed with some pipeline so we lost probably 20,000 liters of water according to Don (so it was probably more like 5000 liters but still a lot). So that’s a project for today.

I spent the rest of the day ear tagging cattle at the Old Macdonald yards. Yes, there is an Old Macdonald farm here, the jokes have been made. Actually the homestead there says Old Macdonald Downs right on the roof. But while the yards there are set up so as to make moving the cattle around very easy, the crush (the contraption at the end of the race that holds the cattle down while you brand and tag them) is at such an angle to the fence, that I while tagging I was in the perfect position to be slobbered on and blood-gushed-on and just generally thrashed around by the poor not-so-defenseless cow in the crush. But apart from my arm nearly being broken every time, my arms got covered in cow slobber as they threw their head in every other direction than the one I needed them to look. The slobber itself is not so bad you can just wipe it off, and getting really dirty in the yards is part of the fun of the whole adventure, but I found out something interesting today. I am allergic to cow saliva. I hadn’t noticed before because I was always wearing a long sleeve shirt when I tagged but yesterday, with a t-shirt on my arms got really itchy only where the slobber touched me, then my eyes got kind of itchy and I started sneezing a lot. The same order of events as when I am around cats for too long. It wasn’t so bad and we got the job done but you never think about animals you might be allergic to that you are never in contact with. I might also be allergic to dolphins, lemurs and porcupines for all I know. But actually, the cattle sneeze sometimes as well, maybe they are allergic to humans.

Today a bunch of us are going into town for the big cattle show. Unfortunately I am among that group but I am happy to at least have most of the day off. There is a mixed group of nine cattle that need branding at the Delmore yards, but that’s not a lot of work and it’s only like 3 K’s away so I basically have the day off. Not to mention I will be in Alice for good in less than a week’s time anyway. It doesn’t really seem like my time here at Delmore will ever end, or that there ever was anything before this in my entire life. But it has been a great experience to look out the window and see the box I was living in shrinking in the distance. I have learned so much and experienced so many things in my stay here that I will be forever changed. But most importantly, I think I can safely say that I have accomplished what I set out to do by coming here, namely to find the drive and inspiration that I felt I had lost after college, and to free my self from the worries of a future that was all to clearly laid out in front of me. I do have goals, but sometimes being able to see the path to them too clearly, holds you back from molding yourself a better route, and coming to a place where there really is only what is right in front of you, has been enormously helpful in wiping my etch-a-sketch clean. Now when I get back to the states I will be in a boat with paddles, rather than a raft. Not to mention sitting in the back of a ute and going ballistic chasing cattle across the open bush is really great time. And I have met some great people and made friends in New Zealand, England, Morocco, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia of course, and I can officially say that I know 1/1,000,000^th of the population of Denmark. But my journey and my travels are not over by far, literally anything could happen in the next five days or in the two months I have before going back home. It is a bit weird to think that I am only 2/3rds done with my trip here, as I said earlier it feels like I’ve been living here a lifetime. 

The Complete History of an Almost Escape.

The past two weeks have not been kind to Delmore. The generator has broken, the homestead bore has broken, one girls foot was broken by a charging bull and another is lucky to be alive at all after flipping a ute, Don nearly sliced his thumb in half, two more utes are out of commission due to clogged engines, another person smashed a rental car on the corner of another rental car and a whole host of other small mess ups and accidents have plagued us in the past few weeks. All of that is on top of having tons of cattle work to do. I haven’t been able to write much let alone think I’ve been so busy. But the end is in sight. I am leaving on Friday. It was one of those chance decisions that pop up and you just go with. Tom and Meri the gardeners from utopia . . .  did I mention them before? They were the people that randomly showed up one night and dropped off Celine. Tom and Meri turned out to be two cool guys that are doing perma-culture gardening in the aboriginal communities up in Utopia. They showed up to pay Celine a visit and Meri mentioned that they were heading up Darwin way on Friday. I figure that I would be spending the time and money just trying to find friends and rent a car anyway so I might as well skip the expense and go with two guys I know.

Also I helped Matthew (Kathleen’s son) skin a cow today. There is a big cattle show coming up soon and Don was mustering in the Delmore West Paddock , but he accidentally hit one of them with his ute, breaking its leg. He can sell damaged cattle so he shot it and gave it to Kathleen and her family. But Matthew was the only guy in the group at the moment so Ji and I drove out with Matthew, Kathleen, Elizabeth and Denisa to clean the killa. I did the knife while Ji and Matthew pulled back the skin. It was quite an interesting experience. I think we would have stayed to finish and to eat part of it with Matthew and them but Ji wanted to go when the cattle truck passed by. I imagine we would have actually been warmer staying by the fire with the aboriginals, than in the big truck with windows that don’t roll up.

