Nick Sanders: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man: Vol 2

By Nick Sanders

AFTER A HIGHLY reviewed first volume of Sanders' life-story trilogy, this second book takes automotive autobiographical style to a different level. Again combining the literary history of his past, fused with his life long obsession with adventure, he produces a true story that reads like a novel.

This book is about motorcycling and lots of it. Cover to cover from the Atacama to Alaska, Syria and the Middle East, London to Cape Town and beyond and then back again. His family, his loves, dashed dreams, the redemption of an average man all fetch up in a stirring personal mix that marks Nick Sanders as a worthy storyteller.

For Nick the individual is the journey and for him personally, attached in spirit with a St.Exupéry or an Eberhardt, asking like Lindqvist 'how many muscles has a human life?'he remains influenced by allegories of existence, and what it means for an ordinary man to try and understand his place in life. If Nick Sanders is an icon it's partly because he's still around. If the journey still continues its because the story's not yet completed.

Inspired throughout with seminal works such as Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Durrell's Quartet and work from Sven Lindquist, he has associated himself with 'outsiders.' He was one. He still is.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Sanders
• Release date: Feb 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780957296381

Book preview

PREFACE

‘A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.’ So wrote Graham Green in The End of the Affair. Lawrence Durrell maintained that ‘…it also takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel…’ – and that, in the end, is what this story is really all about: neurosis and the novel.

A thousand small moments of my own life could never be accounted for without some neurotic content, the calculation of their worth impossible, hidden as they are in a snotty substratum of repressed memory. Nothing has been invented, it all happened as outlined; every morsel of self doubt, self deprecation and self aggrandisement that was bred into my spirit of adventure I turned into a deeper shade of something - an iconic thought important perhaps only to me. Durrell went on to say about novel writing that ‘if you were sensible you’d do something else,’ but when had reason ever troubled the well-scrubbed step beside my own front door? What was I doing lying in the sand beside a broken motorcycle, the heat of the afternoon sun sedated only slightly by a cooling breeze? I was a little way around the world, in Egypt - in the Sinai, to be exact - and a very long way from home.

CHAPTER 1

Around the World on an Enfield Bullet

"Does not everything depend on our

interpretation of the silence around us?"

Lawrence Durrell, Justine

Finding a pickup driver to take money off me in return for a small errand was not difficult, and soon the end-of-day breeze was flitting across my face, and all I had to do was lie back and enjoy the ride. Being driven across the Sinai Desert with my bike on the back of an ancient pickup truck was an unwanted luxury, but right then it was absolutely necessary. I didn’t know where to find a motorcycle engineer to fix the problem, so after arriving in the city at midnight we unloaded it by the 5th of September Bridge where I slept, on a bench beside the Nile, a beautiful river with which by then I was quite familiar.

Riding an Enfield was teaching me patience and humility – well, in terms of motorcycle maintenance at least. My paucity of mechanical knowledge forced me to ask others for help. While its 1940’s engineering was an acceptable given, the Indian material technology was poor and let down what would otherwise have been a reliable brand. Nothing on this bike worked for long, and even though it was generally easy for even a modestly skilled mechanic to restore it to operating order, parts were not always available. The soft screw threads of the aluminium rocker boxes soon stripped and had to be rethreaded with steel inserts; the electrics also performed poorly, and the entire wiring loom had to be replaced early on in this particular project. Equally disappointing was my inability to take Millie, my then-girlfriend, along for part of the ride.

She was flying out to join me, and I had planned to take her to the oasis at Siwa in the Western Desert, 500 miles from the city. It was as far from the hubris and stink of suburbia as we could get. There we could rediscover ourselves in a cliché of swaying palms and allow ourselves to be mesmerised in the way I imagined lovers usually do in such situations. Sanders’ Laws of Love state (among other things) that the person most suited to you is always discovered either too soon or too late, but for now the timing was, well, if not perfect, perhaps only a week out of synch. The bike frame was now padlocked to a lamppost next to a busy road and the engine was divided between two cardboard boxes and a bucket. When Millie arrived at the airport we took the bus into the city; I was feeling mildly concerned that I had so little money left to complete a journey I had only just started.

