Tag: Crocs

Cairns Capers – A Pentalogy in Three Parts

In yet another (not terribly arduous) struggle of being British in Australia, I am often disorientated by a common pronunciation of this far north Queensland town and assume the Australian speaker has moved the conversation on to the French town of an independent film festival.

I don’t know how many of them are looking at me askance when I persevere in mind of a piled stone way-marker, perhaps because down here I’m untroubled by the facial expressions that may be occurring high up in the stratosphere which are no concern of mine.

Maybe it’s just a Queensland thing.

However the hell you pronounce it, this part of Australia is a pretty bloody amazing place. Salivating on the memory, I am currently in a Ken Behrens (UK – google this …) lockdown, enjoying a bit of late morning sun from the balcony and admiring the austere sides of black mountain with its cloak folds of grey-green eucalypt. Vivid yellow wattle competes with the blue of the sky to challenge the high country note of frost in the air. As winter races towards spring, the mournful cry of a raven keeps me in European thoughts: seasons, the gothic and the now-familiar: dryness, drought, fire. Queensland is tropical and it’s utterly disorientating.

Flying to Cairns/Cannes is worth the ticket just for the view. Screw paying for helicopter flights, just pay attention before you land. There are vine drenched mountains in lovely peaks like whipped meringues that glow purple-green against a blue sky and sea. It all sparkles like it’s been glittered for the occasion and is just like those pictures of paradise a girl from Essex would stare at, never imaging she would really one day see.

We hired a car, got Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds blaring like two respectable road trippers should, and set off. Our route was north to Port Douglas for two nights including a cultural crab-fishing tour on Cooya/Kuya Kuya Beach, a stroll around Mossman Gorge, bird spotting on the Daintree River, up to Cape Tribulation, then back south to Cairns to hop aboard with Coral Sea Dreaming for a day and overnight of snorkelling at Milln Reef on old Great Barrier. And singing la-la-la-lai, a-la-la-la-lai, we were off on another round of croc dodging!

* * * *

‘You know vegetarian is an aboriginal word, right?’

Brandon is looking at me devilishly. I sense a trap.

‘No?’

‘Yup – it means really bad hunter.’

Yeah, fair. But I don’t know how he does it. Brandon Walker and his brother Linc have run Kuku Yalanji Cultural Habitat Tours since 1999, taking people out onto the mudflats to share traditional hunting and cultural practices. He said his grandparents taught him to hunt crabs on the mudflats of Cooya Beach from the age of five. They’d grab me by the ear, he said, tell me to look there, look there, and twist, he said. He learned pretty quick. But when he points out to me the serrated curve in the sand under two inches of water, I reckon I could have walked over it a hundred times and never known a blue swimmer was hiding under the sand. Poke it, he says. I heft my little spear and prod, uncertainly. Ooh, it didn’t like it. The outline suddenly swells three times its size under the sand as it spreads its pincers. Shit. Go on, stab it, Brandon urges. I do it quickly before the bugger can think about it. It was a good hit, I got it through and with a pretty impressive perspective angle, the photo looks like the crab’s half my body size. It wasn’t, but still, I killed it and ate it. I’m not vegetarian, and so much for finding the whole experience confronting, coz I fucking sure showed that crab.

This was my triumph of the day but spending the morning walking along the silver mudflats was good enough on its own. The sky was thinly clouded, and the air was warm and balmy without being fierce. There were so many starfish I could barely avoid treading on them, and memorably, a bull-ray swum right into my shins as I waded through the water.

Just remember I killed that crab. Don’t think about the yelping and shrieking I did, then.

Brandon impressed us all again when he threw a spear into opaque water while accounting for refraction and got the ray in its right wing. He removed the poisoned spar from its tail and threw the little fellow back into the water where it swam away to … heal. He promised. He also promised that the 5m croc that lives over in that estuary and the 4m croc that lives in that other river mouth won’t come onto the mudflats while the tide’s out. Righto.

We collected periwinkles and wirrells for eating and pulled black pearl oysters off the mangrove roots which we shucked and sucked then and there. We ate hibiscus flowers for their quenching flavour, and he showed us how to squeeze drops from the white berries of beach cabbage into our eyes to soothe soreness. We fell over little soldier crabs and held puffer fish in our hands and saw the marks left by dugongs with their young. Brandon told us about his grandfather from the stolen generation; how he was taken from his family but escaped and ran back to his mountains and forests and beaches; how his grandmother was carried right past the officials in a dilly bag; how he has lots of children because his grandfather impressed upon him the notion that ‘they’re trying to kill us all. Spread.’ He told us about travelling around the world, getting up to capers in Manchester, playing professional rugby, playing rhythm guitar and how to tell the weather by looking at the cloud on the mountain. It must be so wonderful to know this is your home, you belong here, I wondered. He smiled. I can just about bear it, he said.

