Dear Friends,
I'm home again after some 6 weeks up in our Australian outback in the
Northern Territory. Of course I have the usual abundant stock of new
stories but will just tell you one here tonight. You see last Sunday week I
was supposed to be lost in the bush. Here's how it happened:-
The State Emergency Service were called out to rescue me when I was lost
in the bush last Sunday week! It's a loooooong story, but I wasn't really
lost at all. You see, there's this bloke called Dr. John COOPER, a friend
of mine who owns the land surrounding my friend Viv's property. Her land is
about 1600 acres of untouched bush, but his station is larger than greater
Sydney itself - some hundreds of thousands of acres. Lots of this land is
up on huge plateaux which have never been explored, the reason being that
each plateau is surrounded by a cliff some hundreds of feet high. John is
anxious to preserve these lands from cattle etc., so at Chrsitmas time he
had a steep track graded up to one plateau (and I mean really steep) with
the intention of subdividing that land into 100 acre blocks - too small for
cattle grazing.
In the meantime he had bought a new quad bike - motor bike with 4 wheels
for going bush - and so he and I went up together last Sat. week and
explored the northern half of a plateau which is about 10 miles by 6 miles.
It truly was exciting and absolutely stunning. There were orchids and
grevilleas flowering everywhere. On the Sunday, unfortunately he left it
till too late in the day - around 3:30 p.m. to do the southern half, and we
simply ran out of daylight just when the bike broke down!
You have to imagine - it's pitch black, not a soul for about 20 miles, the
only night in January which didn't produce monsoon rain, a hot north wind
which meant absolutely no bugs or mosquitoes - quite pleasant really at
around 30C. The bike had overheated and John would keep fiddling. In the
end I had to force him to stop, built a nice big fire and we slept for a
couple of hours - duly rationing our water and my smokes! Around 10:00 p.m.
(we didn't have a watch!) the bike started and I had to navigate us out of
there with the compass. John has a shocking sense of direction - well none
at all really - and kept wanting to ride round in circles in this
impenetrable jungle of small tough palms, anthills and logs! We had just
reached his newly graded track when we saw all the flashing lights of the
SES. My friend Viv had panicked and called them out. John was really
embarrassed as she'd done this to him once before.
To make polite conversation, I said to him, "I wonder how Viv's roast is
going?" - knowing she was cooking roast beef for tea. He simply replied,
with his head in his hands: "Oh f**k give me a cigarette!!!" And home we
went to face the harridan :)
David
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