So remember a few weeks back when I almost crashed a ute? One of the girls just rolled it. And not just rolled it but flipped it front over back, that’s hard to do. Even more amazing than that is that she escaped with only some big cuts and what was either a concussion or minor shock. Those are pretty big injuries, but considering what the car looked like after all was said and done she will never have any idea how luck she is to be alive. It was thoroughly trashed. We think she may have been following to close behind another ute in the big dust trail that is kicked up and swerved off to the side into the gutter but we might never know. She had some pretty weird memory loss right when it first happened and she still can’t remember the crash at all. When I first showed up at Dneiper homestead and saw Chloe surgically removing glass shards from Bridgett’s (crashed the car) foot, she commented on the fact that the huge gash went right through her favorite tattoo. 45 seconds later she made the same comment as if it were part of normal conversation. It was like this for the rest of the day. She would be flipping through pictures on the digital camera and commenting on them, get to the beginning and flip through again making the same comments. Short term memory loss is a very spooky thing to deal with. Of course Don had sliced his hand open whilst castrating a bull so he drove her halfway to town where they met an ambulance. She is ok now, she is in more pain but we’ve all been telling her that’s good because it means the shock has worn off.

I think this may be my last post from Delmore Downs now that it is Wednesday night and I started writing this on Saturday….. hahaha. But my adventure is not over I still close to two months left in Australia before going back to the states…and then….

Bushfire.

2AM

Don bursts into my room and flicks the light on. My first reaction is to think “OH S%#T I’ve slept in three hours late and he’s going to shoot me now.” I was sort of half in and out of consciousness and then I heard the words “blah blah blah blah BUSHFIRE….” Then I woke up.

It’s amazing how one word can spike your adrenaline so high so quickly. Something so serious that the simple mention of it is enough to clear any other thought in your head.

There were two fires in Dneiper that had apparently started when someone hit a kangaroo, flipped their car then escaped and tried to make a fire to keep themselves warm in the night. The first one was fairly small and didn’t spread that far. The second one started as a kilometer long and got big enough to spread to the neighbors property.

We took a little longer to get ready than I thought we might on first hearing that there were fires raging out of control on the property but you have to consider that we have to make sure that we have absolutely everything we could possibly need to fight the unknown. We loaded 400 liter tanks with spray motors on the backs of the utes and got the grader ready and left by 4:15.

By the way a grader is a GIANT tractor thing that has a big blade on the bottom of it that drives across open bush and leaves behind it a perfectly flat dirt road as if by magic. And it happens to be a more useful firefighting tool than water. Fire can only spread if it has something to spread to. So the idea is to make a new road around the perimeter of the fire and to actually start fires around the inside edge of the fire side to burn away all the possible fuel for it. Then you just let it run its course and use the water to take care of any places where the fire is out of control or might jump the road.

Those two sentences comprised my 20 hour work day on Saturday. Actually part of it was spent pushing 40 massive bales of hay out of the top of a road train but that part was much less interesting that the fighting fires bit.

We started off for dneiper at 4:15 but then halfway through the grader got a flat tire. Something that doesn’t happen too often I don’t think. by 6 we had gone to the neighbors place and gotten a new tire (which are f__ing heavy let me tell you) and had started to change it. Don had a road train coming in to deliver hay in the middle of the night; it was actually the truckie that reported the fire in the first place; and while they fixed the flat I spent the next few hours unloading hay and gathering supplies and recruits from the homestead. By the time that I got to the first fire it was pretty much out. There was a new road around the perimeter and the whole inside was toatally burnt out, except weirdly enough, for the trees. It looks very weird to see just dirt and ash and flaming embers dotted sporadically by perfectly normal looking trees but that’s sort of what the aftermath looks like. The trees here must have evolved to live with the common occurrence of bushfires.

We spent a while patrolling the edges of the fire and shoveling dirt on the places where there was still open flame and smoke by the new road. The flipped car that was the origin of the fire looked the part. There were river flows of melted metal and glass that had cooled running out of the car. There was just nothing left but the siding and the frame. Luckily there was no one in the car, but unluckily they weren’t so good at watching campfires. Mopping up the first fire was exciting at the time but that was the most boring bit of the day compared to what came later.

After a very quick lunch we met up with Don, Masa and the grader that had just started making a road around the second fire. The plan for this much bigger and out of control fire was to start burning back at it from the inside of the perimeter road. We would do this with a thing called a firebug. It’s a can filled with a mix of diesel and petrol and a long long dripper with a flame on the end. You tip it down and a stream of flaming liquid drops out. And let me tell you, you have never seen a fire start so quickly. It has to do with the terrain more than the equipment. We dropped one match on the ground and absolutely instantly three bushes were two feet high in flames. When the firebug tips it lets out these tiny glowing blue dots that you seen hang in the air for a second and the instant even one of them hits a patch of grass, the whole thing goes up.

And so our convoy started into the bush. The grader in front, making a road, followed slowly by a ute with someone hanging off the side spreading fire to the inside perimeter, followed by a ute with a water tank on the back to put out any trees that might fall across the road or what not, followed by me in my own ute driving back and forth from the end of the convoy back to the beginning monitoring the whole situation and the state of the flames and directing the water ute if needbe. And so it went for several hours making a miles long road around the fire.

The fire is sort of less impressive than you might think it would be at first glance. “Bushfire” calls to mind towering 100 ft. walls of spiraling hellfire, but in real life from where we were making the road it was hard to tell that anything was happening apart from the clouds of black smoke rising from the other side of the hill. But I saw plenty of the danger from it in the fires that we started with the firebugs. One tiny bit of grass would be happily burning, minding its own business, then a small breeze would push by and like spilling water the fire would just move out onto everything the wind brought it to. And quickly it would eat everything 5, 10, 15, then 20 meters from the road and we could only see the flames working their way away from us and a charred ashen field between. Then the grader blew a gasket.

