LETTER FROM THE NORTHERN TERRITORY

Day One (Alice Springs)
Arrive in Alice Springs. A squalid, fetid, parched three-horse beast of a town enlivened only by the diesel fumes of passing coach-loads of Germans, and the arid earth. Rent a couple of cycles so we can visit tourist information (twice), the supermarket (once), a dry river trek (twice) and the local motorway. A sign by the river wisely reads "no swimming". (Water only appears there once a year, but three years ago someone managed to drown, attempting to surf. Or so we’re blithely informed.) We eat our midday meal surrounded by garbage and the odd pretense of green and flies, thus unwittingly setting a precedent for the days to come.

Teach Charlotte how to play cribbage in the evening. Have a feeling she may well need the talent soon. Cook a pan-load of beetroot. It takes forever to boil.

Day Two (Ormiston Gorge campsite)
We start our four-wheel drive across the cursed red earth. (Think old school Judge Dredd.) Imagine an ozone hole the size of three Americas drifting somewhere above our heads. Imagine it as the skin starts to peel away from our arms and legs and thighs. We visit more gaps and chasms and dried-up creeks than at a retirement home. A bloke with one leg and a sympathetic girlfriend very ably attempts one of the more difficult hikes, sweat dripping from every pore of his tanned, muscular frame. Standley Chasm is the archaic chasm's name. It puts one in mind of ancient battles lost and fought over gooseberries or some similar ridiculous squandered gains. (As does most of Australia's Red Center: God, within 36 hours we’re aching for John Wayne or Clint Eastwood to come riding out of the West with the sun at their heels and a whole platoon of Indians standing atop the ridges which mark our every turn of the wheel. If we attempt to whistle that spooky Spaghetti Western theme once, we attempt it a hundred times.)

No swimming anywhere, except the odd water hole - which look taken, lock stock and two bleedin' barrels, straight out of a Noah Taylor film like "Flirting". (Is that the fella’s name? The one who looks like a cooler, sexier, younger Nick Cave?) Or maybe it’s taken straight from a PG Wodehouse novel, all the gay young things splashing and larking about like there isn’t a worry in the world. It makes me feel quite teary-eyed, it does, the spectacle of beautiful young people behaving precisely to form, like they must have behaved for thousands of years now. Even if they are all white, not rightfully black...

Ah yeah, Australia's racist past, present, and presumably future - now there's something the guidebooks don't boast about too much.

High tea is taken at Ormiston Gorge: a fancy name for a fancy bit of rock which lights up bright red among the flies at sunset, and thus completely spoils our Ayers Rock (Uluru) experience a few days later. Bastard rock! We traipse down to the water hole to find wallabies, but find a full-grown snake instead... that’s the end of today’s nature excursions for C.

Cribbage is already proving a boon for these sweltering summer nights. Although I wouldn't recommend anyone actually *sleep* in these camper vans...

Day Three (Yulara campsite)
The real outback stretches forever. Believe me.

(Sorry it's only Day Three... some suspense leading up to this pronouncement would’ve been nice. But Alice Springs isn’t bleedin' Seattle or London, y'know. You travel five miles outside it, you're already in the middle of scrubland, all red and green and the occasional dead cow.)

We travel down endless Ks of unfenced scorched track, passing by King's Canyon (as featured in “Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert”)... We stupidly pass it by and don’t look in, because I misread the map. Soon, we’re near the Red Center's best kept secret, Gosse Bluff. We stop a few miles away and survey the land. There’s not a person, nor any habitation or vehicle or sign of human existence to be seen anywhere, just mile upon mile of rolling green hill. In the distance is a giant stone monolith, seemingly all one piece, bigger than Ayers Rock. (Yes, people do confuse the two.) It looks exactly like I always imagined the fabled Cair Pavarel in the Narnia book series to be like... sorry about the mystical, child-like similes, but wilderness as sheer and starkly beautiful as Australia’s does something to even the most city-bred of men. The rest of the day is spent in a mad rush to make up the remaining miles between sunset and our destination.

Mount Connor, too, does something strange to a relapsed poet.

Day Four (Erldunda campsite)
Want to know what hell is?

