Smoke gets in your eyes

I’d soaked in the hot springs and from there it was an easy run into Darwin – just four hundred kilometres up the highway.

I wasn’t in a hurry because my friend Brad – not being a hobo like myself – couldn’t meet me until after work anyway. So I took things easy on my way north.

First, a splash of fuel at the service station in Mataranka. I treated myself to another milky coffee – only 1,128km since the last one, I must be getting soft – and was savouring it in the shade when a couple of middle aged blokes on BMWs pulled in. One of them was on a 1200 GSA. He parked beside Beastie and said to me, ‘What’s that tiny little thing parked around the corner?’

He was joking but I can’t begin to describe how boring this joke is to me these days. Yes, your motorbike’s better/bigger/shinier/cheaper/nimbler/simpler/more expensive/sophisticated/spiritually enlightened than mine. But I just don’t care. Get on a motorbike and ride it, and I’ll do the same, and we’ll all live happily ever after.

So I mustered up a smile for him and there ensued the usual banter about how he was tougher than me (he took the dirt road out towards Borroloola that I didn’t) and how he was tougher than his mate (his mate seemed used to this), and presumably how his vital masculine appendages were also bigger than mine. Yes, mate, they are… infinitely.

Maybe I was just cranky that morning; or maybe you just shouldn’t interfere with a woman who’s trying to drink her first coffee in 1,128km! But it was alright. I wished them well, and they sent me a picture afterwards: here’s me, still looking filthy dirty despite my little bath in the hot springs, in front of the sunbeaten facade of a petrol station in Mataranka.

So I cruised north to Darwin, stopping for a long rest break under the lazy fans at Emerald Springs roadhouse where the furniture is cane and somehow reminiscent of mid-century Singapore. The view of scraggly gum trees and dongas out the back kind of ruin the effect, but I was still deeply sorry that I couldn’t down a cold beer there. In this heat, with a few hundred kilometres to go, I knew the last thing I needed was beer; but still, a girl can dream.

Now some of you might have noticed the sticker that’s been on my bike since Sydney: WHERE THE HELL’S NOONAMAH?

Beastie, about 13,000km ago: can you see the sticker?

Well, Noonamah is right here:

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Just south of Darwin, it’s a pub and a service station and bottle shop. It’s the place where you meet your friends and buy ice on your way of Darwin for the weekend. It’s also the place to be for toad races and, twice a year, the Noonamah rodeo. On a hot afternoon, under the big trees out the back, the shade is cool and the beer is cold.

It’s not a fancy place, but it’s one of the places where you can just be yourself. Brad gave me the sticker when we stopped here years ago, and I found it again when I was packing up all my belongings to leave for this trip. I stuck it on my bike to remind me of where I come from – of good friends, no frills and no bullshit; to keep me grounded when I’m far away in foreign lands.

And here I was again, in Noonamah.

There was Brad, with the biggest hug I’d had in a long time. I was only six months later than expected.

The next challenge was getting my bike on the boat to Timor, but in the meantime I had the ultimate luxury of a home to go to. I trailed Brad’s ute back to the family property where his mum and dad welcomed me like family.

I felt a weight lift off me. I was tired and skinny, and my eyes had felt like they were full of sand for the last two thousand kilometres. A bed, a good meal, and the company of friends – those are the best things in the world sometimes.

* * *

The first few days I slept and slept. Each morning I’d wake up long after everyone had gone to work, closer to lunch time than breakfast, zombie-dazed in the heat. By nightfall I’d be shattered and crawling back to bed for another twelve or fourteen hours’ sleep.

Was I sick or just tired? I couldn’t quite tell. Colin, from one skinny person to another, theorised that maybe I just hadn’t been eating enough. Maybe my body had just run out of energy and had gone into conservation mode? It sounded like a good hypothesis to me, especially since it kind of justified me eating everything that wasn’t tied down. Beverley kindly fed me up on roast chicken and vegies and chops and ice cream and Brad even let me raid the fridge for his iced coffees and apple crumble.

Eating ice cream in bed… if this doesn’t fix me nothing will.

The dogs were constantly upset that I never left any food for them; they probably thought me a very disappointing house guest.

What, no doggy bag? You REALLY ate it ALL?

I was just starting to think I should cart myself off to the doctor and see if I’d contracted some horrible mosquito-born virus when my energy started to come back. Yes! Now I could deal with all the other practicalities that I’d been dozily avoiding.

The first one was my eyes: what the hell was wrong with my eyes. They hadn’t been feeling right since Queensland; sometimes they were merely a bit stingy and other times they felt excruciatingly sandy, blurry and occasionally photosensitive. It seemed logical to me that the constant flow of hot air over my face while riding would be causing my contact lenses to dry out and become uncomfortable, but this was next level.

I made an appointment with an optometrist and rode into town. She took one look at my eyes and told me my corneas were horribly inflamed and how was it not unbearable? How was I still wearing contact lenses? The answer is very simple, of course: I wear contacts to ride and riding is more important to me than pain. However, my optometrist didn’t seem to be on board with that response and now I was slightly worried too. She said that she couldn’t see what was going on with my eyes because the corneas were too inflamed: go home, put these three different ointment in your eyes, throw away your contact lenses and come back in three days.

I felt hot and cold. I can’t ride in my glasses; they mess with my depth perception and peripheral vision. What if I couldn’t wear contacts anymore – how would I ride? What if my always-defective eyes were finally packing it in altogether?

People sometimes ask me ‘how long will it take you’ and ‘what will you do after the trip’, as if this is just a small intermission from my ordinary life which remains patiently waiting for me, wherever I left it. But there isn’t anything to go back to; there isn’t anything ‘after the adventure’. This is it.

This was my last and only plan, and now here I am standing at the edge of Australia, shrouded in the smoke from all my burning bridges.