Burn-out

Avast, lubbers! I'm back on dry land at Airlie Beach after my first week at sea. I certainly won't stick the full term with Barefoot Cruises, a quick decision made on the back of inside information that at least two of my six weeks were to be spent washing dishes on a motor boat. No issue with the hard work - lord alone knows I've scrubbed my fair share of toilets in the last seven days - but you buy the ticket, take the ride - and I agreed to the sailing. And what sailing we've done has been fantastic. The Coral Trekker is an old Norwegian fishing trawler that has been through a dozen incarnations on an eighty-year journey from the fjords to the reef. She is now kitted out for fourteen passengers and six-day trips around the Whitsundays, a cluster of seventy-four idyllic islands thick with coral sand and crystal seas. Sea eagles snatch at fish and our breakfast in Tongue Bay is interrupted by the gentle old turtles that come to have a look at the boat. Stingrays fizz in the shallows of blinding silica sand at Whitehaven Beach. At the Pinnacles there are white-tipped reef sharks and metre-wide giant clams. Sea worms, brainless transparent tubes punctuated with orange spheres... Groupers and wrasse the size of Graeme Marshall... the snorkelling is good, even without my glasses.

I sleep on the deck, trying to stare out the rabbit in the moon. The mindless satellites, the rock'n'roll shooting stars, Elliot Smith... crash and burn, you poor crazy bastard. My day starts at 6, or earlier if woken by Captain Bob, who dangles an oily rag in my face until I spit into consciousness. Bob is a Whitsunday legend with a thick grey beard down to his navel. He has sailed these islands for thirty years and skippered Coral Trekker for the last nine. He is surly, mean and balding under his sailors cap. He insists that I fold paper towels four times, and unfold each dirty face to gain a possible thirty-six uses from each towel. His wisdom is a fount - "Simon," he growls through his whiskers, "there ain't nothin' worse than a fuckin' jellyfish." Except, I presume, the other things which nothing is worse than, a list that swells every day and to date includes "...a fuckin' shark... a fuckin' saltie... an Irishman on the fuckin' ocean... a warm fuckin' tinny... a hose on the fuckin' pontoon... a fuckin' mouse in the fuckin' drain pipe...". And a 'mouse' is not what you're thinking. He refers to morning and afternoon tea as morning and afternoon "Smoke-o", which is actually totally irrelevant because he smokes foul roll-ups incessantly and reeks of tobacco. The smell is so strong that it has different characteristics be he sailing, sleeping, or indeed smoking. A blunt knife can be "ridden all the way to China" and a good meal would "wake a brown dog". I no longer make any attempt to decipher or even pretend to understand these cryptic asides which he refuses to repeat and on occasion denies ever having said at all. He knows an awful lot about the sea, takes good care of the toilet pumps and seems to find the passengers physically nauseating.

The other deck hand is Spencer, a genial Canadian planning quick escape to university while working under the subterfuge of staying with Barefoot for the next two years. He and I and the ship's cook Amy ready breakfast, heating huge kettles on the gas stove. After a couple of coffees, Spence and me weigh the anchor - all sixty metres of it - swab the deck, scrub the heads (toilets), polish the day's brass, vinegar the varnish and fill the fridges. All this is done around the day's activites, which depend totally on the weather. Snorkelling, or walks on Hook Island - some of the passengers might go scuba-diving. On the good days I get to clamber up in the rigging, unfurling the square sails. There are three yards across the mast - the tallest, the t'gallant, is about thirty-odd metres from the sea. Or rather more pertinently, from the deck: Spencer spent last summer crewing a tallship round the Pacific, and usually waits until we are hard at work in the rigging before telling me the horror story about the girl who slipped, fell, and broke 60% of the bones in her skeleton. I'm well over the fear now. The course and the topsail don't even feel that high anymore, and if we stop for a swim I jump in from the course yard. The square sails are quite pleasing. I like the immediacy of pulling a rope and having something happen at the other end. Coral Trekker is riddled with ropes - after six days I'm only just getting the hang of them all.