Then try taking the Valley of the Winds walk through the Olgas (three-hour return) in 39 degrees Celcius heat, with no map and only a thousand buzzing flies and the occasional idiot Dutch walker for company. At midday. (Yeah, we misjudged something.) Odd then, that when we reach the lookout point and gaze down into the valley below, something very nearly akin to euphoria swells my breast, and refuses to allow me – or a suffering Charlotte - to turn back.

We’re kept awake in the night by the aggressive conversational cries of Aborigines burning plastic for fuel in a field next to us. Kangaroos and emus run wild. (Earlier, a roadside stop had taken on the surreal aspects of a David Lynch movie – one-house towns, and haggard white bar owners, surrounded by folks of another color, informing us that “no, there’s no room tonight”. Believe me, I was glad.)

Day Five
We get lost.

Day Six (overnight coach to Darwin, Elkes backpackers)
I'm unaccountably angry.

I’ve spent too many hours riding on bad Greyhound buses. Don't believe the hype about coach rides having entered the late 20th Century. Greyhound buses boast leg space to rival Northwest Airlines in their consideration of customer needs and an air conditioning system which thoughtfully helps the casual traveler understand quite what his fellow casual traveler had for breakfast, care of a link-up which seems to emanate directly from the back row toilet. All the places we stop at on the 19 hour trip from Alice Springs to Darwin seem to have two white hard-boiled Aussie owners, thousands of gratuitously sexist postcards (eg, Confucius say: There no such thing as Rape. Woman with skirt up run faster than man with pants down) and an equal number of dispossessed Aboriginal natives, all running riot in the dirt outside. They all smile and wave cheerily, like they haven't been duped out of their rightful heritage by a British law that treated them on the same level as animals. I just groan, and wish that maybe a scorpion really would rise up and bite my white boy ankle, so I have something to really complain about - not just a dry, hacking cough that threatens to keep everyone traveling alongside us awake.

Drink a bottle of cough medicine and a few shots of whiskey, and unaccountably manage to fall asleep. Fading dreams see me caught in a tropical storm, washing the sweat and grime away from my folds of fat in a Darwin backpackers motel room. If only I wasn't so damn prescient sometimes! Music here is atonal, atypical Aussie Top 40 fare - that is, Britcrap diluted several degrees and proudly proclaimed original because someone in this giant, sprawling, lovably unkempt continent might have sung a line or two on it.

We venture out to try to see a film. Realize that I’ve seen every film on general release three times already – except perhaps Travolta's “The General’s Daughter”, and hit the pub and Internet café instead. This, I can't deny, is a sad indication of something. Later we eat rolls and play cribbage, doubtless with a certain frivolity. From now on, only sodden rain-filled driving tracks beckon.

Day Seven (Rum Jungle Inn, Batchelor)
Er... the heat must have addled my brain. When I say all those nasty things about Alice Springs, I am of course referring to Kathleen (see Day Five, or thereabouts) on the coach journey up to Darwin. Oops. The heat HAS addled my brain. The town isn’t called Kathleen, it's Katherine. Sorry to any Kathleens, real or imagined, for any slight, real or imagined.

Today we see magnetic termite mounds and any number of thriving waterfalls on our drive through Litchfield National Park. Not for the last time, we draw the line at camping. (In this season, and with these mosquitoes? You’re joking!) Instead, we find the rather nice – if sodden – Rum Jungle Inn. It’s like sheer luxury, man, that I haven’t experienced since that Four Seasons sojourn with Tricky in NYC back in ’96 with my fingernails painted purple and my head pounding like a thousand jackhammers, and the “bed goes up, bed goes down”… er, whatever. There’s a painted croc at the bottom of the pool. The following day, we discover we’re sleeping almost directly above an abandoned uranium mine. Visions of Bart Simpson flash through my head. (Incidentally, here’s the divide between Australia and New Zealand in one easy sound-bite. Australia, I keep thinking of “The Simpsons”. NZ, I think of the far more gentle but no less funny Calvin & Hobbes. If you wanna throw America and “South Park” into this equation, be my guest.)

In the bar, I work out the odds on Keno (Australia’s National Lottery) and resolve never to gamble again. Hem.

Author’s Note: the following Q/As are all excerpts from an Internet Questionnaire filled in at the time.

