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….