Day 208 – 25 February 2010: a paradise in the outback

Steve likes to take us to visitor centres where we can read the aboriginal myths about how this landscape was created as if they were fact. But only for half an hour at a time, or 32 minutes if that makes the return time rounder.

After the round of visitor centres, we walk around Katherine Gorge, a stunning river valley in Nitmiluk National Park. Well, it’s certainly a river right now. We were hoping to go swimming in it, but with the high water, it is likely that crocodiles have got into it. However, the view over it from the cliff top makes me feel like I am on a real trek through the wilderness, although of course we are parked at the visitor’s centre less than an hour’s walk away.

We don’t miss out on swimming either, and I am glad that we didn’t go down to the river, because Steve leads us to a waterfall pool which is elevated above the valley. The fall is about ten metres high and the pool would be perfect for naked frolicking if I was here with just a girlfriend and not a half dozen other tourists, as well as the whole UK to Oz crew. Still, we have a lot of fun diving in from the rocks, and swimming towards the bottom of the fall to take an impromptu natural power shower. It is the most beautiful setting for a swim I have ever experienced.

However, after an hour or so, it starts to rain progressively heavier, and the paths on the walk back have turned into small rivers of their own. However, it is neither cold nor muddy, so I am unperturbed until I discover just how wet everything in my bag is. I’m crossing my fingers for my third or fourth camera of the journey, hoping it will dry out.

We camp at the side of the road at another overnight lay-by, this one with drop toilets and a modicum of cover. I am on the cooking party tonight, and do bbq sausages with lashings of rain.

Day 207 – 24 February 2010: Rock Art & Termite Mounds

We are up at a regimental six o’clock for departure towards Kakadu National Park. We make a stop at the Wetlands Information Centre to photograph termite mounds and to eat a buffalo pie.

After this, we have a walk around Nourlangie Rock, which archeologists think was used as shelter by Aboriginals as long as twenty thousand years ago. There are still rock paintings here, although some have been re-painted more recently as part of Aboriginal rock art custom. Quite saucy some of the pictures are too.

Having a pre-determined image of a desertified outback, I feel quite naïve to find that this time of year is very wet, and the rains now are heavier than usual, to our detriment. We camp at a lay-by which is purpose built for overnight stops, and are told by some fellow campers that much of our plans for tomorrow will probably be voided by flooding.

Day 206 – 23 February 2010: A ghost town of shopping malls

We arrive at Darwin at three in the morning and are met by Steve, our guide in Australia, at the airport. He looks like a rabbi in shorts. We find ourselves being crammed into a mini-bus somewhat less comfortable than the far from luxurious big orange truck.

He takes us to a campsite where I have to put up my tent in the dark as my headtorch has stopped working.

In the morning, we are driven into Darwin centre. Although Darwin has expanded a lot in recent years, the mass of new construction seems to be the hiding place for everybody as there is hardly anybody on the streets. We are told that the streets pack out in the night with backpacking revellers. There are some nice walks along the coast where there are mangroves, though I think there are salt water crocs in these parts, so I don’t go too near the coast. It’s raining too.

Australia is even more expensive than I anticipated, though a major reason for this is the strong Aussie dollar.

Back at the campsite, I go for a swim in a hot pool before dinner. Steve serves us two lamb chops each, which is a feast compared to what we were used to getting while camping with the BOT.

Day 205 - 22 February 2010: The medicine

My cure for aerophobia:

1.    Drive across Asia for seven months, ending up so far from home that you really have no option but to fly somewhere.

2.    Maintain steady level of drunkenness, except where illegal (Iran), or unwise (Pakistan).

3.    Intensify level of drunkenness as date of flight approaches.

4.   Get absolutely blammo on pow-pow punch the night before the flight and sing a not entirely complementary song you have written about your travelling colleagues while having your underwear ripped off by some of the said colleagues - though I recommend getting members of the opposite sex to do it rather than what happened to me.

5.    The next day, waiting for your departure to the airport, consume left over amounts of pow-pow punch at a steady rate throughout the afternoon.

6.   Drink two beers at the airport with an Irishman for company

7.  Arrange to sit next to a girl from Leeds called Jen on the flight, who will then proceed to fall asleep and refuse to hold your hand because you are such a big wuss.

8.  I find it helps if you book a night flight, because being both drunk and without sight of anything outside, you barely notice you are in the air at all….

Indonesia Pictures link

P.S. There are no Fall fans in Asia, although there are possibly recovering former members

Days 203 / 04: 20 & 21 February 2010 b*****xed in Bali

The flight to Darwin will be my first commercial flight for about a decade. The only flight I have been on in recent years has been on a fear of flying course, whereby a hypnotist was sat in a seat in front of me handing me some herbal placebo to smell that was supposed to calm me down. I could have killed someone.

In the past, I have cancelled flights while a taxi waited to take me to the airport. I also once cancelled a flight and instead caught a train to Portugal. Oh, and, erm, I’ve effectively caught a bus from London to Bali. Funnily, I don’t seem to be thinking of this very much, as I am concentrating on relaxing…..and not exploring the more appealing parts of Bali, unfortunately.