Day Eight (Cooinda Motor Camp)
Visit a Mango distillery, and feel obliged to buy some wine. Nearly pass out from the afternoon heat, having tasted all the brews. Drive onto Cooinda where I manage to cook gnocchi and sauce on a BBQ hot plate (much harder than it sounds). It rains all night. Not for the first time, we feel like we’ve been placed on this earth merely to end up as cheap bit-part actors in the sequel to “The Lost World”.

ONE PILLOW OR TWO: Two, wherever possible. Although weeks of backpacking through hot climates has reduced that number to one. Strangely, it seems that the hotter it gets, the more pillows I need to shed.

Day Nine (Annaburroo Billabong)
The cabin we stay in at Cooinda is far too expensive: I exact my revenge by cramming my (unfeasibly large) trouser pockets full with fun-size cereal packs and jam and butter. (The last two items in packs, obviously.) Take a boat cruise through the Yellow Waters in Kakadu National Park with a load of sweating Germans and flies. Every time the boat stops – to view the crocs, eagles, hawks, geese, ducks, spiders, kingfishers, lilies and snake-birds – the flies land and terrorize the assembled. Visit the air-conditioned Aboriginal Cultural Center, where C writes up her diary instead of looking at the educational exhibits.

In the evening, we stay in a bark hut with mosquito nets for walls and a corrugated iron roof.

WHAT DO YOU DRINK: Right now, too much water. Or should that be not enough? The problem of traveling the Northern Territory is that you never know when to sweat and when to swoon. Water is cheap, if not readily available. How Aussies drink such copious amounts of beer in this temperature is beyond me. And spirits... perish the thought. We bought a nice bottle of mango wine the other day, and consumed it while surrounded by mosquito nets doubling as walls and millions of midges, flies and yes, mosquitoes. It was fine, doubtless improved by the elements of cork floating around in the alcohol, there because we had no access to a corkscrew. I won at cribbage... although I have a feeling Charlotte did too. It was a strange night. The storm rain on the hot tin roof was deafening, and I've never undressed by the glow of a firefly before. Or taken a piss while luminous white lizards glared on from the walls around. Honest. In the morning, I ran scared at the merest sight of a wallaby.

Day 10 (Darwin Quality Inn)
Travel on the “world-famous” Jumping Crocs cruise. (See Day 15.) Return to Darwin. See famous (by association) pianist in concert surrounded by Darwin’s finest all dressed in their glad rags.

FAVORITE TYPES OF MUSIC: Vocal, mainly. Female, mainly. I'm beginning to despise music made with guitars with a real ferocity. Especially music made thus by any band from England. The two finest musical acts I've seen recently were the all-female religious a capella quintet Black Voices (who performed at St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne with such good-natured fervor, they almost made believers of even the most secular) and pianist David Helfgott, who played at the Darwin Entertainment Center, Thursday night. (He's the “gifted” one from the film “Shine”.) No, it wasn't for his fame that I loved him. And it certainly wasn't for his technical expertise. It was for the way he humanized even the most unapproachable of musical exercises. And for his wife’s rather moving introductions. My favorite music? Anything which imparts the humanity of the person making it... which discounts 99% of all commercial/alternative music. Anything that is so intense, it completely fails to impart anything human at all. I like extremes - if I want to be comforted, I'll listen to the music of my youth, like everyone else.

Day 11 (Darwin Quality Inn)
How To Survive Darwin (a town we don’t like).

1) Visit the Territory Wildlife Park. It’s friendly, it has transport between animal exhibits, and you get to see a swordfish taken straight from “Casper The Friendly Ghost”. And it’s close by to the city – just hop onto the highway and you’re there. We didn’t like Darwin, by the way, because it was expensive (even in the pre-monsoon season, another word for “rainy season for tourists too stupid to realize they should be receiving discounts”) and mostly shut. The four-wheel drive tracks, the night markets, the cruises… basically, everything in the guidebook… were all closed. Plus, it was remarkably surly for a town peopled with Australians. Basically, Darwin is like Cairns with all the good bits left out. 2) Bring your VIP Backpackers Card along, and venture down the cinema, for a well-deserved, air-freshened discount. We see “The World Is Not Enough”, the new Bond movie – and know we’re onto a winner as soon as Brosnan starts to slide down the side of the Millennium Dome. Such immaculate prescience! 3) If all else fails, watch “The Sound Of Music” on TV. Although, what with all the ad breaks, it’s going to stretch way beyond bedtime…

Day 12 (Cairns Village Resort)
Rather nice for $55 a double room. Good pinball machine (Diner). Free movies, too! Today, “American History X” (Edward Norton, Edward Barton). Weather: rain.