Can the beat of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? The idea that something can happen somewhere to start an unpredictable and sometimes irreversible process somewhere else was always part of my thinking. A succession of small causes can lead to great consequences, and when Roger introduced me to Millie little did I understand how strongly her flapping wings would influence me. This woman was an insoluble problem, one that could only be resolved with the passing of a great deal of time, and like a plant that fed me love like a nutrient, there she would remain until it had been outgrown. It would have been possible to partner her, and on returning from this adventure we could both achieve some vestige of normality. That done, my career would have divested itself of ambition, or at least the need to voyage. Staying with Millie would have offered a temporal solidity, a love imbued with kindness but couched in lightness, but tempting though it was, it could never happen - it never ceased to amaze me how in my short life so far I had perfected over and over the art of the wrong way of living.

For her, ‘living’ was a style of movement that defined how she physically glided through life; for me she was a ghostly ideal of how I wanted to view a woman. Facing off with such a fantasy was a standing start collision with reality. In her world everything was all really rather marvellous, but mine was dominated by function over form: the rocker boxes on my Enfield’s cylinder head had been rendered useless, thereby unseating the con rods. They, in turn, had bent and separated from the big ends, wherever they were, the pistons floundered and the bike and I had to be transported across the Sinai in the back of a pickup. It was anything but marvellous, and with the bike in a pile of bits on the pavement off Tahrir Square, Millie flew into town to find the one thing she hated most - imprecision without order.

At home she had the rush of an artist, picking up scraps of motion and chaos on her daily rounds of many things to do, and that was in part her paradox. For her, chaos only worked within an overall order that was controllable. Chaos within chaos represented a level of disorder outside of a comfort zone she could cope with, and for her, Cairo and I represented a step too far beyond her threshold.

It’s all a bit different, isn’t it? she asked, in her perpetually excited, breathless manner, then lowering her voice after taking a deep breath, as if to command some control, she sighed, appearing resigned to how it would have to be: Do they really have to beat those poor donkeys so hard? I really ought to have a word…

That butterfly movement had rustled up a strong breeze and it wasn’t to her liking, but she was adaptable and stoical, and even though Siwa is one of Egypt’s most isolated settlements, located as it is between the Qattara Depression and the Egyptian Sand Sea in the Libyan Desert, she expressed an interest in going there. However, it simply wasn’t feasible given the Enfield’s current state of disrepair. I described to her how the town actually lies 19 metres below sea level and is a haven for dates and olives, and banged on rather pointlessly about how the Berber people who lived there reminded me of happier times in the desert areas of Morocco.

Oh really, she responded huffily, Thanks for telling me that now we’re not going. Is there anything else you want to tell me we’re not doing? And by the way, here’s your fucking oil. I’d asked her to bring me five litres of oil from one of my small sponsors, and even though the carriage of lubricants was frowned on by the airlines, she had applied extra make-up and spent a considerable time charming some factotum manager to turn a blind eye on this one occasion. I had planned to ride with her as pillion and thought the gentle rush through the desert would have cemented an understanding between us. Thoughtlessly I mentioned this as well and it annoyed her still further. It was an unfulfilled promise too far.

That first night we slept in the same Golden Hotel off Talaat Harb Square that I had used over 10 years previously when I cycled to the source of the White Nile. It hadn’t had a star rating back then, and its comfort levels had deteriorated further in the intervening years, so she slept on the bed fully clothed and I sought some rest on the carpet, which hadn’t been vacuumed - probably ever.

Millie did not have the ability to be alone, and to be honest, solitude can be a fool’s game.

I did not have enough control of my life to be always with her. People like me are time-served escapees, our solitary existences interspersed by sporadic intimate relationships which invariably culminate in glamorous but grand failures. It was not because love is unrealistic; it was simply that we had no way of knowing this then.