The Coral Trekker - we jump in from the first and second yards.


This is me hard at work on the t'gallant. Bob wouldn't let us take a radio up.

The passengers so far have been a mixed bag. We've had squabbling, whining English honeymooners, four German scuba divers who had accidentally booked the wrong boat and spoke no English and a Jehovah's Witness minister who did not laugh at all when he told me that before he was ordained he used to work in Futures and I said it sounded to me like he still did.

Deathly, endless silence...

..check out The Veils 'Advice for your mothers to be': "No man alive has earned the right to save me..."

I think another week here and I'll push on to Byron Bay.

The Greyhound from Noosa to Airlie Beach was pretty grim. The suspension was badly broken and I didn't sleep for more than two hours on the seventeen-hour overnight trip. To put that into perspective, if Ruaridh and I were driving for seventeen hours, we could drive from London to Inverness and back and halfway back again. Assuming, of course, that either of us had the money for petrol. Did you ever pay me back for that? I can't remember. Noosa itself was pretty much what I've come to expect from the Sunshine Coast - amazing beaches, beautiful forest, koalas getting high on the gum leaves, girls sunbathing, mango smoothies, and this same inescapable feeling that I'm on a conveyor belt.

The hostel at Noosa was nothing short of astonishing. There was a guy in my dorm, camper than a row of tents... he insisted on showing everyone in the room individually just how badly he'd burned his arse at the nudist beach. The South Korean couple were horrified and left immediately in shocked silence. The evening entertainment for the two nights I was there was almost beyond belief. For reasons that remain unclear, the bar is a haven for the local hip-hop burnouts who were, at their nadir, breakdancing without irony to 'Eye Of The Tiger'. I couldn't believe my eyes. 'Eight Mile' in the 80s, and the other backpackers stood in a baying circle, cheering for the blood. I felt like I was in 'The Office: Down Under'. The locals were wearing bandanas. They took pity on me and tried to drag me over to their table, but no fear, my friends! I fought them off! I made hissing noises and grabbed at their ankles. They soon let me be with my book and my beer, and glared at me with wounded distrust from across the dancefloor. I left the next morning, and I won't go back.

I read pretty much everywhere - at the bar, on the beach, on the bus... what goes around comes around: in the great karma of the backpacker book exchange, I swapped 'Grapes Of Wrath' (in which I found uncanny parallels between picking fruit in California and working as a camera assistant in London) for 'Ghostwritten' by David Mitchell. The woman in the shop was dismissive. The fool read the first half of 'Cloud Atlas' but gave up without finishing the best book of this century. I raced through 'Ghostwritten' which is superb and swapped it back for 'Bonfire Of The Vanities' which is OK - Wolfe is far better a journalist than a novelist - and swapped it for 'Lullaby' by Chuck Palahniuk which is so-far rather irritating. I think it'll take him a long, long time to write his way out of 'Fight Club'.

"No shirts, no shoes..."

He built his house on sand...

Things have been moving quite swiftly since leaving Airlie Beach. I was browsing in the Worst Book Exchange In The World, uhming and ahing over a massive but dismal selection of 1970s science fiction paperbacks. Most of the books had exclamations in the title - my personal favourites included 'Sea serpents!', 'What a lovely Sunday!' and the underrated classic 'Caution! Flammable!'. After trawling the entire shop I eventually happened upon a tattered copy of 'The Grapes Of Wrath' - which will keep me busy, although it broke my heart to part with 'The Kandy-Koloured Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby'. A poor exchange, but I haven't the space to hump these books around. Baker - the HST letters will soon be slowly enroute to you.

The bookshop notice board had a typically flung-together shower of adverts and memos - always worth a nose - one caught my eye. "Wanted," it said, "volunteers for a square-rigger sailing cruise company." I chased this advert up - starting Saturday, I'll be spending six days at a time for the next six weeks learning 'marlin spike' sailing in the Whitsundays. It's a tough break, I realise, all that sailing and snorkelling in exchange for cooking and muscle - but I think I'll be able to handle it. Funnily enough, the company is one that we filmed for the DVD - Barefoot Cruises - a fact that certainly aided my supplication. The boats are beautiful - I have already filmed on two of the three in their fleet - grand old sailing ships, with a maximum of a dozen punters per trip. The cruises are priced well out of the range of most backpackers, so I'll also get a well-earned break from the gap year/college dropout/sabbatical East Coast 18-30 flip-flop new tattoo cheaper-by-the-pitcher Sydney-or-bust bullshit... of which I've had more than my fair share in the last few days.

