Month: October 2021

Lost in the Bush

First Published: 7 December, 2004

Enthusiastic as I am over the concept of social drinking, even I balked a little when the aboriginal handed me the can of Scotch and Coke. It was after all, only a little after 7am which is early, even by my standards. However, I rationalized that it wasn’t all that long since I’d had my last drink and even though the sun was high in the sky, I hadn’t been to bed so technically it was still late at night, not early in the morning. Plus, as we stared down at the truck firmly embedded in the sand, it was obvious we weren’t going anywhere for a while. I popped the top and took a swig. It was warm and tasted vile but what the heck.

The evening had started out promisingly enough. A bunch of us from the backpackers’ hostel had set out to the bar to sink a few cold ones with the locals. The company was excellent and even though it was karaoke night, we were having a blast. Because of Broome’s location in Australia’s Northwest, it tends to attract a fair number of travellers on their way either to Darwin at the top end or down the west coast. Australia doesn’t have too many roads and generally, you’re either traveling this way, or the other way. As there are only a limited number of places to stop, you tend to make friends with the people going in your direction since you’re meeting up with them repeatedly. Although I’d already been in Broome a week, I’d decided to make it my base for Christmas, now only a few days away. Several others had made the same choice, each as determined as I, to have a good time and the sense of camaraderie was strong.

The night before had been something of a session and several of us had resolved to take it easy this evening. It never turns out like that of course and when somebody suggested we move on to the local night club, the agreement was unanimous. Back to the hostel to change flip flips for trainers, shorts for jeans, T-shirts for collars. Being backpackers, we didn’t all possess such elegant attire or if we did, being backpackers, it was currently somewhat pungent. So, the more fastidious among us found themselves in the positions of being able to trade clean clothes for goods or services. I myself obtained the loan of a very smart white shirt in exchange for the promise of a meat pie, to be delivered at a later date.

Once in the night club, the evening merely picked up speed. Brimming with beer induced self-confidence I was trying to make headway with a drop-dead gorgeous Swedish girl called Kattus, “as in catastrophic.”  I never really got anywhere but at this stage in the evening she was hanging on my arm in a manner that suggested all kinds of delights to come. It was probably due to her looks rather than mine that a bunch of Australian lads invited us all to a party on the beach. We had no real idea where the beach was, but not to worry – we piled into the enclosed back of a ute (pick-up) and off we went, singing and joking as we bounced through the bush. You can’t have a beach party without a fire but rather than follow the time-honoured tradition of collecting driftwood, our driver simply drove over the wooden safety marker posts at the side of the road and once they’d snapped off their bases, threw them into the back with us.

The fire was soon ablaze, and the remainder of the night was spent joking, gossiping, skinny-dipping, drinking and predictably, losing Kattus to a muscular Australian surfer dude named Shane. By the time the velvety night turned grey with the first suggestion of dawn, most people had crashed, either by the fire or off in the dunes somewhere. I was still awake, but tired, stiff, and somewhat cranky. So, when Shane announced he was giving someone a lift to the nearby resort, I invited myself along, thinking he could drop me back at the hostel. I’d have a shower, catch a few hours in my nice comfy bunk and be awake and refreshed by the time the others straggled home from the beach.

Congratulating myself on my forward planning, I hopped in the back and in a few minutes was on my way back to bed. Or rather I wasn’t. Shane wasn’t a local and it turned out that he’d assumed I would be able to give him directions. Not only did he not know how to get to town; he had no idea how to get back to the beach where we’d left everyone else. Neither of us was familiar with the area, we had no map and within a few minutes were unable to determine where even the resort was. We weren’t helped by the fact that the highway system around Broome is a network of dirt roads surrounded by scrubby bush without a landmark in sight. Quite simply, we were lost.

I’ve no idea how many miles we covered cruising up and down, but we seemed to be driving for hours. Occasionally we would pop out and find ourselves beside the ocean but never anywhere we’d been before. Eventually we came across the family of aborigines who were at the far end of several cases of beer. They were more than happy to take us to our beach, if we would only help them get their truck started. Thirty minutes later we were on our way and the only problem now was that they didn’t know where our beach was either. We’d simply exchanged cruising up and down the dirt roads, for crawling on and off an endless collection of identical beaches.  It was only a matter of time before we got stuck and it was then the drinks came out.

I got back to my bed eventually, although not until nearly lunchtime. I got a kiss from the adorable Kattus, but not until three days later when she and Shane were an established couple. And I got grease on the borrowed white shirt, so ultimately it cost me more than a meat pie. But I also got the chance to drink Scotch and Coke from a can at seven in the morning, with a party of Australian aborigines, while watching the sun come up over the Indian Ocean.

So, all in all, it wasn’t a bad night.