After about two and a half hours it was time to go – but no it wasn’t, because he took us to his folks’ house over the road and cooked all that good stuff up with a brick of butter and intensified garlic and chili marinades. We slurped it all up with deLICious fresh damper, chucking the shells into the bucket between our legs, while Brandon made us jewellery from the wirrell shells we’d collected. He was a legend, his family were lovely, and it was pretty much the Best Day Ever.

After this we went to ‘Wildlife Habitat’ in Port Douglas (it’s a zoo, it’s just a zoo) and I nearly passed out with excitement when we entered a room filled with free-flying birds. I could have stayed there forever dodging wood swallows, finches, and doves while staring at little quails and the bush stone curlew, but the best little chap was a cockatiel who came and sat on my shoulder for about 20 minutes. Wandering around we also saw cassowaries, eclectus parrots, royal spoonbills, lorikeets and black cockatoos. Yup, lost my mind.

Gift of the Gibb – Pt 1

‘So this is it, guys! Jump in.’

In, he said. Well, I didn’t quite know what ‘in’ was. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, and I was cold and needed a wee. I was aware that there was water of an uncertain depth ahead and while I’d like to use the old metaphor of ‘inky black;’ maybe chuck in a ‘gurgling’ to describe it, I’d be lying because I couldn’t see a bloody thing. The light of my feeble headtorch patchily revealed that the valiant Damo – our guide, had stripped down to his shorts and boots and was rubbing his hands together between hunched shoulders. Then that image was gone pretty quick, lost to the gulping blackness. Apart from the wobbling, unenthusiastic glow of his headtorch ebbing away, I could see nothing else.

I stood on the sand, with the Gentleman nudging me; go on, Chris. But why the fuck, I thought, am I in a pitch-dark cave at 6am about to swim in a flood-swollen, frozen creek infested with goddamn crocodiles?

Well, I didn’t want to be left in the dark on me own for a croc to find, so in you go, – and I did that thing I do when getting in water (only recently discovered, as entering the inclement waters of the Irish, Atlantic and North Seas is not something in which sensible Brits indulge), which, it turns out, is hyperventilate the words ‘shit! fuck! fuck! Ok, I’m in, I’m in, shit! fuck’ and there you are, aloft, kick, swim! Hope your boots don’t weight you down, don’t think about the crocs and get to the other side.

This was the first major spot on our tour of the Kimberley; heading from Broome to Darwin: Tunnel Creek. Despite arriving at the stretching crags of a 350million-year-old coral reef at dawn, swimming that cold creek wasn’t even the first impressive thing I’d done that day. No. That was to meaningfully pick up the shovel and disappear off into the bush. But I’d been keen on getting to Tunnel Creek – I’d been lent a book by my shanty man Bruce about the Bunuba people’s resistance to encroaching and violent pastoralists in the 1880s, led by the heroic Jandamara who evaded capture for years by hiding in these caves. I dunno if he had to deal with crocs. And they were certainly there; as we followed the creek’s strips and pools, careful not to stumble and reach out for the wrong half naked person in the dark; little red eyes at the edges of the caves where they cringed, spread like butter against the walls. Bloody hell. And then walk towards the light, and relief dripped off me, along with the water, as daylight emerged at the other end of the tunnel, festooned with trees, littered with heron and loud with peace. Until Damo pointed out the long, deep imprint of an enormous reptilian tail in the sand, heading from whence we’d come.

‘Right guys, back through the creek again, then!’

FUCK’s sake.

On our way back, we encountered three noisy lads on giant, unicorn inflatables with tinnies.  Now we’ve read a lot about crocs, or ‘croncs’ as the Gentleman has affected to call them. Salties can live in fresh or salt water and have a gland that removes the salt. They can come up to 100km upriver. They like to eat small calves, or wallabies, or wallaby sized humans like children and Chrissies. They can lean back on their tail as if it was a fifth leg, just like kangaroos, so pealing you off the roof of your ute isn’t much of an issue. They can even, apparently, climb up waterfalls. Jesus. We have agreed that, along with its weather, you don’t fuck with Australian wildlife. The hippy mantra ‘they’re more scared of you than you are of them,’ rather underestimates the boofhead courage of your average 5 metre fucking salty. But here’s an observation from The Brit Abroad, West Australians and Northern Territorians certainly have an impressive risk tolerance. Or commendable courage. Or they’re just fucken nuts. I pondered the gleeful shouts of those floating blokes the next day while drinking a cup of tea by the bank of the incomparable Manning Creek at 7am, breath caught by the misty golden beauty of the morning. Little fish swam right up to the edge where I sat, then spun round to rub their backs on the sand and flash their silver bellies to the sky. I sipped me tea and watched a white egret on the rock in the middle of the river, patient and still, next to an equally motionless penguin. …   …    …   Why the hell is there a penguin in the Kimberley. I shaded my eyes from the sun, and it shifted, revealing the long neck of a white bellied cormorant. Righto. Animals are secretive and deceitful in this country. Remember that, Chris. What else do you need to remember? Shit. Eyes widening, I hastily interrogated the sand. I couldn’t see any croc tracks, but I took the opportune moment to get the hell away from the river’s edge.

