circling songlines

  A hill I have often said I abhor flat. Well, except on a bicycle, perhaps. Even then the wind always fights me, no matter which way I ride.  Which I don’t. So, for example, in Australia I find the Hay Plains to be perhaps the only stretch of roading that that I yearn to escape. Or in New Zealand the Canterbury Plains [as it happens I will be avoiding traversing them today, travelling north in a different word, taking an inland route to avoid the tedium]. I could never voluntarily live in a flat town … Hay – Levin – Invercargill … though mowing lawns is a whole heap easier. And I did live in Palmerston North for four years but I was young and silly and rode bicycles then.  Slowly I have come to realize that it isn’t “flat” per se that irritates me. It’s flat and manicured. Flat with fences. Flat with hedges. Flat with windbreaks, manicured out of all semblance of nature. Flat lands desecrated by human fiddling.   As I headed north from Normanton, pre-dawn, ...

Camp 119   By the time I reached the Gulf Country any hope of keeping this blog relatively current was gone. I had wildly under-estimated the degree to which I would be off-grid. The telco, Vodaphone, assured me at Tullamarine (Melbourne’s international and domestic airport) that they had something like 98% coverage, but of course that was by population, not area … I sussed that out when I asked the eager Tullamarine telco salesperson about coverage at Gibb River, a random outback site that I threw at him. Like many Australians he had no idea of anywhere beyond the boundaries of his city. If that. As one respondent to my Facebook posts noted, I had travelled far more of Australia than most Australians. That was true even before this trip. But it’s now my task to soldier on, finding ways to turn an adventure into words … I hope you stick with me? Oh, and elsewhere a pictorial travelogue is slowly forming too. Look out! So I reached Borroloola, and I reached Bing Bong, and I ...