No-hitter no more

It's the no-hitter of hiking: a walk in the wild with zero human contact. And I had it. I had it. Almost.

I was deep in the bush now, and even here there was a place for tourists with buses and koala keychains. It was place called Undara. Most of the last 100km here was a one-lane road, but there's a 35 dollar buffet dinner at the restaurant on site. Defiant, I made due with what was at their little general store-- Processed ham on chicken-flavored rice crackers. I don't know why they felt the need to make the crackers taste like chicken. And I'm not sure why I tried to cancel it out with ham. Anyway, I told myself that it was what the Aborginals ate, and almost believed.

Surrounded by some of the things I was trying to get away from, I made for a hiking trail nearby. I was in the Gulf Savannah, which meant that all sides of me were dressed with knee-high grass and well-spaced trees that never got taller than twenty feet. The terrain changed as I walked though... from flat and grassy to big red piles of granite rock, stacked high enough to see the tops of the trees. The sky was grey, the wind was whirling intermittently -- and between the gusts there was just me and my silence. This place was the opposite of the rainforests to me -- everything struggled to stay green. The trees looked like old men; grey and twisted, and any green leaves on their branches looked like it was their last gasp of life before falling. The only other life I saw on the trail were a few kangaroos, who checked me out for a while before hopping off and disappearing.

I walked for two hours, stopping occasionally to take it all in, before running into two retired couples from Sydney about 200 yards before the end of the trail. My no-hitter was no more, but I took comfort in the fact that I saw more kangaroos than people, and that these retirees would probably never know the joy of Aboriginal Chicken Crackers.