The Plan
The plan was simple. But then plans usually are. Too simple. I never made plans. Or, at least, i never expected to stick to them, because i couldn't. I lived my life according to... Well, to put it simply, according to which way the wind was blowing at the time. And just as it's impossible to know which way the wind will be blowing on any given day sometime in the future, it was impossible to say exactly what forces would be exerting themselves on my life tomorrow even, let alone next week.
Anyway, the plan was to travel to India, from the furthest away corner of Australia, using surface transport as much as possible and only flying when it was unavoidable. After India, i intended to travel on to Europe the same way. This was a journey i'd been wanting to do for years. I'd done so much flying between Australia and Britain - most of it over approximately that route - and i was sick of looking down out of the aircraft window at all the places i wanted to see at ground level. I'd flown over those places eight times - and once round the other way, over the atlantic and the pacific. That was a total distance of close to two hundred thousand kilometres in the air! I felt very strongly that that was enough flying for one lifetime. Now it was time to travel at ground level.
To call it a plan is misleading really. It was more like a vague goal. There was an element of prediction in it too. The closest i could ever come to what most people call "planning" is a fairly accurate prediction of the future, based entirely on intuition. Sometimes i was close. Sometimes i was way off. But one thing's for certain, i never really knew where i was going till i got there. And sometimes even then i wasn't too sure!
The journey that would eventually take me all the way around the world started in February 1995, in Wyndham, in the hills on the south coast of New South Wales, the very furthest south eastern corner of Australia.
That's a fairly arbitrary starting point really, as it could just as easily be said to have begun in Melbourne in January. Or in Brisbane the previous November, in Cairns in July, Melbourne in May, Delhi in January, London the previous December, Wyndham the September before. Or even in Sydney in late 1988, which was when i really began travelling. Since then, i'd rarely spent more than a few weeks in the same place. And, more often than not, two weeks had been my maximum. However, as i came to realise gradually over the next few months, this particular journey was really the completion of one i'd started nine years before, in November 1985, when i left London to live in Australia.
Anyway, this particular leg of that very long voyage began for me at Wyndham on the new moon of the 2nd of February, 1995. New moon is a good time to start such a journey and every significant leg of it over the next few months began on a new moon. I'd been aware of the idea that it's good to start new things on the new moon for some years then, and it had always seemed reasonable to me. However, until that point, i'd never found myself in a position where i was able to, or even where i particularly wanted to fall into step with that particular natural rhythm. The rhythm of the tides, the rains and - very likely - the rhythm of the winds. But now, suddenly, it more or less just happened. It was convenient, but it was also a conscious decision. And from the way things worked out over the next few months, i realized it was one of the smartest decisions i'd ever made in my life. I doubted, after that, that i'd ever start anything important in my life again at any time other than on the new moon.
I was travelling with Nicki, who'd lived in Melbourne all her life and hardly ever been anywhere else. She was coming with me as far as India - leaving not only south eastern Australia, but the whole continent for the first time in her life. She turned out to be one of the best travelling companions i'd ever had - and travelling with someone else is one of the hardest things it's possible to do. But i won't be writing much about her experiences, which were very different from mine, she's quite capable of doing that herself.
My friend Phil had a hundred acres near the small village of Wyndham, in the cattle farming and forestry country inland from Eden. About eighty acres of it is forest. Regrowth, of course, recovering from more than a century of logging and cattle farming, but beautiful and constantly growing nevertheless. This was the closest i had to a home - the closest i'd had to a home for years - although i never spent a lot of time there really. It was a base and somewhere i was always happy to arrive back to.
My bedroom there was a large tarpaulin, supported in an inverted vee shape by a frame made out of old teepee poles, open at both ends and with a grass floor. It was right in the middle of the paddock at the southern end of the property, not too far from the kitchen. I'd sleep out there in the summer and the winter, in frost and in rain - although, when it rained i usually got wet and had to take refuge in the kitchen! Every morning, i woke up and looked out the end of the tarp at kangaroos grazing on the grass of the paddock. At night i'd wake up to weird, cough-like noises as they do whatever it is they do at night all around my bedroom. In the morning, too, there were birds in every tree, fluttering around, looking for breakfast and calling to each other across the spaces between them. Also, unfortunately, there was the distant mooing of the beef cows in the ugly bare fields of the next door cow farm.
After a few short days in the peaceful, natural environment of Wyndham, during which i shaved off my mohawk - and every other bit of hair on my head, it was back to the noisy, polluted concrete nightmare of Sydney. From there, we had to get to Darwin, the northernmost city in Australia and the closest point to Indonesia. There's a massive mountain range and a desert in between Sydney and Darwin and there's no direct route from one place to the other. You have to go either west to Adelaide and then north, via Alice Springs, or north, via Brisbane and north Queensland and meet the Alice to Darwin road at Tenant Creek. Either way, it's a journey of close to five thousand kilometres.
At first, we were going to go via Queensland and spend a bit of time in Brisbane on the way. There were a few things i wanted to do there, a few loose ends i needed to tie up from a couple of months before when i'd lived there for four months (the longest i'd been anywhere for years!) That would have meant a sixteen hour train journey from Sydney to Brisbane and then two or three days on the bus from Brisbane to Darwin.
But we changed our minds. Going via Brisbane seemed too complicated and it would take a long time to get to Darwin if we hung around in Brizzie for a while. Somehow, going the other way seemed a better prospect. We wanted to go by train all the way to Alice, but there was a problem with that idea. The Indian Pacific, which runs from Sydney, on the Pacific coast, to Perth, on the Indian Ocean, and stops at Adelaide twenty four hours into its three day journey, left Sydney on Mondays and Thursdays. The Ghan, named after the Afghani camel trains that used to do the journey before the railway, and which went from Adelaide to Alice Springs, left Adelaide on Thursdays. I personally disliked Adelaide and neither of us wanted to have to spend several days there, so this was a problem. We could have gone via Melbourne to Adelaide, which would have taken approximately the same amount of time, but that seemed too much like going back on our tracks. Nicki'd only just managed to escape from Melbourne and neither of us wanted to end up back there again so soon - even if it was only for a couple of hours between trains.
In the end, we decided to get the Indian Pacific to Adelaide and then the bus from there to Darwin. Nicki had a friend in Alice Springs, so we'd probably stay there for a few days on the way up. There were two bus companies which ran between Adelaide and Darwin. One, McCafferty's, was good - the drivers are friendly and helpful and the buses are in good order. The other, Greyhound Pioneer, was terrible - the drivers were miserable and unfriendly and the buses were always breaking down. This has now changed, as McCafferty's have taken over the other company, but back then it wasn't hard to decide which one to catch.
It took us a week to escape from Sydney. It wasn't too bad as we both had a lot of things we wanted to do there, but still we were both desperate to leave after a few days. Monday's train was a bit too soon though, so we bought tickets for the one on Thursday - economy class sleepers. We were going to have a night on the bus the next night, between Adelaide and Alice, and the idea of getting a good night's sleep on the train first was an attractive one.