I left Airlie Beach on the overnight Greyhound to Hervey Bay - arriving at 9am or so, I checked in and signed up for a three-day-two-night wham-bam tour of Fraser Island. Fraser Island is one of Australia's most popular tourist attractions, but I tried to keep an open mind nonetheless. I was thrown together with a further six backpackers from my hostel and we embarked on our mission the next day... I was 'Grandfather Simon' by lunchtime. Four Swedes, two Swiss and me - the oldest by a good six years, and therefore the only one legally allowed to drive the car - the island can be travelled only by 4-wheel drive. Fraser Island is made entirely of sand, on which evolution has somehow seen fit to develop mangrove swamps, dense rainforest, perched lakes and a multitude of fresh water springs. On sand. I want to be entirely clear on this point. Not mud, or rock, but sand. So much sand that for its 125km length multiplied by 25km width multiplied by however deep the damn' thing is, there is supposedly more sand in this island than the Sahara. Sand, I tells you, and sand again: the main road is the beach, with a speed limit of 80kmph. Craziness abounds - the landrovers and landcruisers roar along Seventy Five Mile Beach at top speeds, fishtailing wildly in previous wheel ruts and turning suddenly between the dunes to access the inside of the island.


Seventy Five Mile Beach - the main road on
Fraser Island. Jordan - your suggestions
on a postcard.

Offshore, the surf is constant and looks incredible - it's a shame that the sea is lethal, shot through with undertows and rife with Tiger Sharks. All the good swimming is to be had inland. Lake Wabby is the most incredible place I have ever seen. The geography of the place is baffling. A half-hour walk through the bush from the beach brings the keen traveller to the lakeside, surrounded on three sides by dense forest and on the fourth by a towering sand dune. If you climb to the top of this dune the contrast is even more spectacular - desert runs five miles inland and bang into the lake. We got lucky - there was an Australian family who lent us their sand boards to surf the dune. Marine ply, curved to fit and plastered in surf wax, 30 metres down and straight into the warm waters. Incredible.


Dune surfing...


Nice Australian girl who lent us the boards...


Yours truly with a perfect splash down that
nearly lost me both my sunglasses and all
sensation below the neck.

We camped on the beach - BBQ on the gas stove, rubbish locked away for fear of dingos. There is much worry about these dingos. Though they number only 200, they are the purest of the species left in the wild, and in recent years their natural hunting techniques have been eroded by a dependence on the detritus from campsites. Chalk another one up to humanity. I think we've 'won', by now. I emailed the editor of the Australian climbing magazine 'Rock' with my worries about the prevalence of spiders while bouldering - she replied that most climbers simply scrubbed them away, which seems a bit queer to me. She wants to print my letter and open a debate - I hope I'm around to see the results. I realise that spiders are hardly endangered - especially in Australia - but it's almost a matter of principle.

Sand makes the camping difficult. You're not supposed to camp on any vegetation - it's all that holds the dunes away from the road. The weather whipped up on the second morning, and there was no shelter in which to cook. I had to throw away formative scrambled eggs because the gas stove wouldn't stay alight. Sam Hesling is probably shaking his head in despair at this, but Sam, you don't understand. There is no shelter, Sam, none at all. I couldn't cook under the car - the tents were no good - coolers are bad windbreaks. It's sand, Sam, sand, and there's nothing you can do about it. Sand.