The grading and controlled burn had gone without a hitch, and we had surrounded the down wind side of the fire already and were just about to start working on the other half of the perimeter luckily, so we didn’t need everyone. And Don sent most of us back home. They had all been giving it their all and Masa and Ji had gotten up with Don and I at 2 AM so they had a well earned end to the day, But a chosen few stayed back to finish the job. Don, myself Chloe and Celine kept fighting for another few hours and it only got more intense after dark. This time I was on firebug duty, and I don’t know what the guys were doing with it during the day, but at night it might as well have been a flamethrower. During the day thwy would roll along and little fires would pop up here and there behind them; at night we were rolling along and I would watch the little blue dots fly out of the firebug and lite up the grass, then look back only a few meters to see an entire hillside on fire. Flaming trees falling, towering walls of smoke, everything, nothing but flames all down the road we just came from. And I started it all.

The rest of the perimeter went ok until the last hundred meters or so when Chloe and Celine in the follow-up ute got bogged in the sand just as the flames were licking up and were right in the path of all the smoke. We managed to tow them out just in time for the neighbor to show up and help finish the last hundred meters. All in all I worked 20 hours straight. But I have to say that I felt good every second of it. You might think that you would feel tired, and I could tell that my body was getting fatigued (especially from those stupid hay bales and hanging onto the side of Don’s ute) but my mind was ready to go as long as it needed to to get the job done. It’s the kind of thing where if you stop for even a second you won’t be able to start again but if you keep going you can go until you drop. Of course I didn’t feel tired until I was partway through the drive home, causing it’s own problems, but at least there wasn’t any fire around.

All in all the technique worked very well. I drove back today and checked on it and found just ash fields of what had been before grassen prairies and hills. Just black and grey. I have to say that this has been the most amazing thing that I have ever been a part of. I mean just watching the raw power of the bushfire puts you in shock. But it is a great feeling working in such a great team as we had and everybody working and doing what needs to be done to make sure that we win the fight. You don’t really notice how long you’ve been up for or how many snickers bars you ate instead of a proper lunch, you just do what needs to be done. And everyone that Don sent home was fighting to try to stay and keep going even Masa and Ji who had been up as long as Don and I so props to everyone on their hard work. We won the fight with no mistakes. Delmore:1 Fire: 0

And now it’s back to fighting steers.  

BUSYBUSYBUSY

So this is another backlog notice. It has been so busy with the cattlework until yesterday that i haven't had any time to post or even much to write. It's pretty hard to do anything but come home and crash right after feasting. so just read the post right under this one first if you care about timelines. however if you happen to be a time traveller you are probably used to stuff like this so don't worry about it. 

There have been major continental shifts in Delmore life over the past couple days. Tom, a fixture of Delmore life, has left for greener pastures, and the time of my new friends Espen and Rasmus has been cut unexpectedly and unfortunately short. Delmore downs will miss the touch of Danish in it’s accent for a long time coming. A few days ago it was just Rasmus, Espen, Tom and I, and now there are seven new backpackers. There are two English girls (Bridgett and Helen) an Aussie girl (Chloe) two Aussie guys (Masa and Ji) a German girl (Tina) and Moroccan girl (Celine).

The arrival of Celine last night was extremely unexpected. Ji was outside starting a fire and icame out to see how it was going. I said “oh yeah Ji that looks good” and then I realized that I was talking to three people that I had never seen before. You can’t imagine my shock. The only thing that was running through my mind was how did they get here? We weren’t expecting anyone because Don hadn’t told us anyone was coming let alone that we should pick them up and we are in the middle of nowhere. But it turns out that Celine’s boyfriend and a friend of his work on perma-culture in the aboriginal communities in Utopia so they are familiar with the area and they just dropped her off. I had a very interesting chat with one of the guys about working with the aboriginals and how different projects work or don’t, and about how the Australian government doesn’t really understand what the aboriginals want or need. Waves of projects come in to the communities to try to help bring them housing and this or that not really understanding the aboriginal worldview and the projects always fail. For instance, western people live in houses, so we see people sleeping in the dirt by the fire and we think “oh they must be poor or uncomfortable”. But that is how they have lived for all their lives and generations before that, so if you come in and build them a house they are very likely not to see it as a house as an interestingly stacked pile of firewood. And so on. So they are working on building gardens and orchards WITH the communities and in the right places so that tey will feel they have more ownership of it and be more likely to take care of it. But they were very cool guys and Celine’s boyfriend lives in Darwin so I may have found myself a place to stay when I go up there.

Anyway, so I learned to drive a car with snow on the road. I learned how to drive a manual car driving cattle through the Australian bush. Not only am I starting to get the hang of driving stick, but I did it while herding cattle in the bush. You want the cattle to go really slow so they will eat while they are walking and not burn too much energy, so you end up troding along in first maybe second gear and going that slow in the bush it’s really easy to stall out. So you get a lot of practice starting into first which was the last thing I was trying to figure out how to do smoothly. But I got it and I managed to get in some tearing around chasing cattle because at the end they decided that they were just going to turn around and go the wrong way. While I did do what I think was a good job herding the cattle, I did manage to put a nice big spiderweb shaped crack in the windshield. We were walking them along the edge of a creek and there were suddenly a lot of low scrubby trees around, which the v8 ute I was driving usually passes through like they were paper, but I found a branch that was just a bit too big AND bumped over some big logs at the same time. I had to dig the back wheels out of the sand and seriously work the four wheel drive, but we made it out.

