The creek is shallow and the water is far browner than I’ve become used to; it’s muddy, almost dried up.
‘It’s a good job we didn’t go down to Osmiridium. We'd have had to filter all the water. Must be unusually dry around here at the moment,’ Jyrki comments, poking his hiking pole into the creek.
Where did they come up with a name like that? It sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi novel.’
‘It’s a real word. It’s a metal related to platinum, a compound of osmium and iridium if I remember right. Maybe people have mined it around here; there’s been tin mining in Melaleuca, too.’
‘What can you make out of it? Rings?’
‘Small things that are put under hard sustained pressure.’
‘Such as?’
I smile wryly at my question; I only spot the double entendre after I’ve said it. Now would be the time for a light-hearted compliment.
Jyrki’s face lights up; you can see the light bulb switching on in his head. I wait patiently.
‘The nib of a fountain pen,’ he says.
Jyrki
The location of the creek’s outlet is constantly moving. The exact spot where it decides to burst a sandbank can shift by a couple of kilometres at a time. Sometimes there are two outlets at once. The shallower one, the one that sometimes almost disappears, is one we should be able to wade across easily.
The map gives us a choice of routes. I go for the one running adjacent to the sandbank.
Of course, there’s no path on the sandbank, just some tufts of grass and a dune whipped up by the wind. Perhaps that row of marks, like melted dents in the ground, could be the prints from yesterday’s hiking boots.
My feet sink into the sand, and in no time so much sand has come in through the top of my boots that I can’t move my feet inside them at all; it feels as though they’ve been set in a plaster cast. My boots are like dead weights. I can only guess at the route. I know the general direction, of course, but where exactly are we supposed to cross the shallow river outlet? I try to look for signs along the steep embankment on the other side, anything at all.
She asks how long this is going to take. I tell her we’re nearly there.
To the left is the ocean, to the right the brown, deep and rapid-flowing New River Lagoon outlet and behind that an embankment reaching up towards the sky. We stagger along the bank like two insects in a sandpit. Although by now there should be weeks of routine in my thigh muscles, in this loose sand I have to lift my legs like a stiff arthritic mutt.
Then I see something further up the embankment. It’s almost like a set of steps up the hillside; a few horizontal logs and something that looks like iron chains glinting beneath the sand. I stand there catching my breath. My face and neck are covered in fine sand carried on the wind and stuck to my sweat. I am the sandman, from head to toe.
But before we can reach what apparently passes for a path we first have to cross the second outlet from the lagoon. The water comes up to just above the knee — a welcome reason to take off our boots and empty half a kilo of crap out of each one.
Once we reach the other side it will be impossible to put socks on our wet feet without getting them caked with sand. Must remember to turn them inside out later on and give them a shake. If we don’t, they’ll chafe like sandpaper.
The weight of the rucksack pulls me backwards as we scale the almost vertical embankment. Time and time again we have to grab on to the iron chains and whip more sand up into our faces. Some of the logs laid down to form steps have come away from the pegs keeping them in place. Behind some of them, the sand has flowed away or been scattered by the wind so much that the logs are like shelves wobbling in the air.
She’s huffing and puffing her way up the embankment in front of me.
Every time her foot slips another cloud of sand billows into my face. I shout up to her to keep a safe distance. If she falls and I’m too close behind her, then we’ll both be screwed. She turns to look down at me and says that I’m the one that should keep a safe distance by not coming up so fast.
Heidi
An aluminium dinghy has been pulled far up on to the shore, for understandable reasons, and tied to a wooden pole with a rope and a couple of carabiners. The oars have been propped upright in a piece of plastic piping nailed to the side of the pole.
On the opposite shore, about a hundred metres away, there appears to be another boat and a colourful buoy raised on a pole.
On this side, too, there is a signpost and a board with instructions. The instructions are also given in pictures — probably for us foreigners and all the crowds of illiterate people that surely swarm here every day. Working out the boat system is like doing a minor Mensa puzzle: first you take this boat, row to the opposite shore and leave all your stuff. Then you take the other boat, tie it to the back of the first boat and row back with both of them. Pull one of the dinghies far up on to the shore and tie it down securely, then row back to the opposite shore with the other boat and tie it up ready for the next customers.
I wonder how many people have thought: Screw this. Anyone could cross the river and just leave both boats on the other side. Arriving here and seeing both dinghies on the opposite shore would be a sight you wouldn’t forget for a while. And if you were the lucky person this happened to, you’d have plenty of time to sit there meditating, waiting for some unlikely Godot to show up on the opposite shore.
The dinghy is bloody heavy. By myself I might just have been able to push it into the water, but I could never have hauled it far enough up the soft sands of the opposite shore as it needed to be.
If I were here by myself, I might have taken the easy way out, too. Dragging that dinghy across the sand would be hard work for an athletic man, let alone a woman. I would row across and leave both boats on the same shore. Hadn’t Jyrki said something about most hikers going the other way around Southy? So, statistically speaking, someone was more likely to turn up at the shore with two boats first. I’d be doing someone a favour.