Anyway... back to Hervey Bay... we kept the deposit on the car, which is good - the two Swiss kids took it for a joyride on the beach last night. Underage, drunk, uninsured, high tide, in the dark: coming to a cinema near you soon. Here tonight and off to Noosa tomorrow before returning north to Airlie Beach and Barefoot Cruises. I think I'll go for a another look at the shop selling trinkets. In the window they have an impressive display of novelty pencil sharpeners, including the Sydney Opera House, which is to be expected, and London Bridge, which is not. Other examples included tractors, skulls, double-decker buses, spinning wheels, the World Trade Centre (1966-200, apparently), a stove, a telephone, a barn, a toilet, a tank, a howitzer, a Stealth Bomber, a lunar landing module, the Pantheon, the Scales of Justice, and - my personal favourite - a golfer, nursing an erection.

Roadkill

Any faint hopes that the demolition gang would start either late or not at all at the weekend were brutally crushed at 6.30am. Fortunately, I was already awake by this time, thanks in most part to my fellow dormers, three lads from Miscellaneous in the Home Counties. I went out for a few beers with two paediatric nurses and some grimly serious gym teacher - we invented life stories for the covers band - returning about 1am I tripped over Suspect no.1 passed out lengthways across the doormat outside our dorm. I tried to wake him - he was having none of it. I left him to his catatonia and moved inside. Suspect no.2 was comatose across his bed, head wedged firmly against the wall. There was an unconscious girl laying crosswise on top of him. Everyone was fully dressed. Suspect no.3 was also in a vegetative state, but - and here's the rub - making the most extraordinary noises I have ever heard in my life. Until now, I thought Calum Carr had the worst snore in the world. I have on occasion been forced through sleeplessness to rise, cross the room barefoot and beat him solidly in the head with a pillow in a vain attempt to make him stop. Suspect no.3 was in a different league of nocturnal noise-making altogether. His snores - I am not exaggerating - noticeably increased in volume over about ten minutes until the point where he woke himself up. With his own snoring. He choked, snorted, raised his head, looked directly me, said something along the lines of "Snargllfush" and crashed back to his pillow. Within a minute, the noise had begun again. It is quiet to start, like the distant approach of a dirt bike from over the hill, but soon reaches incredible volumes before the perpetrator rouses himself again from this horrific slumber. Calum, you have something to learn from this boy.

This performance was repeated several times before I finally fell asleep - and woke me again at 6am. I watched another full cycle in stunned disbelief. The only thing missing was Sir David Attenborough crouched beside this slumbering behomoth, talking in hushed tones about the regurgitative processes involved or the eco-system evolving from his socks. Neither was Suspect no.3 the only irritating animal in the dorm that night - I found myself the victim to the repeated attacks of the common bed bug. The little savages had a field day on my legs, a lamb to the slaughter. How do they survive without backpacker shanks? I was itching to get the hell out of Townsville.

The ferry for Magnetic Island is a sedate affair, and - the frantic, queue-jumping arrival at the terminal aside - the island itself is a very laid-back affair. The kind of place that students with Guevara posters and bad beards or middle-aged housewives heavily into their yoga might refer to as 'chilled'. They are, of course, scum, though their point is clear. I spent two happy days on the beaches here, and tore my fingers open on the granite. There are boulders everywhere - the island is covered, riddled, scattered with bizarre totemic structures that appear man-made but are clearly formed by the accidental tumble of ten thousand years. The climbing was pretty good with nice sandy landings and some hair-rasing top-outs. I found a fair bit categorically impossible, and entered into the state of the hard-done-to boulderer when confronted by the chalky hand-holds of a previous climber who is evidently better than me. I spent a huge amount of time glaring in quiet fury and confusion at handprints two feet higher up the wall than I could manage. Weasels.



The hostel was good and free of vermin, and I spent my nights drinking beer and reading in a quiet bar. Early to rise this morning, and back onto the Greyhound for the five hour trip to Airlie Beach. It wasn't too bad, but I'm getting the first suspicions that I will be ready to kill someone by the time Sydney rolls around the corner. The Greyhound is all very well, but the monotony is becoming oppressive and I have now seen the Jennifer Aniston chick-flick 'Rumour Has It' no fewer than three times.

Everyone on the bus will die, if - by some horrible, unhappy accident - that becomes four times.