            I have also been given the full (or mostly) bore tour of delmore so I am now set to do some bore runs, and there are new people to look after the shop if need be so I should see a bit more action than before I think. I’m moving up the ladder.

            It’s funny, it’s really hard to think of what else has happened these past few days despite the fact that so much crazy stuff has been happening. The crazy is second nature to me now I suppose. *eye twitch

            But it is very strange having people that were like family just up and leave, and I’m not really used to seeing this many new people all at once for a place so remote. But I have so many friends here, I’m sure we will be even close over the next few weeks as we live and work together we will be a new family.

Also with Tom leaving,, that makes me not only the oldest person here, but the one here for the longest which is a bit weird being a sort of elder on a cattle station. I didn’t really see it coming.    . . . . . . .

And then I fell asleep while writing and now I can’t remember what I was thinking about. . . .

The Fight Goes On.

(All of this was written on the 15^th of June so it’s a bit out dated)

Oh boy what a day. I suppose it’s been a few days since I’ve posted on the blog. We have been doing work in the yards and mustering and driving cattle everyday since. . . . I don’t know it feels like forever now. All I can hear is mooing in the back of my mind right now. Last Saturday we had the day off, truly off. Tom, Esben, Rasmus and I went to town and watched the prologue for the Fink Desert Race. That is a huge 500 km offroad car and motorbike race in the outback. It was pretty cool to see all of the motorbikes and quads going all out on the dirt tracks. Also to have another day in town to chill out was nice. But then we started the mustering again.

At this point I am actually starting to get used to the cattlework. I am definitely less afraid of the cattle and am certainly more confident blocking one when they charge. I have started to be able to tell what they are going to do by the sounds they are making and where to put myself so that I can avoid being hurt and get them to go where I want them at the same time. It may be less exciting to write about or to read, but for me it is a big step. Being able to overcome an instinctual fear and to think on my feet. Becoming acclimated to life as something adventurous as a cattleman is pretty cool if you ask me.

Over the past few days I have been doing more of the before mentioned eartagging as well as ear marking which means actually cutting a little circular chunk out of the ear to mark them somehow. Again I don’t really know what it is for I just do as I’m told haha. I got to brand a cow this morning that was interesting. I can’t tell how much it hurts them, some of them scream and kick and some don’t really do anything when the iron is pressed on. Either way the cattle are pretty hardy.

Today we were working on branding and tagging a large group of calves and I had the lucky job of filling up the race. Calves of course haven’t been in the yards before and most are only a week or two old, so they are scared and don’t know what to do. But most of the other cattle go away from you when you walk towards them but the calves just freak out and go in all directions. It’s like when you throw a football at the ground try to guess which way it will bounce. (haha an AMERICAN football that is) They just go crazy and smash themselves into the fence or they just freeze up and block all the other ones from going where they need to go. So I ended up getting kicked like 10 times today trying to get them up the race. And boy can they kick hard. One of them got me right square in the side of my right shin and another kicked me on the back of my left knee. Both of my legs are now pretty bruised and swollen but otherwise fine. I look pretty funny walking around tonight especially considering what happened later. But yeah, the calves may be crazy but they are so adorable. Especially the newborn ones; they can’t even walk so we have to pick them up and carry them from yard to yard. If they stayed that size, and that calm, I would love to have a little baby cow running around the house as a pet. But they quickly get to be 1000 pounds and pretty wild very quickly.

So we worked all today in the yards and that was good, but then it got to be almost sunset as we finished up. Then we had to get the cattle back to the paddock where we mustered them from. Rather than use the cattle truck tomorrow, Don decided to have us walk them the 4 or 5 kilometers back to the paddock. This is the classic cattle drive where there is a huge long group of cattle with a few guys at the back and a few guys running up and down the sides to keep the cattle in line, except we are in a ute and on motorbikes instead of horses. Theoretically it should have been pretty easy, we were just sending them back the same way they came in and there would be less of them this time. But we had no radios, the sun was down, there was no moon and it was actually RAINING. I know! Of all the times! At first we did pretty well, I was in the car with Don driving helter skelter through the bush, and then we started to lose containment. They were starting to go off the road to both sides and then it started to drizzle. For whatever reason that is a signal to the cows that it is time to stop and eat so they all just split up and started grazing. And then the wheel fell off of Esben’s quad bike. So in order to try and get them all back into the group Don had Esben and I go ON FOOT. There probably aren’t very many people in the world who can say that they have driven cattle on foot at night. Now I am among those chosen few. Our job was to walk through the bush and make sure that we didn’t miss any straggling calves and to get them back into a group. For the most part it worked. I started walking north screaming at the top of my lungs, “WALK UP WALK UP!” Then I noticed some cattle to my left and I brought them back to the group but then we crossed the road, or some road anyway, keep in mind it was pitch dark and I didn’t have a light. The cattle were meant to stay on the road but more so we want them to stay in a group so I pushed all the ones I could see towards the group. At this point I swear I kept going straight north or in the direction I started. I pride myself on my excellent sense of direction, but apparently it’s not excellent enough to handle walking the outback at night with out a flashlight and driving cattle at the same time. But apparently I lost my way big time. I think that everyone did. Every motorbike that passed me said they had no idea where the road was and that they couldn’t see anything. I told them to try being on foot. Anyway at some point Don showed up with the ute and showed Esben (who I had found elsewhere in the bush) and I where the road was and we managed to get most of the cattle going again up to the gate to the holding paddock, (which also happens to be the airstrip for the homestead) and then somebody told Don that one of the new guys was missing. Oh yeah I forgot two new Aussie guys showed up. So we hopped on the back of Don’s ute and started calling and searching for him back in the direction of the yards. At this point down a quad bike, a motorbike-r missing and Don’s ute searching for him the cattle were a lost cause. We just opened all the gates for them and eventually they’ll smell the water in the holding paddock and come in on their own. But we searched and searched and I turns out that he had kept going on the road like he was told and ended up way ahead instead of behind. We were all glad to see him safe.