The next day we travelled by train to Alexandria and took lodgings in a poor part of town. From our windows we watched donkeys whipping up dirt from the road, which settled as dust along the shafts of sunlight that pierced the room. As she lay on the bed asleep, I watched her breathe gently, her finely-chiselled cheeks still, her full lips gentle, her even eyes quiet. She seemed to me both magnificent and a source of terror. Jung said that, as a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment, and while I felt this too it was for different reasons. There is another Law of Love, not just about beautiful women, but strong ones who exist in a type of territory not every man is allowed to enter. If she were a bird about to fly away I would not see that, but only the fluttering branch from which she jumped. Our time together would be haunting, bordering somewhere between the simple pleasure of not being alone and the wistful happiness I felt as I looked at her. In my one-dimensional world, normal is the ideal aim of the moderate, and she was anything but that. She had bravely come to see me, but it was to a place I knew and had taught myself to like. The dust and grime were the building blocks of this, my second home. A third of my existence had been spent traipsing through noise and filth and this must have filled her head with the litter of difficult dreams. Yet she had a clever grasp of the deeper meaning of things, understood the importance of being dynamic in the pursuit of a cause, so perhaps it was a commitment to not knowing what was going to happen next that threw her? I explained to her that this journey would take four months with no actual business plan for when I got back, and maybe she viewed this as an inconclusive future.

Outside the small window the donkey drivers pushed and pulled their carts and groups of men held hands as they fingered their rosaries. Perhaps as with people, you can only really know a city when you fall in love with one of its inhabitants. From the outside I saw few people undamaged in some way by poverty and lack of care. Looking back on this woman who lay on my bed gave me moments of distraction from this human harshness. Just then it seemed that the unbearable lightness of beauty is inestimable and if it had no other function than interruption, it was enough. Her being here was like a former life presenting itself, unattainable with words, difficult to capture in thought, but we were back once again in the world of Lawrence Durrell writing his Quartet. His rented home, Villa Ambron, with its belle époque architecture and Roman columns built into the wall of what became its own purpose-designed artists’ atelier, was close to where we had taken our room.

Durrell was offered the use of the top floor. Ambron, one of the city’s wealthiest men, became a patron of the arts, in particular supporting Durrell as he wrote Justine, a book considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Durrell was nominated twice and was turned down on both occasions, once because of his monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications. I understood this when he was quoted as saying, People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it. I had this fever with Millie. She was not quite dressed and I caressed her even though she had fallen asleep, exhausted by the train journey from Cairo. It would have been easy for love to turn into something more casual, which is what it did, and when she woke we took from each other what we knew we had to give, and then in each other’s arms fell into a deep slumber.

For several days we were close like this even though I was supposed to be motorcycling around the world. At night, apart from her breathing and the sound of the donkeys baying, I occupied the edge of a sort of silence. Existence has everything to with silence and its interpretation; like landscape, you have to breathe it in. There has to be no effort, just a calm linking with where you are and what you see. It would have been easier to understand if I had known how to feel, but my childhood absented the process, and the parts to build such a construct had already been rubbed smooth so nothing would stick.

Soon she would leave and the bits of my bike would have to be gathered and flown somewhere for reassembly. Mechanically powerless, I lacked even the resolution to try and put a spanner on a nut. Peeling off a tyre to repair a tube was something I felt nonchalant about; the thought of pulling apart a pair of crankcases instilled in me a void I didn’t know how to fill. Even though much had been achieved, unless the rods connecting the pistons to the big ends were secured, nothing else on this trip would matter.

Our last night. The streetlamps outside our window gave off an eerie glow. Guardians watched from better-class porchways, slitty eyes making sure the street stayed quiet all night. Back then, Cairo and Alexandria in the dark were like villages as they settled down to sleep. There was never any privacy until dusk fell, followed by night like a blackout curtain where you could slink about in the shadows, or sit crouched over a thick coffee. Crowds had a habit of forming wherever I stood; I was a poor man’s celebrity, half the world watching everything I did and the other half pretending not to. Some smirked if I tripped whilst walking, or shied away from a sneeze, or attempted to prey on a perceived vulnerability if I began to look sad. Some shook my arm or hand to wish me well, while others gave me pouches of fruit as if to say thanks for paying homage to their land. The confusion came not in glances or in gifts but because there was so much care. As a foreigner you could not be overlooked.

