I’m still alive! Can’t believe it myself after all this time, but here I am for another lengthy blog from Down Under. After following the tracks of Mad Max in Broken Hill and dipping my feet in the harbour of Adelaide I was in dire need of occupying my hands with something else than handing money out for car parts of questionable necessity. Since I apparently am of the rare breed of backpackers who want to gain some experience apart from how to be a strawberry-picking wageslave, a week of endless applications followed. When I finally got the offer to work as a bulldozer operator far up in the Northern Territory, I was electrified. Grabbing the reins of over 20 tons of heavy metal would be unimaginable in my homecountry without six weeks of training before even being allowed to touch it. But well, there still was one hurdle to be crossed…
Roughly 2700kms of mostly straight roads through the heartland of Oz. And thats not counting my little 500km detour to the famed ayers rock.
To be fair, the approach was the best part. For my taste it was a bit too crowded with all the buses spilling out hordes of tourists. I’ve visited other, more intimate aboriginal sites which only stood behind in terms of magnificency. But well, being in down under for almost a year and not visiting one of the most famous places in the world would be a bit blasphemous, especially when I’m passing by anyway. Hell, I didn’t take a single proper photo. Well, there’s too many of this place anyway, so why bother…
Much more interesting (and completely deserted when I came there) was one of the underground churches of Coober Pedy.
Apart from being pretty much the last stop for cheap fuel before the two-dollar-lunacy around about ayers rock, the town carved out of rock could easily give one the feel of being stranded on an alien planet. Spaceship included. (This one is from ‘Pitch Black’)
Would you look at those entitled pricks?! While my van has been my home for the last six months, the same car obviously merely suffices as shopping cart for other people. Nahh, the elderly couple living in this massive Rig is far from entitled or pricky, they’ve just decided that houses without wheels are just not their type. We ended up having a good chat which mostly consisted of moaning about the various problems we have had with our Delicas.
By the way, this is what happens to almost every car below a certain value when they break down in the outback. Getting them towed from here would simply cost more than just taking off the plates and buying a new car. Can’t say that I haven’t stopped at one or two to see if there weren’t some fuses, interior bulbs or hubcaps to be salvaged.
Flies are a real choking hazard in the outback. It is nearly impossible to make an unfiltered breath in some places, also theres always some of those silly buggers finding interest in your eyes, nose or ears. Luckily I still had some flymesh from my time mounting flyscreens at the Gold Coast, a few stitches later and I had my own special flyhat.
Finally out of the desert, and into the tropes. Luckily I’ve chosen to come here in ‘winter’, in summer I would probably rate the fresh springs around here as lifesaving rather than just refreshing. Unluckily I got sick and was stuck at one of the springs before I was finally able to continue the last stretch to my new job. Winter also means dry season up here. Which in turn means bush fires all over the place. Which becomes even more menacing when your new employer tells you the harrowing story of how they’ve lost two bulldozers in one bushfire due to an unfortunate combination of bad luck and bad judgement of the operators. And now they want ME to do it better? That backpacker dude who has exactly zero experience with them?
But why should I ask myself those silly questions if I can let myself get distracted by low flying helicopters and cuddly calves?
But lets get to the Dozer, finally. The plan is to clear 400-800ha of woods for planting hay. First, two Bulldozers with a heavy chain strained between them knock over the trees in the designated area, afterwards the area gets “raked” clear of fallen trees and debris.
What you see here is an oversized shovel with fins on the bottom, a so called stickrake. ‘Stick’ may not be the right term for the fully grown trees I’m pushing around.
It gets a bit dusty around here…
Whenever I encounter roots or stumps, this bad boy here comes into play. It’s called a ‘ripper’. No diminutives this time, and no fooling around either with this one. Just ram it into the earth and rip the stump right out.
For steering there’s two levers, pulling them halfway engages the clutch for the respective side, pulling them all the way engages the brake too. Modern tracked vehicles change gear ratios to not simply lose half their traction, but this 40 year old machine is a bit more… rudimentary. If I’m pushing a heavy load and would get stuck if I decoupled one of the tracks, the solution is to slightly angle the rake into the ground on one side while the other end loses ground contact, like steering a sled with your feet. Ridiculous, isn’t it? And my boss even approved it!