Once the dinghy is in the water, Jyrki climbs in and puts the oars in the rowlocks.
I know what to do next: I push the boat with both hands, at a run, and hop on to the thwart seat so that the speed and my added weight gently carry it far out into the current.
Jyrki puts the oars into the water. He pulls, and one of the oars sinks deep beneath the water leaving the other to skim the surface. Jyrki gives a heave; his second attempt isn’t much better either.
Jyrki can’t row.
The idea seems a bit baffling, and the longer I watch him the more comical his flailing becomes, especially when one’s desperately trying to keep a straight face.
The boat lolls from side to side, the bow pointing first one way then another. Every time he tries to row, one of the oars sinks in deeper than the other. Eventually we reach the opposite shore almost sideways. Once we’ve unloaded our rucksacks, untethered the other boat and tied it to the back of ours 1 take hold of the oars.
‘How about I give it a go?’
Jyrki doesn’t say a word. I sit on the middle thwart and let Jyrki push the boat out into the water. He almost capsizes the thing trying to imitate me as, scrambling and splashing, he comes crashing down on the back thwart.
I keep both oars at the same height and row in clear, even strokes. At least I’ve learnt something at our family’s summer cottage: the bow touches down on the other shore before I’ve even really got started. Using our push- and-pull technique, we return the other boat to its own pole. Hauling it up the slight incline is almost impossible. The push and pull have to happen at precisely the same fraction of a second, otherwise the boat won’t move an inch.
Jyrki lets me take the oars without any further discussion. Who would have thought it?
It’s been almost two hours since we first arrived at the outlet when I finally sit down on the edge of the boat, fastened securely to its pole, and start to pull on my socks and boots. Jyrki shakes his head.
; ‘We’ve got four kilometres of sandy beaches ahead. I wouldn’t bother with those.’
Jyrki
The sandy beach: synonymous with that shiny jungle of parasols and Speedo kings sunning themselves in the heat; in the background, the incessant thump of pop music from the terrace bars of giant hotels scraping the sky. Along the beach, rows of identikit overpriced caffs all out to maximize their profits. Isn’t that right?
Prion Beach is an exception to the laws of nature; it’s as though a neutron bomb had exploded. How come there isn’t a single sun-worshipper on this four-kilometre crescent of white sandy shores washed by foaming waves? Not a single flip-flop print; not a can of beer half buried in the sand; not a cigarette end. How could anyone have overseen such a clear gap in the market? Why had nobody thought to construct a Hobart to Melaleuca motorway so that people could nip out to this glinting golden paradise without a care in the world?
As if in answer to my question I hear a familiar buzzing high up above us: the daily small aircraft travelling back and forth to Melaleuca. Its dung-fly droning always finds its way into your ears just as you’ve finally accepted your oneness with the wilderness, just as you’re about to sever the final thinning ties between yourself and civilization.
On my hiking trips around Europe, even in the most remote Alpine regions of Switzerland, Italy or France, you took it for granted that the sky would be laced with the trails of jet engines or that helicopters would chatter overhead at regular intervals, carrying out a variety of maintenance operations in remote mountain villages. But out here there are no vapour trails twining like ropes criss-crossing the sky. Out here the sky shouldn’t be corseted like that.
Once we get past Melaleuca and reach Old Port Davey Track we won’t have to see or hear any flying machines. There you can breathe the air of freedom.
His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with a maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this be-patched youth.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
NEW ZEALAND
Kepler Track
February 2007
Heidi
To pass the time that afternoon we boiled up a beef stock cube and sipped it from mugs with some pieces of bread. We chatted to a German guy who had spent the summer in Eastern Finland a few years ago and still raved about the quality of the light and the hush of the pine trees.
The cabin at Luxmoor was surrounded by a wooden terrace from which you could gaze down at the stunning panorama of fiord-like lakes whenever the misty, rainy weather deigned to draw back its curtains for a moment.
A bird fluttered down and landed on the terrace railing.
It was a gleaming emerald-grey colour and had a hooked beak and large claws. At the base of its beak its nostrils rose up in a ragged yellow lump. It watched us steadily, not the least bit scared.
I remembered the inquisitive, cute little weka. I put my mug on the railing and, using my fingers, ripped off a piece of the bread roll I had bought in Te Anau and gingerly placed it on the railing. The bird looked at it, then looked at me — almost shamelessly, you might say — and took a step closer to the chunk of bread with its large, nimble, sharp-clawed feet.
Just then a hand swept across the railing and snatched the piece of bread, crushed it in a fist and handed it — no, shoved it — back to me.
‘Don’t do that. Ever again,’ said the man.
I could feel my face turning red.
‘What’s the matter?’ I managed to splutter.
‘That’s a kea.’
Kii-a. I realized straight away that the bird had been named after its own call.
The man was a ranger, a park keeper who lived at Luxmoor during the peak season. ‘When these birds eat too many processed carbohydrates from the tourists they don’t have any inclination to look for their own food. Then they come up with alternative pastimes.’