The poor parts of this place came as a shock, not to me but to Millie; our stay quickly became an adventure beyond where she wanted to be, and she returned home in tears. There were genuine proclamations of love before she left Cairo, and over the telephone in Delhi we promised to wait and be strong, but even though the bike shuffled steadily across Asia, crossing hot deserts in India and Ghats where monkeys ran alongside, by Calcutta she had also pushed on and was already in the arms of another man. Perhaps it ought not to have been a surprise that it took so long. Delhi is so large it would not have pricked my heart so much had she at least made it beyond the suburbs.

From Bangkok to Singapore I tried to win her back, continuing alone as she left me, then crossing Australia broken-hearted. Yet to my mind, how could anyone not want to experience the smell of hot oil and the sound of a single cylinder ricocheting along narrow streets? If it was a choice between domestic containment and the chance of adventure, not even love could stop me. Yet as I huffed and puffed and shuffled across Europe, into the snow and rain of the Dolomites; as I rode hard across Turkey and the Middle East, manacled to this poorly machine; and as I hitch-hiked across the wilderness of the Sinai, debilitated and drifting in hard-to-remember imaginings, it was just possible to recall what it was like to be held by someone who cared. The death of a beautiful moment is without doubt the most poetic subject in the world.

The time had come to leave Cairo once more, so I had the bike taken once again by pickup to the cargo area beside the airport.

Diary: Cargo Village, Cairo

On the outskirts of Cairo airport at Cargo Village I pay to get into the enclosure, only to be told to return to the city to get the traffic police to issue me with an exit warrant. Taxi there and back, it is 1pm, customs closes at 5pm, flight leaves tomorrow. Having returned again to a barred window numbered 3, where girl in large spectacles says go to see engineer, who verifies engine and chassis number, I return to previous window. In the background the women do the work, the men hang around and grin. I buy stamps to stick on forms; all is going well until they discover there is only one number plate (I kept one as a souvenir). I have to find a police station that will type a letter and mark it with a rubber stamp to confirm it has been stolen. I do this but forget the stamp and return once more to the police station, and then back to window number 3. Am directed to a large room where a woman with even bigger spectacles scribbles on the forms and stamps. Then to the Chief of Police for another stamp and scribble, and two men tell me to go next door to Mr. Fat Balding Man, who laughs at me and reluctantly agrees to continue the process. Next I go to Mr. Very Fat Man for another signature, then back to the girl with the smaller large glasses for a slip of paper to take to Mr. Disinterested to make a payment. The entrance policeman also has to sign a docket, then back to Mr. Fat Man who produces a form in quadruplicate and sends me on to Mr. Angry Man’s office where the rubber stamps are released from his drawer. The paperwork then passes to Mr. Slow Old Man, back to Mr. Fat Man, more money through the metal grill and finally to Mr. Greasy, who thumbs through my wodge of papers and says I can go. Sadly the bike has by now missed the morning flight, so it will have to go a week later, but I am free to fly.

Goethe said, Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. I felt nourished by this thought, even though experience had already demonstrated to me its falsity. Sporting books of seminal work had started in me as a young sportsman a process that would continue for the rest of my life. I tried to follow the strict edict of the one-time coach of the Green Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi: When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Yes, it was hard, and no, I didn’t see any reward. My bravery in not giving up as an adventurer had much to do with my having nowhere to go if I did.