WHAT IS YOUR BAD TIME OF DAY: Any time I'm reminded of the past. Today, I sat on a bus behind my loved one and was reminded of a missed opportunity on the 351 from Brentwood to Chelmsford with a girl from the Ursuline, which haunted me for years. (I never had sex until I was 23.) It made me incredibly, inalienably, unalterably sad. Even though my loved one is a 1,000 times more beautiful. I cannot reclaim the missed opportunities in my past... and my whole life up until the age of 21(-ish) was one missed opportunity.

Day 13 (Cairns Village Resort)
Movies: “A League Of Their Own” (Madonna, Tom Hanks) and “Rushmore” (Bill Murray, with an awesome 60s soundtrack). All right, so I’ve seen both already. They’re still free. Weather: rain.

Days 14-15 (Great Barrier Reef, Cairns Village Resort)
Two days on a yacht, sailing out to the Great Barrier Reef, past Green Island. Cruise almost canceled because of gale-force winds reaching over 30 knots. Snorkel, sunbathe, throw up.

STRANGEST PLACE STAYED IN RECENTLY: That depends. A house with mosquito nets for walls is out of my experience - but then, so is below decks on a yacht built to take 15, the sound of water slopping across the stern a constant reminder of how close we are to the deep blue sea. The following day I jump in, flippers first, despite being unable to swim more than two yards. The call of the coral is strong in Australia.

STRANGEST TRIP TAKEN RECENTLY: See above. If by trip, you mean drugs then the after-effects of Kwell, a fearsome anti-sea sickness pill, when taken in conjunction with alcohol, are extremely disorientating. The floor doesn't cease rocking beneath your feet on dry land (even now), you can feel every molecule in your body pulsating with engorged blood. Pupils dilate, it's impossible to focus. I'd recommend them to almost anyone. If you're talking physically, then the Jumping Crocs cruise near Darwin is pretty awesome - crocs jumping straight out the water, separated only by a glass partition from you, reaching for the meat on tenterhooks. The dry announcer kept reminding us of the damage crocodiles could do to human flesh if they so desired, and how training them to leap for meat wasn't bad, Not At All. (He spoke with a very stilted voice.) Not for the first time, traveling through the wet lands, I was reminded of David Lynch.

Day 16-18 (Cairns Village Resort)
These three days were a blur of heat-soaked, rain-drenched visions.

1) Feeling like a Cub Scout at the Flying Doctor’s Visitor Center, with all the exhibits laid out in the museum like it was an entry into Seattle’s Museum of Modern Art. I sat in the cockpit of the plane, and thought of my mother preaching to all her wide-eyed kids about the Great Outback. The film of the pilots crackled and fizzed wonderfully. Pictures of Her Majesty graced the walls. I bought a book and posted it through to England. What an excellent place.

2) Wandering through the sumptuous Botanical Gardens, the same day. We ran for cover from the mosquitoes after only minutes. A picnic seems like a great idea in such surroundings, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone actually try eating there.

3) Taking a Brian Belcher River Cruise at Daintree. What a great name! What a cool, laid-back guy! What a miserly collection of baby crocodiles!

4) Discussing a rather tasty job offer from the UK over a coffee, near the Shopping Center. I haven’t mentioned Cairns’ tidy sum of shops yet, but yes we appreciated them. Especially the covered ones. The job offer involves the Internet and… wait! I shall say no more. After a brief, fierce flurry over which film we wanted to see (“The Fight Club” or “Toy Story 2”), my choice won. (I sulk louder.) So it was over to Woody and Buzz Lightyear to round out our visit in Cairns, a neat tourist city. (Something I thought I’d never discover.)

The rest? I can’t recall.