All in all today was the hardest day yet I think. Any way I am the most tired and hurt I have been so far even more than the seventeen hour day I worked last week. That time we had an assembly line going and I was just bending over and eartagging most of the day. But today was jumping fences, blocking big angry mama cows, battling calves and on top of it all basically walking home and shouting my lungs out. At least you get good cardio at this job. I’m sure that there is stuff that I’ve missed (haha like the fun I had this morning driving the Subaru with the broken engine to the yards) but I’ll have to save it. I am indescribably tired. Sleep.

And now another day is done. Spent loading steers onto our cattle truck, branding and tagging calves and drafting steers to get ready for the road train to come tomorrow.morning EARLYEARLYEARLY. But the past few days have been great, Don’s girlfriend has come to visit and she has cooked us wonderful gourmet meals every night. And we get wine! The work is hard and there is not much time to sit down and think, but life is pretty good right now. Even for Delmore life, which I always an adventure. Although I haven’t had time to draw or play my banjo in a week or so hopefully I will get the right side of my brain some exercise soon. It’s funny how doing a job seemingly 24 hours a day, that requires you to be thinking in the moment and react quickly gets you thinking in such different ways that a job where you have to be analytical or can just think about things all day. I can tell that I am thinking differently now than I was just a week ago when I had time to sit in the shop and reflect and write and draw. Now I am working physically all day and have to use my action instincts all day and I can’t seem to access my creative brain at the moment. It’s not that it won’t come back, my point is that I can see how people really are products of their environment.. . . and now I can’t remember what I was saying because I fell asleep and now it’ s another day later. This one marked by the arrival of three new girls, an Aussie a German and a Brit, and by the leaving of Tom, the four month hard-hitting world traveling Danish Delmore veteran.

Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Cowboys.

(For those of you who enjoy reading chronologically, you should read the post directly below this one first. I have a bit of a backlog because of bad internet and the lack of time as described below)

I need to find some other way to describe how my days are going because everyday is seeming to be more crazy than the last, and I can’t keep saying “Today was the craziest day of my life.”

AND YET

I got up at 6AM and was tagging, drafting, counting and mustering cattle until well past midnight. This made the last muster look like we were putzing around twiddling our thumbs. I spent the first part of the day as the designated ear tagger.

In addition to a big colored ear tag that designates whether the cattle is a steer or heifer, or is from Dnieper or Delmore; there is a smaller button shaped tag that goes on the other ear that has a particular code on it. Several years ago some of the (quote) “stupid f___ing backpackers” put tags with the wrong code on all the young cattle. Now several years later the cattle are huge, ready to sell and need to be retagged. So it was my job to reach into the cows ears check the tag number, and if it was wrong or just didn’t have one to cut off the old one and tag the ear. Luckily there is a big clamping device that holds the cow in place by the neck so I could do my work and Rasmus could get a tag on the tail. (He got the crap job) My job was made harder though by the face that the cow could still move vertically in the clamp, and though they couldn’t break out they could sure thrash about and with a knife in one hand and my arm shoved between the head and the metal fencing I could stand to lose a finger or break my arm very easily. But I got the hang of tagging pretty quickly and the other guys did very well on their second day in the yards, Don said we all did an excellent job, which is a big compliment from him.

My new hat is definitely well broken in by now. When Don releases the clamp on the cow, I have to put my hat in front of its face so it won’t charge out when we don’t want it to. And more than once the cow shoved its nose right in my hat and blew a bunch of slime in there in addition to the blood that was on it from the horns we were cutting off. Cutting the horns off, does something to affect the growth of the cow at a certain age, I’m not totally sure about the reason though.

The first part of the day we processed 200 of the “truckers” that I drafted out the other day. Which went from early in the morning to three or four when the road trains showed up.

All is normal in the Delmore yards, save for the mooing of the cattle in the pens and the occasional “WALK UP WALK UP!” Suddenly a grave hush falls over the cattle, cockatoos stop squawking, the dog growls slightly. One worker notices pebbles on the ground start to bounce and shake. The workers take off their hats and look to the south where a billowing thundercloud of dust can be seen growing in the distance behind a dull groan. As the cloud grows huge in the foreground birds take flight and cattle on the road outside flee in terror as what was before an ambient noise grows into a huge chest rumbling growl of 15 electric guitars cranked up to 11. The train powers off and silence returns once again. A faint whistling can be heard in the distance as the dust clears to reveal the opening door of the cabin. 

ENTER THE COWBOY.