The bike was to be sent to Delhi while I landed in Mumbai. In order to book my train passage from the central reservation desk at Churchgate Station it was necessary to take the commuter line to the city centre. The carriage was so packed there was just enough space to hold one’s head up and away from the bellies and groins in what was a meat sandwich of men. Outside the doors a phalanx of younger men held on to the train by their fingertips. I asked if anyone had ever fallen off, and heads shook in the Indian way, looking like yes, but in fact meaning no or even maybe. Given the restrictions on our space, head-turning was the only means of expression. A commotion of raised voices drew our attention to the door. A shout demanded the communication cord be pulled, it was and promptly came off in someone’s hand. A girl had fallen off from a compartment further up the train and someone had recognised her as she flew past in her sari. This young woman was from a family in Malad and was due to get married to a man at Mumbai Central - but maybe not any more. A host of overhead fans swished the hot stale air around us and a forest of stirrup-shaped handles clattered. Everyone was quiet; it was the way of things in India.

A week later the 11.25 up-train Pashim Express took me to Delhi. Crossing the edge of the Thar Desert forced a terrible heat into the non air-conditioned carriages and so you sat, without movement except for the eyes, watching single trees pass in the parched wilderness like signposts in time.

Rattling along to a slow methodical rhythm, the express to Delhi took 22 hours. In this 2nd class compartment bunk beds that folded down from the compartment walls allowed us some vestiges of sleep. Train life here is a linear village where all services are thrust through barred windows or carried on heads along a narrow passageway running centrally between the seats. Cold juices were embedded in buckets of ice, hot sweet tea swilled in unfired clay cups while cakes, sweets, nuts and small toys were offered from outstretched hands. Chai-wallahs and hawkers with their shrill voices urged you to buy their chapattis and chili chicken. Omelettes were served for breakfast along with sour yoghurt and daal. Sometimes while still within the station complex I could see over small walls women scything wheat in the fields, while others pumped water from wells as bullocks pulling trailers were walked by the men.

There were 17 procedures needed to gain possession of my bike along with the hire of a small truck to transport it to an authorized Enfield dealer. Faxes from Enfield’s head office in Madras instructed personnel in their northern office to make all necessary arrangements for its complete repair. So far this was a journey about going around the world with a motorcycle that refused to work and the reason why the bike could not be repaired in Cairo was because the man I had trusted to do so had no intention of making it run, taking instead 24 of its components for his own use. The entire journey was also in jeopardy as my funds had now dwindled to £90 – enough to last barely a week - and only the promise of payments from stories I had written would keep the project alive. On the positive side, the bike was at least ready, fuel in India was inexpensive and as long as I slept in fields alongside the road I could probably afford to descend the four days and 1,400 kilometres back down to Mumbai. The road was hot, as was the air, and the horizon was a sea of dust. The temperature in Rajasthan was 46 degrees centigrade and the wind scorched everything in what had become a corridor of heat. On the side of the road, women with limp hair that hung like dripping oil carried loads of brushwood on hunched backs. Men sat on their haunches smoking biddies, their forearms resting on knees, hands with long fingers drooping towards the ground. Along sections of roadworks it was once again the women who carried on their heads wide wok-shaped vessels filled with broken rocks.

In Mumbai I stayed with Millie’s sister Kate who had married a man from India. Through them I made contact with the Adavasi tribes people, 120 kilometres north of the city in the Dahanu-Teleku region. There I was introduced to a Parsi called Biram who had lived with the Adavasi for 21 years. His house was a fresh clean dwelling made of mud and dung walls with banana leaves for the roof. The Adavasi are very simple people you know, he said, they are the original people of India, like the Red Indians of America or the Aboriginals in Australia. They don’t have a caste, they are just themselves. The man who had introduced me to these people was Biram’s brother Bohman, who was clearly enjoying my interest.

Now tell him everything, he said, Everything. Tell him about the screwing, about having each others wives. He turned to me, "You’ll like this, this is really funny. Biram smiled, it was a joke in a lifestyle that didn’t appear to present anyone with any problems. You see, over the way, and he pointed to a small village mostly obscured by trees, One of the men jumps one of the other men’s wives and he in turn jumps one of the others and so it goes on. The secret is not to let anyone find out and no one cares or finds it a problem."

But what happens if you’re caught? I asked.