I spend both most of these days in the pool, the highlight being the uneven tiles causing first Shay and then me to cut our toes causing little flows of red in the pool water.

Lucinda is leaving us at the airport when we fly out, as she is going back to start another tour. We will be picked up and escorted around Australia by the man who, a little ironically, built the truck we travelled all the way from London to Malaysia in. Lu has organized the punch for the party on our last night in Bali.

We are also saying goodbye to our American contingent, as Stacie heads back home after a while more in Bali, and Brian is going back to Thailand, I believe. I have a feeling Shay will feel the loss of his roommate more than I will mine....

Days 202 – 19 February 2010: inertia in Kuta

I have an ‘Australian Breakfast’ this morning, which apparently means steak and eggs.

Walking around the southern side of Kuta, I come across the Water Bom waterpark, which has lots of slides like roller coaster rides. I don’t go in, though, as I am saving my money for Australia and it does cost a fair few bob. I also don’t get on the ‘Bali Slingshot’, as kind of bungee chair that throws you up fifty feet, as well as dropping you back down.

I don’t remember having an Indonesian pizza yet, so I stop at a place called Little Italy, which is the same name as my favourite pizza place when I was a child. The pizza is big and done well with a wood fired base, a nicely flavoured tomato base (although maybe a bit too much basil). Definitely top league - 9/10.

In the evening, there is a pool party, and I start with a few cocktails late in the afternoon, which puts paid a semi-plan I had to do a midnight hike up Gunung Agung, a stratovolcano which is also the highest point on the island.

I was getting rip off quotes for going there anyway (US $120), so I probably wouldn’t have gone anyway. I have been very lazy so far. Despite Kuta being the least appealing of places to stay on the island, I have not bothered exploring anything else. This is the last stop of our purely overland part of our trip, as we will be flying from here to Bali. This feeling of an end of an era has sparked a bout of lethargy in me.

After a couple of hours in the pool, a few of us wonder off to a bar doing some karaoke, and Joost leads the dancing.

Day 201 – 18 February 2010: A rock’n’roll breakfast and a kamikaze coach drive to Bali

Going down to breakfast, I find the band playing to breakfast crowd. Enrique invites me to get my guitar and join them. Thankfully my guitar doesn’t have a pick-up, otherwise there may well have been some booing from certain sections of the audience. I do however sing a few songs, a couple of slow numbers one of which was a Rod Stewart number, and then a (considering the time) non-sequitur rendition of ‘Wonderful Tonight’ for Jen. This is not my usual type of music, but I am getting used to being a crooner. While the band play some punchier numbers, Scottish Widow Helen and pistol Pete get up to do some dirty dancing, Pete stripping off his shirt. This has been the most memorable and enjoyable breakfast party I’ve ever been to, although it may well be the only one.

Today we have a thirteen hour bus ride to Bali. The coach driver is unusually aggressive even for these climes, operating by the right of way rule of biggest is best. On several occasions, he pulls out to avoid an obstacle or to overtake regardless of the traffic facing us, causing many vehicles to swerve away. At one point he comes close to running over a cyclist. I am sitting uncomfortable in a front row seat, not just because in the likely scenario of a crash I would probably be thrown through the window, but also because my seat neighbor is a fast man forcing me to face into the aisle. I have a sleepless journey.

For the final part of the journey, the bus gets onto a ferry and we have a well needed break from the rollercoaster bus ride. On the ferry, we can see a group of boys, mostly teenagers, but one boy who must be about seven, swimming off the pier to the side of the boat. They swim up to the boat and start climbing the ropes up onto the upper deck on which we are standing. On the deck they ask for money, offering to entertain us by jumping off the deck, which is at least thirty feet high. As we don’t want to encourage anybody to jump from these heights, nobody gives them money, but they have to jump anyway as the ferry starts to leave the port, including the six or seven year old.

The sun sets as we travel the channel to Bali to stunning effect, and I am relieved to have sea air breeze to freshen me up after the bus ride. However, the final part of our journey sends me stir crazy because, after reaching the coach’s final stop, we then have to cram into mini-buses. I am expecting to have to travel like this for twenty minutes or so, but it takes another hour before we reach our hotel, by which time it is midnight.

We are staying in Kuta, a capital of debauchery for mainly Aussie twenty-somethings, and we have arrived at the peak party hour. Re-fuelling on a McDonald’s, Caz comes over from the beach opposite saying she has just seen a naked couple come out of the sea looking for their clothes. With Belgian Sam waiting at the hotel for the keys to the room he is sharing with Caz, she decides instead to come with Dan, Brian and I to explore the club lined streets a few blocks back from our hotel. This just makes me feel old though, as I can’t stand the cacophony of noise congregating on the street, each club booming out its wares, the combined effect being quite tortuous. Having said that, I think it was better to be outside than inside any of these clubs. We sit down for as a quiet a drink as we can muster. On the way back to the hotel we are offered a whole range of drugs by various people, the most alarming being Rohypnol, the date rape drug, which was offered to Caz for some reason.