I’m working 37kms away from the farmstead, so I’m usually not even touching the ground for lunchbreak. Rather soak in some sun on my self-proclaimed rooftop terrace than dealing with ticks and snakes down on the ground.
Speaking of snakes: They seem to be the only ones not fleeing from the rumble of my yellow iron throne. Got a lot of bad karma gathering up I guess…
Because at one moment I’m helping a fellow backpacker solving the most infuriating puzzle in the world (namely assembling seeding machines which sat around long enough to sink into the ground),…
…and suddenly I’m 250kms north in Hospital. Well, not that suddenly, inbetween were three agonizingly long hours of trying not to panic, spelling my name many, many times and “flirting” with cute paramedics. Well, I guess I should elaborate more on this. Feel free to skip this paragraph if you’re not exactly into an overlength accord of things sprinkled with bits of analysis what I have done right and where I fucked up. But lets start in the beginning. The most infuriating puzzle in the world.
I was walking through the tool shed trying to find some bolts, walked by a feed pallet, suddenly a black scheme shot out of the packaging and I felt something tapping the side of my stomach like a gentle tap with an open hand. I jumped away and saw the dark body of the snake gliding away under the pallet from a safe distance. I didn’t think I had been bitten at that moment, but just to make sure I pulled my shirt up and checked for any bite marks. Nothing. Phew. I was probably lucky that the snake was falling while trying to strike me, or so I thought. My heart was still racing when I walked back to the station to warn my coworkes of the agressive snake in the toolshed. (Mistake No. 1: Always make sure that you can describe or identify the snake) While I was walking back, I pulled up my shirt a second time and noticed a small hole in my shirt offset from where I had felt the impact to the side in the kidney region. I checked the underlaying skin and see: Three tiny little red dots. I fought to get my racing heart under control and walked back to the house while shouting to my coworker (Mistake No.2: As soon as you’re out of danger, lay down and don’t move. Get your heart rate down. At least I got the last part right. Sort of. But better lay for hours and wait to be found than to walk fifty metres). Back at the house I was confronted with our panicking cook and my coworker who didn’t really have a clue either, but at least he was staying calm, sat me down on a chair and got me a glass of water (Mistake No. 3: Sitting down is a good idea, but not as good as laying down and not moving a muscle. Also, in case of an impeding operation it is best not to eat or drink anything, especially if the affected area is the stomach). Boss and wife were in town that day, no one had a glimpse of a clue on what to do. And now our beloved cook was asking me on what to do. Funny. I’m very occupied with possibly falling dead on the floor the next few minutes and trying to calm myself to save myself from the prior, could you guys handle the rest? No? No. Apparently, there’s two kinds of people in an emergency: Those who panic and run around like headless chicken and those who fight down their emotions and try to work on a solution. At that moment I had two prime examples for both in front of me: Our aussie cook who even had to be instructed to call triple zero and my french coworker who quickly got me a chair and would probably have taken the reins in this situation if he wasn’t hindered by the language barrier. So it was me who ended up with the telephone and trying to stay calm while the emergency call center bloke insisted on getting my personal data (for my death certificate, or what?) before starting to give me hints on what to look out for in case of a venomonous bite. Looking back I was in an interesting state of mind at the time: Slightly annoyed by the tedious and bureaucratic call I was taking but at the same time trying to find peace with the thought of kicking the bucket the next few minutes. My name and the name of the station was spelled out a few more times, after the emergency team couldn’t find our airstrip on their maps it was decided that my coworker would take me with his car to meet an ambulance halfway to the town. At that time the sun was setting already and I was quite sure that if I died, I would have done so an hour ago, so I grew more and more embarassed by the thought that the only ambulance in town was being blocked by me for a three hour round trip. But that embarassment was soon replaced by an interesting conversation with the paramedics about apnoe diving and the conscious slowing of the heart rate to conserve air and – you guessed it – spelling my name a few more times just for the fun of it. When we finally arrived