I had no idea they still existed. I thought ok so the cattlemen drive around in utes and yeah mustering is crazy but when the truck arrives we just load them up and they drive them to wherever, end of story. Nope. This guy was the real deal. With a cigarette in one hand, a bullwhip in the other and no hint of hesitation he jumped right in with the craziest of cattle by himself. At one point the cattle were bunched up tight and he jumped up on their backs AND WALKED OVER THE GROUP OF 15 COWS.

Now they didn’t have cars in 1877 so what sort of truck does a 21^st century cowboy drive? He drives a ROAD TRAIN.

Yes the road train. It is exactly what it sounds like. Imagine a normal eighteen-wheeler. Now make it a double decker. Now, make it THREE TRAILERS LONG. We have pictures of our land cruisers far in the distance and the road train right next to them doesn’t even fit all the way in the picture. Just massive. And by the way, there were two.

We were finishing up in late afternoon when the trains arrived and Don decided we had time to do some more mustering before the sun went down. Now I have maybe described before what mustering IS but not exactly what that entails. Mustering is where we go out to the paddocks where the cattle live most of the time and we go “collect” them. This involves using three or more guys on motorbikes and two utes driving going absolutely apes#&T in the bush, flushing out the cattle and herding them in this case into some portable yards to load onto a road train. I of course took my usual position on the back of Don’s ute. I thought that driving around the yards was crazy, HAHAHAHAHA. How naive I was. When Don is mustering in a ute it’s as if he is running through the bush on foot, completely disregarding the fact that he is driving a car completely in predator mode. Zoom forwards into a grove of trees BEEP BEEP BEEP! Lurch to a stop. Reverse at high speeds zoom forwards again. Cattle running on all sides and motorbikes swarming around and poor Esben and I holding on for dear life in the back of the ute. All of this is completely off road, trees be damned we don’t have the bull bars on the front of the utes for nothing. I managed to capture a bit of it on my ipod before it just got too crazy to keep filming. Half of the video you can just hear “TREE TREE TREE!”  “WATCH THAT…. OH S*#T DUCK!” It’s a bit long but I will do my best to upload it to facebook.

But we (and by we i mean the cowboys) managed to get most of the cattle into the train (which I can’t imagine driving that road train out into the bush like that but he did it) except for a few that managed to jump a fence (yes cattle can jump very high especially if you chase them with a Toyota) Then it was back to the yards, by now well after dark, for a night shift of loading the nearly 300 cattle and finishing up the tagging of the crazy fat angry ones that I knew so well from the other day. And thus the night went until almost one in the morning. By the end of it I had worked 17 hours with only small breaks in between for lunch and dinner. And when I say worked I don’t mean I clicked away on the computer for 8 hours, And I feel exhausted (still a day later) but great. It is a good feeling to both do such hard work and have such excitement. I definitely have one of the coolest jobs around no question. I much prefer the exhilarated but wiped out feeling of having run around working my butt off all day, to the boring lazy back-aching wrist-cramping eyeball-frying computer work of a desk job.

When compared with yesterday, today was a very strange and quiet day. We all definitely got off to a late start having gone to bed around two fifteen and we all felt like we had a hangover. Later on, Kathleen and the painters showed up and did a good set of paintings and then Don came and took me over to the yards where he shot two sick cattle and we dragged them out of the yards with the ute. I had to bury just the heads of the cows because they had big infections on them and Don didn’t want the living ones to get sick. Then it was back to the yards where he and I drafted and watered some cattle then Tom showed up and he and I checked some tanks. All in all it was a pretty boring day. (When compared to yesterday of course)

Revenge is a dish best served fried with onions.

Ok so I’ve done yard work before but this was something else. I should post pictures to describe more accurately how this whole thing worked; but essentially there was a group of cattle that we had to sort into the different types. One that would be sold or Truckers, ones that would be sold in a different weight category, Fats, ones that would be released back to grow a bit more, Bush, one for Calves one for big females, or Cows and one for the Race which is the chute you send the cattle up to get branded at the end. Each of the different categories has a different holding pen and in the middle of them is a circular chamber about ten or twelve feet in diameter, with a door leading into each one. So someone had to be down in the middle area pushing the cow into a certain door and making sure that they went in the right door. You guessed it, that was my job. And these cattle today were extra big and extra pissed off. The other guys and James the helicopter pilot mustered the cattle yesterday from a paddock where Don keeps all the big ones and the ill trained ones. And the sound of the helicopter in the morning really got them going. They were actually all right in the beginning but they got progressively bigger and more pissed off. I have to say that I’m not actually frightened of chasing the cattle around even in a small pen, if they have room to move away from you they will with nearly no problems, but I have seen how high these bulls can jump and buck and there isn’t really a lot of room in that circular chamber. If they went crazy and I wasn’t able to get up on the fence that would be it for sure. Especially if it had horns. The Fat ones were the worst by far. The bush gate ones were a bit wild but they just went right in and the trucker ones went pretty quietly but of course the big ones had to be the problem children.

Then there was the cleanskin bull. A clean skin is one that has managed to avoid being trapped and branded and this one was not only older but it was a bull. It was three or four years old and had never been in the yards before or delt with a helicopter and now these monkeys were trying to get it into this tiny litte pen, and it was PISSED. It huffed and puffed and kicked sand everywhere, bucked stamped, bent two steel beams of the fence and broke one welding joint. Needless to say I was well up on the fence before Don even opened the gate. I guess we’ll have to deal with him tomorrow somehow. Hee hee nervous laughter.