Kuta is the site of the night club bombing of 2002, which killed over two hundred people. We passed the site of the bomb on the way into the town. It is now a memorial site, but the near surrounds have clearly not changed their character since then.

Day 200 – 17 February 2010: Mt Bromo and a Liverpool loving Wayne Rooney fan

We get up at three o’clock to cram into jeeps taking up the rocky road to see sunrise over Mt Bromo valley. On arrival, we find the side of the roads crammed with other tourist transporting jeeps, and the short hike up to the viewing point is crowded. It is worth it though as the rising sun reveals a valley of ethereal beauty. There is a large plane in the middle of the valley out which the volcano rises, and we can see donkeys on the plane being lined up to carry the less physically tenacious up to the top of the volcano.

Although we are nearly on the equator, we are also high up, the viewing point being higher than the peak of the volcano, and I am glad that I haven’t sent all my cold weather gear home.

After sunrise we walk through the valley. There are steep steps that enable us to walk up to the volcano peak and we can see messages in rock left by people who have had the nerve to go right down into pit of the steaming crevice. I can’t imagine how they weren’t overpowered by the sulphur, nevermind the fact that this is still an active volcano (which erupted again in late 2010 and early 2011).

After the volcano visit, some of us are enticed to go into the nearby seaside town of Probolinggo to go on a shark viewing boat trip. We are not quite sure which sharks they will be, but it turns out to be the harmless but huge whale sharks.

When we arrive at the jetty, which is behind a small but closed amusement park, we are greeted by the local tourist board and some journalists from ‘Compass’ a Javanese newspaper. This is an attraction which the local people have only just started to exploit and two of our ladies, Rhiannon and Mary, are ceremonial garlanded with a ring of flowers for the benefit of the newspaper’s photographers. The head of the tourist board is also here and joins us on the boats.

On the trip into the bay, which features a dozen or so traditional fishing platforms, we float about for more than an hour before turning back to shore. We have taken out two boats and the skipper of the other one has let Jen take the helm to at least make the trip memorable. It was almost more memorable than we wanted because Jen starts cruising toward our boat, which has seen better days, not realising that boat steering is not quite as responsive as a car. The bow of their boat bounces into the starboard side of ours which triggers a burst of colourful language from Pete, while Jen can’t stop laughing.

With all the tourist board here, it is disappointing to them and us that we face the prospect of coming away without spotting any whale sharks. However, about half way back to shore, one of the skippers spots a dark spot in the near distance, and we motor toward it to find a fin and then a huge spotty blob floating slowly by our boat. After this, we spot another couple and get up very close, although I can’t help feeling that is they are to turn this into a tourist attraction they might be better advised to approach these great creatures with less directness as they could scare them away from the bay. At one point one of them bumps into our boat, though I think this might have been a defensive warning by the shark.

I am tempted to jump in with them. While they are filter feeding animals, the fact that these fish are eight to ten metres long does induce fear, although I am convinced not to dive in finally by the presence of some long snake like creatures that we spot breaking the surface while pointing straight up and then descending in the same direction.

I probably spend too much time trying to get a good photo, which never emerges because of the digital delay in my cheap camera.

On returning to the bank, the tourist board officials have laid out a table with opened coconuts for us to drink out of. I am one of a few of us interviewed by the journalist on our feelings about the prospects for tourism in this area. I respond that this area has a lot more potential and would be very attractive to western tourists, but the fact that there aren’t more is due to transport issues. For us, having travelled overland all the way from London, it is no big deal, but there is no easy or quick way to get here. With the local air transport links having the worst safety record in the world and with bus drivers being kamikaze like, there is some distance to go before this becomes as mass tourist destination. That’s not an entirely bad thing from my point of view.

Tired from an early start to the day, I retire to bed early. However, I am disturbed by a group of Indonesians who have gathered for a small party on the balcony on our floor, and with our wicker walls, they might as well be standing next to us. I go outside to see what is going on, but they are very friendly and I sit down to chat and they share a couple of their beers with me.

Only one of them, Enrique, speaks passable English, although some of the others know some rude words in my language. It turns out that these guys are a band and played in the hotel restaurant at dinner time, which I missed. I have a long conversation with Enrique in the universal languages of music and football. He is a Liverpool fan, although he says his favourite player is Wayne Rooney (Manchester United having the most notable fan base of any club in Asia). It is refreshing that here there is no contradiction in that, although he does share the universal disgust of just how greedy footballers can be too. I also satisfy some of his curiosities about England, explaining that, while English people do not tend to be as friendly as Indonesians, the fact that he is not white would not make him stand out as being unusual in most parts of my home country. We part in the early hours of the morning as friends, him inviting me to stay with his family in East Timor the next time I am in Indonesia, and me promising to take him to see Manchester or Liverpool if he can make it to England.