I looked at Jyrki. For him there was no insult worse than being called a tourist. His nostrils flared, and with his sharp nose for a moment he looked almost like the kea itself.
The ranger told us that keas only live at altitudes of a thousand metres and above. And that they’re smart and nasty as anything.
As the bike sinks beneath the water in the harbour and the last thing you see is its white saddle; things start popping into my mind.
Ante always says you can tell what kind of person last rode a bike by sniffing the saddle.
But nothing can keep its scent for ever, like you can’t take a foreign country home with you. Nobody can walk around for the rest of their lives with the smell from, like, Australia hanging around them, so people can see straight away they’ve been somewhere. They’ve always got to bring it up themselves and bore other people with their fucking holiday photos.
People think that if they do something they believe is real, even if they don’t enjoy doing it one bit, they’ll be fighting off medals and awards when they get home.
And what about when they’ve kicked the bucket? At least they’ll end up with a bit of decent company: a stone that’s as dead as stones can be and a layer of flowers that are even deader.
There’s another bike in range. There’s no one about, only a couple of pissheads getting into a scrap a bit further off, and their field of vision extends only as far as the spit flying from their mouths.
A few steps and the wheel’s off the bike stand. If it had been locked with a chain they’d both have gone. Bike stands are a good weight. If you lift it by the carrier at the back, it’s easy to push the locked bike a couple of metres using only the front wheel. Splashety splash.
And now nobody will ever sniff it again.
Where once something stood, now there’s nothing but an empty space and the harbour is a little bit fuller. Something in the world has moved, and later on it’ll snowball. Maybe tomorrow when someone turns up and says to themselves, I’m sure I left it here.
SOUTH COAST TRACK, TASMANIA
Surprise Bay to Deadman’s Bay
Wednesday, March 2007
Heidi
Any beach can be wonderful, amazing and marvellous when you walk along it for four hundred metres.
But a beach can be a total fucking nightmare when you walk along it for four kilometres.
Normally you’d stroll along the shore and enjoy digging your toes into the sand. Normally it would feel nice when your foot sinks into the dunes.
Normally you wouldn’t have a twelve-kilo rucksack on your shoulders and hiking boots dangling around your neck, their heels and toes constantly pummelling against your ribs.
Normally it would feel wonderful to let the sea breeze flutter through your hair.
Normally you would actually have hair.
In other places you would walk slowly, enjoying the smell of salt in the air, admiring the magnificent waves and foaming crests. Here you plod onwards, dripping in sweat, only to realize after half an hour that you can’t see a thing. Or that you can see but only through a strange, blurred fog. And then you notice that the watery mist, whipped up from the sea by the wind and with a good dose of salt, collects on the surface of your sunglasses so that everything looks dim and obscured, every bit as annoying as a piece of apple skin stuck stubbornly between your teeth — you can't forget about it, and you can’t think about anything else.
When I try to start cleaning my sunglasses I see that I only have a few tissues left in a packet crumpled up in the pocket of my shorts. Jyrki has another packet, although I’ve no idea how many are left. It might even be empty.
I feel a chill run through me as I remember that we didn’t buy any more. Everything else but not tissues. Jyrki assumed complete authority over our shopping trip at the Woolworth’s in Hobart, so how the hell have we ended up without any tissues? You need them all the time: for scrubbing dishes, to use as toilet paper, to clean cuts and scratches and for all kinds of basic cleaning. Such as scrapin
g the salty crud off the lenses of your sunglasses, because no matter what else I try and use — the hem of my T-shirt, the edge of my shorts, in desperation I even dig a shirt sleeve out of the bag of camp clothes in my rucksack — every piece of fabric I have with me is soaked in just enough sweat or sun-cream or some other shite that my glasses simply will not clean. Although they might get a bit brighter they’re still coated in an annoying film that refracts the light at will, leaving me almost half blind.
Once we set up camp maybe I’ll try using the cotton lining of my only pair of clean underpants, but until then I have to look at this awe-inspiring landscape as though a thin blurry gauze had been drawn between it and me, making the view seem dull and giving me a headache into the bargain.
At the western end of the shore, where we are supposed to start climbing back into the woods, is a stream running across the sand. By the side of the stream is a pole with a sign and a couple of giant plastic vegetable scrubbers hanging on a peg.
‘I see. Time for a wash.’
The sign bears a word that I don’t recognize: phytophthora.
‘The Europeans must have brought it here,’ says Jyrki, already kneeling by the water’s edge with a boot in one hand and a scrubber in the other. ‘Root rot. It’s some sort of fungus that kills local plants. At the moment it’s one of the most destructive plant diseases in the world; it threatens something like nine hundred species here alone. And that, of course, threatens animals as they lose their food and shelter. It spreads through mud and soil, so via car tyres and shoes, that sort of thing. We must be about to enter an uninfected area.’
Right, A biohazard. We were both examined at the customs office in Auckland when we first arrived in New Zealand. We had to declare our tent, boots, hiking poles, the works. My equipment was brand new, but Jyrki’s stuff was checked and disinfected, meaning that we almost missed our connecting flight to Wellington.