it was ten o’clock in the night, the last time I had eaten something was sometime around noon and I was starving. When trying to get out of the ambulance my driver stopped me in my tracks to present my next vehicle to me: the wheelchair. Remember: As few movements as possible. For the next three hours I was laying in ER and felt mighty ridiculous with my three tiny red dots while a woman a few curtains next to me was giving birth (congrats, it’s a boy!), a guy had lost three fingers while trying to close the tailgate of a cattle trailer and another bloke got his hip shattered when a bull crushed him between a gate and a wall. In in the middle there I was, kind of wanting to ask for something to eat but not willing to disturb the nurses when there was so much grief and pain around me. When one nurse finally checked on me I was flooded with sandwiches and yogurts all with their expiry date on today, I didn’t mind at all. In fact I was a bit glad that I had finally found my purpose in the ER as a living leftovers bin. After a sleepless night of hourly checkups I was finally left into a light sleep, being confronted with my last mistake: I may have had all my paperwork with me, but a toothbrush and a fresh pair of clothes would have gone a long way, too. When I was finally released 24 hours after the bite, I only had the greasy and dusty clothes I had been wearing for work, my absolutely hideous flymesh hat and a clear plastic bag filled with paperwork, my wallet and a towel one of the nurses gave me. So I walked out into the warm afternoon sun and down the road in direction of the town centre. Brown fields on the left, a deserted cemetery to the right, I was feeling like a lone stranger in a western movie. A few cars were passing by, but no one stopped for the greasy thumb I held out. To be honest, I wouldn’t have stopped for myself either. That way I spent a very uneasy night in a hostel until my coworkers picked me up on their shopping trip on sunday.
Coming back to the farm and inspecting the place where I had been bitten, I found this scene: A big python trying to eat a dead raven. Well, if the same snake had attacked me, I haven’t been in real danger as pythons are non-venomous. What a mess. Anyway, I’ve got similarily scary animals in store for you.
Enraged bulls. While interesting to watch from the safety of a car, I soon found myself in the middle of a very special hell called ‘cattle yard’, where I learned jumping two-metre-fences in record time. Imagine being limited to roughly ten metres of sight due to dust, panicking cattle to all sides and suddenly a bull decides not to run away from you anymore but to try and give you a little bit of a “love tap”. Safe to say I wasn’t reluctant to climb back onto my dozer where nothing can go wrong as long as I’m not doing stupid shit…
Wasn’t me. Really. And an exploded battery would soon be one of the smaller problems to arise… Soon after, the hydraulics system stopped working, and, well, while its possible to just drag blade and ripper with you as you go, it’s not exactly useful to keep going like that. I tried really hard to blame myself, but in the end it boils down an ancient bulldozer which would only receive the minimum required amount of maintenance. Something is bound to break at some point. The other bulldozer at the farm was knocked out for weeks due to a leaky turbocharger, wich lead to a nice little engine fire. My last week on the farm consisted of keeping myself occupied with odd jobs around the farm and driving out to the dozer from time to time to test new theories the mechanic from the other side of the world had cooked up for us. A bit frustrating…
…but more than worth it if boss takes you there by helicopter.
Less fun part: pulling bogged dead cows out of waterholes. Interesting how morbid our humor got after just two of those “rescues”. Even if the cow survived heatstroke and dehydration for a few days, most of them would usually die shortly after being pulled out. The one that survived nearly impaled my coworker, apparently it didn’t like nearly having it’s neck snapped by our rope. Oh, yeah, and apparently cows resort to cannibalism when they’re living in low-fertility areas. Yummy.
Well, in the end all the waiting was for nothing (except for another week worth of money in my account), my dozer is stuck until a new hydraulics valve box can be found, which means I’m out of work. With a freshly bolstered bank account balance I can afford to take a while off, and I’ll be extremely happy to not eat steak for a few weeks. While my boss here offered to recommend me to a melon farm which is searching for tractor operators for the harvest season, I thankfully declined and decided to just see where I end up next – not having the slightest clue on where to go I’ll probably end up chasing the sunset again.