Oh, they call the village elders, sit around, agree that the guilty party pays the original dowry back to the husband. He therefore doesn’t lose out financially and they break a twig to signify the anger is over and get pissed on toddy. Biram explained to me how these people live in something akin to original simplicity. The Adavasi are the stonebreakers and their cousins the Khadothi enjoy decomposed meat, happily carving up a dead cow. The maggots and worms are eaten along with the meat.

There are sayings in India such as Yeda ban ke Peda khana, meaning ‘how one pretends to be a simpleton and yet enjoys all the benefits that comes ones way due to the pretence,’ and travellers are often the beneficiaries of this philosophy. This is the opposite of Naak pe makhi na baidne dena, ‘a fly is not allowed to sit on one’s nose.’ In Indian culture this signifies pride and pretentiousness, something this poor journey would never allow.

Feral dogs chase me out of villages past charpoys – beds of sticks and string – as clumsy-footed crows stir in the low branches, making them creak. The bike thumps along pleasantly enough in the early morning light, gathering a little speed on the downhill sections of road pinched between wisps of mist peeling off the paddy fields. On the surface there is bucolic charm, what Gandhi thought of as ‘ideal social units,’ but this contrasts starkly with the reality of India’s caste system. I was just an outsider passing through quickly, observing only what I was allowed to see. Caste-based ghettos mean that villagers from different stratas of society rarely intermingle, they do not socialize across caste lines and do not inter-marry. At the bottom of this social ladder lie the Dalits – the untouchable caste, a word derived from the Sanskrit meaning ‘suppressed,’ ‘crushed,’ or ‘broken to pieces.’ Mohandas Gandhi coined the phrase ‘Harijan,’ or ‘Children of God,’ a term now considered derogatory. Dalits are historically associated with occupations regarded as being ritually impure, such as leatherwork or the disposal of rubbish or animal carcasses. Ironically, the midwives who deliver babies from middle- and upper class women of the village are considered unclean because they come into contact with the placenta.

There are around 900 Dalit sub-castes all over India, often with their own internal divisions, making political cohesion almost impossible. What you don’t see are the Dalit-bashers abusing the lower caste society. Typical bullies of a low-caste peasant order, a rung or two up this slippery social pole, these men congregate at sundown ahead of their ablutions and demand - and are allowed, for a few handfuls of rice - the services of the Dalit women. It has been estimated that 40 per cent of the non-Dalit men ‘uphold’ what is an ancient tradition, so entwined in village culture that the practice recalls a famous condemnation of village life by one of the country’s founding fathers and himself a Dalit, B.R. Ambedkar. As the architect of the country’s 1949 constitution after the departure of the British he asked: What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism? For several more days I rode towards Calcutta, like an ant following the trace of some second hand smell.

So, having packed the bike on a plane I flew across the Andaman Sea, disembarking in what was formerly known as Siam. Electing not to ride into the capital city of Bangkok, I headed south and then slowly down to Singapore in a matter of days. I flew to Perth, the bike was released from customs within an hour, and after licensing it with the authorities set off on the Great Northern Highway along the west coast towards Geraldton and Broome. There was something of a ‘Groundhog Day’ about my travels. If this was a journey with gaps allowing for periods of reflection, equally it lacked the constants of normal life which help to mark its progress. It was possible to wake each morning to find that all the parameters of the previous day had been reset, and while we are what we repeatedly do, very often it was just another day on the bike.

The bike was performing impeccably, the sound of the single cylinder and its half litre piston ricocheting off anything that encroached on the road. For the most part the engine, like a ventriloquist, threw its sounds across the edges of vast plains so bugs and small rodents would know of my approach and attempt an escape. Each night, having brisked together a fire, I camped in the desert amongst the thorn scrub. The further north I rode the hotter it became, and quieter too. In the intense heat the Rock Partridge Cocks stopped calling, no more blithesome chuckles across the waterless desolation, and at midday the air shimmered in a kind of glassy crepitation.