The ambient fear level I would say was pretty high today. Every time Don let another one or two Fat ones into the pen I could feel myself tense up my stomach and muscles and brace for impact, as if tensing up would do ANYTHING. I would be but a rag doll if they charged. Which many of them did. On most days in the yard the cattle are very well behaved and there are only a few crazy ones that give you the stories to tell. Not today. Today my stories are about the ones that actually DIDN’T kick at me or chase me up the fence. Every so often I would have to stop and think to myself….”This is you’re idea of a f___in vacation?” If I die here at least I have no one else to blame. Although if I’m going to die here at Delmore, I want it to be in style. It has to be in a flaming ute driving off the side of a cliff and crash into the helicopter exploding into a herd of stampeding bulls. Or fighting a bushfire. But as scary as it was Don told me that I should get a medal for not showing my xfear, which I took as a big compliment. But not showing my fear was more out of self-preservation I think than an attempt to impress the others. The cattle are fairly stupid, as far as stupid goes, but sensing the fear of something you are bigger than and angry at does not require much brain power. They know when you are afraid of them and they take that advantage to charge. Also if you let your fear get the better of you, you won’t be paying attention to the hoof that whizzes past your ear. It’s better to just suck it up and keep them moving. But still when you are standing behind a cow whose leg alone is as tall as you are, and you know it can’t see you it is very hard to get your self to reach out and push on its butt. By the way that is actually how you DON’T get kicked. If you are standing behind a cow that doesn’t know you are there and you just start yelling for it to move you will scare it and their first reaction will be to kick. But if you reach out and gently put your hand on their tail or back leg they will know you are just some pesky little monkey that can’t really do them harm anyway and they should just walk away. Also most of how you direct them where to go is through body language rather than making noises at them. In fact as I found today, sometimes making noises at them just scares them more and its better to just stand behind and where they can see you and to keep your arms out so you look bigger. You have to let them know that you are ALLOWING them to go in to the gate and not chasing them through it. Fear is no way to rule.

Haha, and Buster the trusty failure dog showed up halfway through. Buster is the worst cattle dog in the outback. He does go after the cattle, but the only problem is that he always chases them AWAY from where you need them. Also the cattle think that he is a dingo so they get more agitated. We always try to leave him at home but he always wants to follow us., and usually he just turns around and goes home but this time he ran the 5 or 6 kilometers to the Delmore yards. So he spent the rest of the day chained to the ute barking and whining away. He certainly is a very good-looking dog but his looks are only fur deep. And he sheds all the time.

And after a very long day of nearly being kicked in the face by angry cows. I was able to take my anger out on some very well cooked steak at the end of the day. It felt and tasted that much better.

But I think tomorrow we will weigh, brand, tag, castrate and check the teeth of the cattle (to find out their age) then the giant road train will show up and take away one hundred and sixty of the probably 500 cattle in the yards. Then more mustering. Its going to be a long month I think. 

Kukembak gudwan daka.

Today was a good day. I had a wonderful day off from working in the store. I spent it shoveling a mixture of algae and cow manure out of water troughs. It was quite relaxing. Actually I do much prefer the physical work to sitting around working the store, I mean that is the whole reason I came out here anyway. I have the rest of my life to sit at a desk.

I don’t really understand how the manure actually gets in to the water in the quantities that it exists in there. I mean for the most part, the cattle face the water mouth side first. They don’t really have much incentive to make the effort to turn a 180 and do their business. Not to mention they have a MILLION other acres in which they can and do do that business.

As Rasmus and I were cleaning one of the troughs, there were probably about a hundred cattle around trying to get to the water and drink. They would come in the gates and get really close and look mad at us for being in the way. Also we had Buster there with us and I think they thought he was a dingo or something because they made really angry sounding noises that I have never heard them make before. I was getting a bit nervous that they might charge us so I chased them out of the yards and I put a stick across the opening in the gate. Just one small stick. The cattle were so funny, they wanted to get in and go to the water so badly and they could very easily just walk right through the stick and not even feel it. But they would just walk up to it, look at it and think about the problem in front of them for a while. Then they would look back at the other cattle as if saying “Help me out here guys, I can’t figure this out” Then they would try to go under the stick and realized that they were too big. Eventually after much impatient mooing and blankly staring at the stick they would give up saying “I just don’t think it’s possible.” 

The troughs vary WIDELY in their hygienic condition. The first on we cleaned was filthy beyond all imagining, but it didn’t smell that bad. The next one was less dirty, but smelled revolting, Algae and manure soup. But then the very last one we did I would say was clean enough to drink out of. . . .  maybe. There was a bit of sand at the bottom and a little algae on the sides but the water looked clean enough. Fortunately I had plenty of water in my pack so I did not have to find out its cleanliness.

Later on it we went out to Red Rock (a big rock formation in the middle of a wide open plain) to watch the sunset and what a sunset it was. Keep in mind that the sunset is fantastic here every single day. But usually there aren’t any clouds to make it really interesting. But today there were big puffy well defined clouds all over and the colors were spectacular. The coolest thing was that the sun was actually behind the clouds, but as it sank to the horizon it lit up the clouds making it look like the clouds were actually behind the sun. I’ve never seen anything like it before. And so an hour was spent cracking open beers, messing around with buster, chucking rocks off a cliff, hollering profanity at the top of our lungs with no one around to hear and deciding that we had it way better here than backpackers who just go to Sydney, see the opera house and blow all their money on booze.

