Mataranka to Darwin – God Love the Melon Pickers

The warm, clear waters of Mataranka Hot Springs, Northern Territory

Last year Alicia and I moved to the Victorian high country to do some pine planting. In winter. To say this was an ill-thought-out career move would be a gross understatement but while thawing in front of the fire in the Myrtleford hotel one night I had negotiated with an angry Belgian guy to buy all the camping gear out of his wrecked Ford wagon.

            “You give me ze rip off but I don’t care, take all zis shit.”

            And for $100 it was done. Tents, eskies, sleeping bags, cookers - a bargain. Fast forward 8 months and as I sat in the Mataranka pub watching the heaviest rain of the Wet season scour the campground, I knew that Pierre (or whatever his name was) had got his revenge. I had taken just under a week to travel the 3300km from Melbourne and I had camped nearly every night. And every night something new and interesting had happened to my ‘bargain’ tent. By now it was less nylon than duct tape and there were no pegs left to anchor it with because they were holding the poles together. Now I was deep in the tropics and it was not in ideal order to withstand the foot of rain that the tail-end of cyclone Yasi was expected to drop. I would need to get awfully drunk to sleep in that tent.

The fatally wounded tent. RIP

Luckily I was in the Northern Territory where it’s not considered a hangover unless you’ve woken up with someone else’s turd in you underpants. In the candlelight I ordered a beer and inquired about some food. The Irish bartender said that she’d see what she could do but with the power cut it would be hard. A very drunk man with a face so creased and brown he looked like a baseball mitt invited me over to his table and I got chatting to the residents of Mataranka caravan park. After a while it was obvious the power would be out for a while and the waitress cooked us all steak on the gas stove. One of the residents told me to park my bike in the bar and sleep in the ‘melon pickers quarters’. Somewhat to my surprise – especially about parking in the bar – the waitress agreed. So I spent the night drinking slightly warm beer by candlelight chatting to the three Irish backpackers who worked there and their boss who, late at night in a fit of drunken bonhomie, offered me a job. I slept in the melon pickers quarters – basically an empty backpackers dorm – and woke furry-mouthed in the morning to find that my tent had disintegrated. Sacre bleu!

I took a reviving dip in the natural thermal baths. The water was so clear I could see turtles swimming 6 feet below. A canopy of huge webs stretched across the pool, a brightly coloured spider in the middle of each. Eventually I packed my damp gear, dumped the sorry excuse for a tent in a wheelie bin, eased my aching body onto the bike and left for Darwin.

            And it rained. And rained. 600kms and 9 hours of constant, heavy, drenching rain. Big fat rain. Like riding through a waterfall. And cold. Honestly. Cold. I mean really. Deep in the Australian tropics and shivering like a bastard. Jesus. Sometimes I was down to 60kph in a 130 zone because the rain was streaming down my visor and the bike was skating and aquaplaning over unseen puddles. By the time I reached Mitchell St in Darwin, the backpacker-ravaged main drag, it was dark and I could not have been wetter. Dripping and shivering I parked illegally and walked into Melaleuca on Mitchell, the first backpackers I found. The tattooed girl working the night desk looked at me.

“Orright mate? Bloody ‘ell, you’re wet”.

See, I told you it had been raining! Near Katherine I stopped at Edith Falls. You can swim here in the Dry Season.

            I checked into a cheap dorm and waddled, clothes and all, straight into the communal shower. I did that thing that you see in movies that I didn’t think anyone actually did and sat on the floor of the shower fully clothed making contented moaning noises, like a half-drowned cat rescued from its weighted pillow case. I kicked a snoozing German out of the one free bunk and proceeded to stank the place up pretty good with my wet, mouldy motorbike gear. The four Germans in the room gave me haughty, disapproving glances now and then, but whether that was because of the smell or just because Germans do that kind of thing, I couldn’t be sure.

4000 overloaded kilometres at (relatively) high speeds on baking desert roads is a good way to bugger a rear tyre.

            Late that night, I woke to a sparking, smoking electrical socket in the ceiling. Turns out the water evaporating from my leathers strung all over the room, combined with ze Germans unplugging the air conditioner to charge their laptop, had caused critical levels of condensation to seep into the electrical socket. Woops.

            The next few days were spent trying to sell my bike before my flight out to Bali and drinking with various staff and residents of the hostel. I found out, somewhat to my consternation, that my new roommate Connor was one of the prime suspects in a series of shit-smearing incidents in the hostel toilets. I learned from the receptionist Lauren that a few weeks ago the former prime suspect, a strange kiwi vagrant, had been summarily beaten by outraged residents. Bowed and bloodied he had left. The following week, however, the arcane symbols had reappeared in the second floor mens loo. Connor himself blamed a copy-cat shit artist but the night cleaner – a 65 year old Geelong taxi driver, friendly in that edgy taxi-driver way – refused Connor’s conciliatory beer that night.

Our week in Darwin passed by in a blur.

            After a failed eBay ad, I had to go old-school and handwrite for-sale notices and post them (literally, not in a Facebook way) on the backpackers noticeboards in town to sell the mighty Nighthawk. I also posted on Gumtree.com as an afterthought and as I was losing weight at the local carwash polishing and cleaning the old bike in the million degree heat and hundred and thirty percent humidity, a young kiwi stoner called. He wanted to look at the bike. The next day I had $1600 in my hand and a skinny Auckland-born drug addict with no motorbike license was the proud new owner of the faithful steed that had bought me 4000kms through rain, heat and floods from one end of the country to the other – as far as you can go without falling into the sea.

            A couple of days later, Alicia flew in and we wasted a few hot, rainy days pleasantly tooling around Darwin, including one confusing night involving three drunken soldiers, an ‘entry only’ tattoo and the only gay bar in Darwin, upon which I see no reason to elaborate.

Very early in the morning of the 16^th Feb, after an all-nighter in Darwin to save on accommodation, we flew out on a $95 Air Asia flight to Denpasar, Bali.