There were watercourses but I did not see any streams. On the banks of rivers the silver barramundi spends the first six years of its life as a male and the rest as a female. Playing in the same mud, the platypus frog carries her young in her stomach and gives birth by regurgitating them. Feeding from inlets coursing across the moist mud they close down their ears and eyes and use a mysterious sense to locate food. I pretended to know how to smell scents on the wind and sifted through sand on the side of the road to see if there was any sign of life, when suddenly a chocolate wrapper blew across my face and I looked up to see a roadhouse advertising food in the distance.

At Halls Creek I pulled in for a rest and a round-faced man with bushy eyebrows called me over for a chat. He was sitting with a strapping young lad whom he introduced as his son, and said they were gold miners. We started to chat. How much did the mine make? Well, I guess if gold costs $558 an ounce and there’s half a gram in each ton of dirt, and we shift 400 tons a day…, he began. He was very open and seemed eager to impress me, or at least to have someone new to whom he could chat. He asked his son to get me a coffee and continued: If we shift this amount six days a week that’s 2,400 tons a week. If we get 1,200 grams that’s $21,000 every single week, which is a lot of dollars in a year…, and there his conversation tailed off. He had a fixed stare about him, and while it was a cliché, there was something feverish about his story and the way he told it. The mine’s just down the road, he said, why don’t you come and stay for a few days and we’ll give you some work? to which I agreed, and after getting up to leave the café I followed him on the bike until we turned off road into the bush for about 30 kilometres.

I was to stay a few days and got paid in gold for making the boys their sandwiches before they went to dig more holes. They said it was puffters’ work in these parts, but I didn’t care and they were glad of the company. One night the son suggested I go for a swim in a billabong known to contain Johnson crocodiles. He said that they were a type of crocodile with a long narrow snout, a bite from which would hurt but usually didn’t kill. They would group as a pack, eat small fish and were unlikely to attack a person on the basis they didn’t predate in quite the same way as saltwater types.

But what if they do attack? I asked.

I’ve got a gun, he said, showing me a puny device that looked as if it would struggle to stun a rabbit. If this was a ploy by some tough Australian to test my manliness it failed. I carried on for a few days making ham and cheese sandwiches and waiting for the workers to come home at night when I’d put the kettle on for a cup of tea. In these parts there is a perception that this is as close as you get to being a homosexual, so after a brief few days I left.

A week later and back on the road, I sat resting by a roadhouse on the way to the north-western seaside town of Broome. A tall moustachioed guy walked up to me to have a look at the bike. Did you hear the one about the guy who loved his girlfriend Wendy so much he had her name tattooed on his you-know-what?

Er, no…, I replied, wondering quite what it was about tough Australians who sprayed me with saliva by standing too close.

"Well, he was standing at a urinal next to an Abo one day, and glancing down he saw the letters W and Y tattooed on the Abo’s dick as well. ‘Hey, so you’ve also got a girlfriend called Wendy?’ The guy turned to him confused, ‘I don’t know no Wendy!’

‘But you’ve got the letters W and Y on your donger!’

He looked down, ‘No, it says Welcome-to-Kunnunara-and-We-Hope-You-Have-a-Nice-Day.’ He paused just long enough for me to ask him if he too were a crocodile hunter. How did you know that? ‘Oh, fuck me,’ I thought, ‘there’s nothing going on upstairs here,’ and a quizzical expression spread across his face. Well, yep, I sure have caught me a few crocs, he said, introducing himself as John and languidly greeting me with an outstretched hand, An’ I’ll tell you how," and as he rolled a cigarette he proceeded to explain the precise manoeuvre you might employ to catch a crocodile should it be necessary. While it was scarcely possible that every Australian I met this side of the Gibson Desert was obsessed with either catching or being eaten by crocodiles, his slow outback drawl certainly proceeded to endorse the stereotype.

"First you row out on the river at night with a torch, looking for them red eyes. They’re like logs, you know, so you pull alongside ‘em, and then over the side of the boat and you lash ‘em around their mouth. Then as