Two days later......

We made a really awesome lasagna the other night. I thought it was going to be way too rich because we put like 500g of cheese and a kilo of meat and made the sauce with butter and flour but it turned out really well.

And Saturday (was that yesterday?) was probably the busiest day at the store that we have had since I got here. Family after family showed up and cleaned us out of soda and candy and canned corned beef. I think one of the other station stores in the area closed so they all decided to come to Delmore before their kangaroo hunt. I don’t think they got anything that day by the way but Tom saw some of their drawings in the sand when he went to check a bore. They use the sand drawings as sort of signs or maps for other groups to say “we didn’t find crap over here, go check that way…etc”

I am starting to pick up on simple parts of their language though. For instance they say “ka-la” when they are finished with something. As if to say “ok we’re done here” or I’m finished with this. And they seem to add the suffix “----ielo” to mean give that to me. So if they wanted bread they would say “bread-ielo”. And certain words of theirs I think came from English. For instance I think they call cars “motokai” from motor car. And banana is “bananan” HAHA and there was a girl Megan who worked here when I first got here and for what ever reason they call her Megaleen. I’m not entirely sure why that is easier to say but it is what it is. I would think that this was just one person mispronouncing the words but they all seem to say them the same way. 

They also make use of a lot of sign and body language in general conversation. For instance if they are saying that something is going to happen later on they point at the sky and move their hand across it, meaning when the sun has moved to a different point. And there are a bunch of signs that Kathleen uses that may or may not actually have any meaning or relation for that matter, to what she is trying to tell you. I haven’t really figured that out yet.

It’s funny how certain this do get lost in translation for language to language. The grammar of one language may cause some one to say certain things in different ways when they are learning a new language. For example if they are trying to ask about amounts of things we have in the store they just say “Something? Or nothing?” but it is the same with everything else. Like when the phone rings and I answer it Kathleen always asks “Someone? Or no one?” or in the store it’s “Meat. Something? Or nothing?”

I might be completely wrong about all of the language stuff but I think it’s all pretty interesting. It’s not like being in France or Italy or something, this language and culture is COMPLETELY foreign to me but you do pick up on things. I don’t know if I’ve already written about this but it turns out that they certain colors they wear mean different things, like they wear white to funerals (white is the color associated with death for them) and they wear red if they want to fight or find a date. Also different families won’t shop in the store at the same time. They seem to value privacy and staying out of the business of others. If Kathleen’s family is in the shop and Freddie’s family shows up, Freddie’s family will wait outside until Kathleen’s is done shopping. I think it’s a politeness thing, they are obviously friendly to each other I think they just respect each others privacy.

Another interesting thing is the way they shop. Don calls it a “waterhole mentality” which makes a bit of sense. If there is a lot of something on the shelf they will buy A LOT of it. But if there are only a few left, even of something they want they won’t buy more than one or two. I think they look at our store as a sort of store room and if they see that supplies are running low they will try to save for the supply drought. Haha except for soda. They will always buy soda.

I am so glad that I got this chance to come out and work in this place. This certainly is as true of an outback experience as you can get. I think that most people just come to Alice, look at the aboriginal art in the galleries, go for a hike in the mountains, see uluru and never actually speak once to an aboriginal person. But here I am getting offered bush plums by Freddie Jones, listening to Kathleen tell me about the Kangaroo hunt while I mix her paint and pushing around cattle and hurtling across the bush at 90 mph in a ute. I am very lucky to be able to do this. Haha and get paid for it.

I should be going to bed actually as there will be mustering in the morning. I may get to see the helicopter action this time! Last time I just did the yard work but I may be in a ute while the helicopter herds the cattle. It should be pretty awesome.

OH ALSO BIG NEWS. I have decided on a date for my departure from Delmore. The 11^th of July. That will make it four months exactly since I got here on March 11^th. I was thinking of leaving a bit earlier, but the combination of getting to muster more and needing money (or lack of spending more like it) was worth staying another few weeks. But the plan is still to hang out in Alice for a few days, maybe do a hike on the Larapinta trail, then try to find some backpackers heading to Darwin, then around to Cairns and beyond. I want to be in Cairns or nearby Port Douglass for my birthday though.

It’s weird how long the month ahead of me seems even despite the rapid pace at which the last three have flown past me. But the expansion of the universe continues to speed up I suppose.

OH AND I THINK I SAW THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION TONIGHT. We were out doing a night run checking bores and I looked up and thought I saw a plane, (which was weird enough) but it didn’t blink or have red lights on it and it was too bright. Especially considering that it flew in a slow arc across the sky rather than in some what of a straight line like planes. I can’t think of any satellite that would be that bright either, and I have seen plenty of satellites out here. Yes the sky is so clear you can watch man made object pass by in orbit. It’s funny I have started to be able to tell my direction by the stars here. I guess its one of those things like learning to read street signs in the city. Although it’s much more useful because you can always tell what direction you are heading no matter what the ground or the road is doing.

Ok I think that three pages in word is enough for one blog post and I have to get up early anyways. MUSTERING. I’m excited.