Mark Twain, Compulsive Liar
or
The Oz Bus Drive Something Fun Tour
Have you ever been sitting around a table
in a pub in Australia with people you've just met from other parts of the world
(in this case they were all English), each with a pint of Guiness (because it's
an Irish pub), and the collective conversation begins to get rolling and seems
to snowball to a brilliant epiphany? Well, I was lucky enough to be in the middle
of one such situation that resulted in the following string of conversation:
To begin with, the others in the group had met a guy a few days prior which
was still a topic of conversation to them. They had decided he was a compulsive
liar. Whatever he said, it was a lie. So they recounted how they had spent the
evening listening to his lies, not believing a word he said, but enjoying the
entertainment nonetheless. I made a comment about how if he would have simply
written "lies" down on paper, and admitted that they were fiction
(and not even that is necessary), he could possibly have been a best selling
author. But as a compulsive liar, he didn't get much respect. This got us all
thinking about how many liars actually fancied themselves storytellers, and
what's the difference really? Which prompted Matt, from Liverpool England (and
yes, he sounds like a Beatle) to coin the phrase of the night: Mark Twain, compulsive
Liar. See? It's all in how you look at it.
This story has nothing to do with this letter's adventures,
but I felt it deserved mentioning.
Fresh with the memory of the Fraser Island 4x4 Safari
in my mind, our Oz Bus tour presented us with another chance to Drive Something
Fun. Go-Carts. For 15 minutes I raced around the track. Catching, passing, and
catching again the other 3 people on the road course with me. Racing down the
straight away, sliding into the turns, turning into the slide so as not to spin,
and all the while sitting in a stiff fiberglass bucket seat about an inch off
the ground. I woke up the next morning with a bruise on my tailbone, one on
each side of my ribs, and a blister on my left bum cheek just under the bone
(yes, I have a boney ass. I know!) about the size of a 50 cent piece from any
country that has 50 cent pieces. I had to sit lopsided on my right bum cheek
for about a week. But it was all worth it.
In the town of 1770, founded in 1770 (clever, I know),
the Drive Something Fun tour continued. We took a scooter tour of the area.
It was quite a site. 25-30 people on scooters racing around the backcountry
of a smalll Australia town. Happily for me, there were too many people in the
group, so I got stuck with an Enduro off-road, street-legal dirtbike. It was
about 3 times as powerful as the scooters the others were riding, and big enough
that I didn't hit my knees on the handlebars.
We looked like a motorcycle gang out of Revenge of
the Nerds as we rode around for 3 hours trying unsuccesfully to sneak up on
wild kangaroos and wallabees. The guide, a tough leathery looking biker, actually
took us to a biker bar just in time to watch the sunset on the beach across
the street. I tried to imagine the ribbing he must get from his friends in the
biker bar when he shows up with 30 tourists on scooters. But it was all worth
it to us.
Not wanting to sit still for too long, lest we become
too comfortable in our surroundings, we signed up for surfing lessons the very
next day. Being from California, and a competent snowboarder, skateboarder,
and boogieboarder, I had always assumed surfing would come naturally to me,
althoughI had never given it a fair chance. I imagined myself gracefully paddling
out through the surf and then sitting atop my surfboard waiting for that perfect
wave to gently guide me towards the shore as I nimbly sprang to my feet and
posed, hips forward, arms back like those loongboarders from the 60's. Then
I would deftly creep out to the nose of the board to stick my toes over the
edge and confidently "hang ten" before centering myself again just
before the wave pittered out and I would hop off into knee deep water and paddle
out to put on the whole display again.
It turned ou tto be nothing like that. The first wave
I tried to catch rolled righ tpast me, laughing at my failed attempts to hitch
a ride. The next wave I cought, but quickly fell into as soon as I tried to
spring to my feet. I regained my confidence when I looked around and saw that
none of the other 7 peopl ein my surf class were having any more luck than I
was. Eventually I caught a few waves and managed to stay on my feet, precariously
balanced on a surfboard, and ride the foam of a broken wave into shore. And
that, technically, is surfing. I decided I had had enough shortly after I learned
first hand why the board is supposed to be carried out through the surf to the
side of the surfer. Becuase if it is done in any other way, the sea will find
a way to manhandle the board away from you and strike you quite solidly in teh
head, or in my case, the jaw. I managed to shake off the dizzyness after a few
minutes and catch two more waves. I decided this was enough to prove my manhood,
and called it quits.