Barbacoa española

~ Spanish Barbecue

First Published: 23 November, 2004

To many Americans, the term “Barbecue” conjures up images of Dad in the back yard, grilling hot dogs and burgers. However, to young Brits, enjoying cheap vacations on the Spanish Costas during the ‘70s and ‘80s, a barbecue meant a bus trip up into the mountains where for a paltry sum you’d be fed mounds of roast beef, chicken and pork. All washed down with lashings of low-quality beer and wine. Traditional Spanish entertainment would be laid on, with singing and dancing into the wee hours before you were poured back onto the buses for the journey back to your respective resorts.

Having holidayed in Spain several times with my parents, I was something of a veteran of the Spanish barbecue, although this was the first time I’d attended one as a grown up. (I use the term loosely – I was only a little past my 17th birthday and very immature). Still, I was able to fill my friends Steve and Graeme in on the routine.

“All the drinks are included in the price.” I told them, “So you can get totally wasted and it costs virtually nothing!” This was our kind of night out and we signed up for the trip with enthusiasm. Now we weren’t totally without street smarts and realized it wouldn’t be smart to go with no money whatsoever. We each took along a healthy sum, perhaps the equivalent of about $3. You know, for emergencies. We were on the bus and listening to the spiel from the courier before we learned of my misunderstanding. He explained that all the drinks during the meal were free. After that you were on your own. This was a blow.

“Not to worry,” I reasoned, “we’ll simply drink as much as we can get our hands on while they’re serving the food; and that should keep us nicely pickled through the rest of the evening.” This sounded like a plan and as the waitress filled our plates, I did my best to vacuum up any alcohol that came within arm’s reach. Being a few months older than me, Steve and Graeme displayed a level of maturity I wasn’t to enjoy for another decade or so and while knocking back a fair few themselves, weren’t going over the top at anywhere near the same rate as me.

To be clear; even at this tender age, I was an old hand at the art of drinking too much and I felt little concern as glass after glass made its way down my throat. Red wine, white wine, beer, are you going to finish that, course after course, drink after drink, we’re almost onto dessert, port, champagne, sure I’ll have some more, that’s it, fill the glass, good man. Finally, the meal came to an end, but I was quietly confident I’d imbibed enough during this limited time to keep me comfortable for the remaining four hours ‘till night’s end. If I’d given little thought to the effects such a large volume of mixed drinks would have on my system, I’d given even less consideration to how it would react when mixed with a healthy dose of beef, chicken and (probably undercooked) pork.

It was maybe twenty minutes before I first received signals that all was not well below decks. “You know,” I announced to the world, “I have a feeling I might need to puke fairly soon.” I decided it would be good tactics to make my way to the bathroom and simply hang out there for a while. That way, if the worst happened, I wouldn’t suffer the embarrassment of a Technicolor yawn in public. I found myself a small but serviceable bathroom, took a whiz and observed with a note of smugness that some lightweight was already passed out in the single stall. I washed my hands, took a step back to check my appearance in the mirror, and promptly let loose with a deluge of projectile vomit that would have looked clichéd in a horror movie.

It was the beginning of one of the longest evenings of my life.

Looking back, it was the sheer volume I find most astonishing. We’re not just talking about a couple of heaves here, but wave after wave of semi-digested food and unprocessed alcohol. I knew I’d put away a lot but still can’t comprehend how that translated into the gallons of waste my body was now expelling. Think Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote. In no time the tiny bathroom was awash in chunder and while my body was doing its best to reject the poisons, enough had made their way into my bloodstream that despite my best efforts, standing up was simple impossible. Over and over, I would use the sink to drag myself gasping and weeping to my feet, only to slip and fall once more into the mire. Great pools of barf covered the floor, the walls and even to my bemused astonishment, the ceiling, hanging in grotesque stalactites some six inches long. It simply went on for hours.

Finally, after eons of this torment, I was able to stay upright. I wiped the crud off the mirror and stared blearily at the circus freak looking back. It was in my hair, all over my face and my clothes were simply coated in the stuff. What a mess. Throughout the whole ordeal my bathroom companion lay in the stall, completely comatose, even though he, like everything else in the room, was bathed in my bulimic symphony. Curiously, nobody else had attempted to enter the bathroom the whole time I’d been in there. Until now. Slowly, the door opened, and a middle-aged guy took two steps inside before stopping to stare in horror at the nightmare facing him.

“Pretty bad, huh?” I mumbled. He simply stared.

“It wasn’t me!”

Amazingly, his faced cleared in understanding, as if I could be standing here, covered from head to foot in stomach contents and yet, have nothing to do with the gallons of vomit adorning the room. I pushed past him and out into the main hall where Steve and Graeme met me with relief. They’d spent the entire evening trying to find me and had scoured the building without managing to find the one bathroom where I’d been trapped for almost four hours.

Over the years there were many more nights when grain and grape colluded to make a fool of me. Thankfully, I never quite replicated that performance. Yet for me, the word “barbecue” will never invoke an image of Dad with a spatula in his hand.

Pity, really.