More on crocs later.

We stayed at Manning Gorge two nights. The first day began with an hour’s walk down to the waterfall to go for a swim in the gorge. Damo was pretty convincing about toughening up – you start the walk by swimming across the creek, he said, you’ll be right, he said – there’s little blue barrels to dump your gear in, then you can just hang onto them and kick if you can’t swim. It’s hot, you’ll dry out in no time. Far out. But having done the same thing the day before in the pitch freakin’ dark and much colder water, this was, er, too easy, as they say, so in I got. It was a beautiful river, surrounded by trees, rocks to laze on, birds and the blue, blue sky, I was actually pretty energised getting in. Refreshed, we hiked over the hills through pink wildflowers and cotton flower trees that bear pretty yellow blossoms (right on the end of the branch, with no leaves; imagine a magician’s wand when it spurts a bouquet out the end) and eventually got down to the waterfalls and swimming pools of Manning Gorge. It was glorious. Red, red rocks curved their arms around us, and slabs floated in the water, sprouting shady young, green eucalypts. Vivid scarlet dragon flies landed anywhere you threw your eyes. Fishes swum up to the rocks and gawped at us and rainbows capered in the waterfall’s spray. Like, ya know those screen saves on your computer of magic places you don’t really think exist? It was just like that.

The whole adventure was very much walk to a gorge, get in the gorge, walk to another gorge, get in that one too. Which was great, because if the Gentleman and I had been driving the road alone, I don’t know we’d have committed in quite the same way. Despite the children running around with pool noodles stuffed into their rucksacks and really making a go of it. After dutifully getting in Tunnel Creek, Bell’s Gorge, Manning Gorge and the waterlilies of Galvan’s Gorge we headed off to El Questro Station across the Pentecost River.

El Questro had been talked up a fair old bit by old Greg, camp guitarist, singer, American accent talker and teller of tall tales. After five nights of sleeping in the bush, this camp site had a bar, he said. Steady on, I insisted, after all, we have campsites with bars in them even in Grimsby. (For those that don’t know, this is a thoroughly uninspiring north-east corner of the UK.) And we were packing a hell of a lot of juice – the Gentleman and I had not expected it to be quite the booze cruise it turned out, but Damo is there to be our guide and make sure we have a good holiday, and when it’s dark and the activities are done, what else is there to do but sit round the fire, drink beers and sing? A bar would at least ease the pressure on the icebox, furtively betraying us beneath our seats in the giant 4-wheel drive van by piercing our unopened cans with the combo of sharp ice and rough roads. The bar delivered (until we drank it dry), and as El Questro is an enormous cattle station, occasionally you’d see a cow wander around. These must be some of the most lean, free range organic beef cattle in the world, but who knows how many there are because there are no fences, and you have to get an external company in with helicopters and special gear to hunt down and round them up for selling. But here we were at the feet of the Cockburn Ranges (Australia pronounces all the letters, to my glee), the Pentecost River flowing by and the tall rocks heated up creeks to keep the Zebedee springs at a beautiful 38 degrees all morning. We were in them at 7am, lolling around in hot water between pandanus and ferns like a luxury tropical bathhouse. Apparently, they chuck all the proles out at midday and then the hot springs are the exclusive reserve of the posh lodges where celebrities are helicoptered in. They can keep it – who wants to be in hot water after midday? They’ve missed the best bit! True to that, we left Zebedee springs to hike to Emma Gorge; the coldest waterfall of the tour. Striding up the rocks we passed a limpid blue, sunlit and sparkling pool. Can’t we stop here, Damo? No. Get in the cold one. So we did and it was the true sublime; my breath was taken away by water kept in the shade all day by the enormous cliff surrounding it, the water was deep and murky, I swam towards the yawning black wall that was so tall as to block the great fiery sun and my soul expanded in the terror.

Right after I got out, someone shouted that they’d found a hot spring by the other wall. Bastard.