Jason and I went ahead of our small group of merry
travellers (which had grown to 7) the very next day. Destination: Dingo. Jason
and I wanted to do an overnight campout in the "bush" which would
require an extra day at the cattle ranch, and leaving 1770 early would let the
group catch up to us.
The town of Dingo is hot, dry outback desert. Home
to the Namoi Hills Cattle Ranch where we hosted that night by a staff of cowboys
and wayward backpackers who got off the Oz Bus and didn't get back on. AFter
a cookout (which no one actually saw being cooked) of roast beef, potatos, and
veg, we were kept entertained with line dancing, tug-of-war between Northbound
and Southbound Oz Busses, the obligatory drinking contest/race (in which I did
not partake), and a campfire lit with the Pour Gasoline On It And Make A Trail
Through The Dirt 8 Feet Long And Light It From There method, and of course,
music (muc more modern and non-country than one would expect to find on an authentic
cattle ranch), and dnacing (I won a free beer for shakin' my tailfeathers) through
the night.
When the sun finally came up, Derek (who seduced all
the ladies on our bus with his tight Wrangler Jeans) took us on a tour of the
ranch. He showed us their skinny and unhealthy looking ("there's a drought
on," he claimed) burma cows and informed us that the optimal size for a
bull's testicle is 42 cm around when buying it at auction for stud purposes.
I couldn't help but notice all the girls (city-slickers, mostly, in flip-flops,
standing in cow shit) admiring Derek's Wranglers again.
Then Derek gave us a firearms demonstration, after
making it clear that he had a legal duty to shoot to kill any dingo, wild pig,
or wild cat that he saw. Taking a dingo skin to any post office in Australia,
he informed us, was good for $10! Then he asked for donations of things to pu
tholes in with his shotgun. I offered up a representation of my psuedo-corporate
life back home: my Spider-Man t-shirt. One of the designs from my former office,
and something sold on their website. Sorry Glendale, but I think it adds character.
It's full of holes, but still wearable. Probably the coolest casuality was the
baseball hat with the Canadian Flag on it. The shot went all around the flag,
but didn't actually hit the flag. That invinceable Canadian flag.
Moving on, we drove fartehr into the center of the
ranch where we were given a whip-cracking lesson. Around the head, adn then...BACK!
I nearly had it, but then lost the technique. Jason didn't have much more luck.
After that, we had a chance to throw a real live boomerang. Mine almost came
back to me, but it changed its mind at the end of its journey and decided to
just drop into the dirt instead.
That being the end of our tour, Oh look! A chance to
buy boomerangs and whips and various other 'authentic' aboriginal and Australian
art and souvenirs. I didn't. Jason and I watched as the rest of the bus got
back onto the big green Oz Bus and went on their way, while we got back into
the pickup and speeded back to the ranch, bouncing around like cadged basketballs
along the rutted and uneven dirt road.
Later that evening, a small group of about 5 of us
followed our trailguide out into the "bush" on horseback (continuing
on the Oz Experience "Drive-Something-Fun" tour). Since I was the
only one with prior riding experience, I was given Midnight. The black horse.
What a beauty. The other staff members gathered around, apparently waiting for
me to get thrown off, and trying to intimidate me by saying things like "hey,
isn't that the horse that threw that backpacker off last week? Is he still in
the hospital?" Little did they know that I've been thrown off horses before,
and I lived to tell about it. Midnight and I had an understanding. And we had
a fine sunset ride out to the campsite where we rolled out our swags (a small
mattress with a sleepingbag attached and a canvas coccoon around that. A self-contained,
one-person tent. We lit a fire, stared at the stars, and cooked a huge dinner
of steaks, sausages, bacon and eggs in toast, tomatoes, and...there was something
else, too. I'll have to check the photos. As I was struggling with my camera,
trying to get the perfect photo of the centipede, Laura (the guide) told me
to "hurry up, because I have to kill it!" as it made its way into
our camp. Oops. Didn't realize they were that dangerous. Forgot I was in "the
bush." She smashed it with her heel. Laura is one of those cute little
blonde girls who is stronger than she looks, rounds up the horses on a dirtbike,
and can castrate a bull in about 8 seconds. A true Aussie Cowgirl. And that
was my Halloween night.
We woke up with the sun I took a photo of the sunrise
from my swag, and then we packed up and rode back to the ranch to met our friends
to head on to our next destination. But that's for another letter...
"The voyage of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes, but in having
new eyes."
--Marcel Proust
Props to my Peeps, and Peace on the Mothership,
Chris