We stop in the most bizarre places - garages, black with oil - sugar cane railway stations - hairdressers - public toilets - cinemas. For a short while today we drove a red dirt road that splits the railway from dusty back lots. There are cattle in identical fields, birds of prey wheeling by the roads. A wombat, roadkill on the verge, spread out like a fireside rug. Jennifer Aniston, roadkill on the verge...

Airlie Beach itself is a ten-minute walk from one end to the other. It's a bit like Perranporth, although the weather is a little better. The heat is oppressive. I'm considering a three-day sailing trip round the Whitsundays - I didn't see so much of these islands when we shot through here the first time, sporting a camera and a mindless trigger finger. I've said it before, but it remains true - the Campos effect - digital is a lazy medium and quantity inevitably replaces quality. This is truth. Selah.

...in a rueful manner

Townsville is almost exactly as exotic as it sounds. But who needs an alarm clock when your dorm is directly adjacent to a demolition site? They keep that particular nugget quiet on the fucking brochure, I assure you. Australian weather being what it is, the gang starts the big crane at 6.30am. But hell, why not? I can kill a day in Townsville, surely... please god. Are you there, god? Talk to me, god?

Picture the scene: I'm trying to find the path to climb Castle Hill. Rock boots, chalk and water safely stashed in my day-bag. It's already pushing 30 degrees at half-past ten, and I wander around the suburbs for a happy half-hour before seeing someone to ask the way. He sucks at his teeth in a rueful manner, and I know exactly what is coming next. I've done it myself to hapless tourists in London. The man grins. "Castle Hill, eh? No, no, no. I wouldn't do that without a car, mate, I really wouldn't." No, of course you wouldn't. Silly me. I mean, why would you have a 300m hill bang in the middle of your town with a clearly visible lookout post and no-doubt a plethora of stunning panoramic views of the Sunshine Coast but make it accessible only by a winding 4 mile road? He has a twisted smile. I'm not staying in Townsville much longer. Tomorrow I'm catching the ferry to Magnetic Island where I've booked into a hostel for the weekend. There should be some accessible climbing on the beaches there - I've seen the pictures. It sounds a real haven from the East coast backpacker rendering line... "After you get used to the smell of rendering fat, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it!"

My hostel is cheap and cheerful, full of surly blonde German girls who are difficult to talk to. I stayed in last night - a good change from 'Drink or die' Cairns. Pasta bolognese is rapidly becoming a staple diet. Over here, Woolworths is like Tescos, except the meat racks are one-third packed with diced hearts of various descriptions: stir-fry beef heart. Casserole lamb heart. Cubed pig heart. The troubling thing is that it looks identical in texture to the regular stuff - but costs half as much. I have a grim fascination with these hearts. I keep prodding them through the plastic and getting odd stares from other customers. Fear, fear.

Spiders, skinks and Greyhounds

Cairns is rapidly wearing thin. While sunny, it is full of cheerful and bronzed bodies by the massive communal swimming pool. In rain, the place suddenly resembles nothing so much as Freshers Week in a grim northern town, boom and bust on the back of some obscure industry. Every bar runs nightly wet T-shirt competitions and national flag body-painting... there are drinks deals and much school-disco style dancing to the tune of covers bands. I haven't seen a Pied Piper yet, but I'm sure he's kicking around somewhere, drinking fizzy beer and leering at the girls. I wasn't much keen on Freshers Week the first (two) times I tried it, and the rest of the East Coast is starting to sound fairly similar from the jungle drums that beat along the backpacker trail. I've bought a Greyhound bus pass - $330 for unlimited stops covering the thousands of kilometres between Cairns and Sydney. I'm leaving tomorrow for Townsville and Magnetic Island, on which there is supposed to be some decent bouldering.



Trying not to break my ankles at Trinity Beach. V1? 5b?

I went out to Trinity Beach yesterday and scared myself with some low climbs over ankle-breaking landings. Amazing friction on the rock - I lost a lot of skin, but this is normal. I'm going to sell T-shirts to climbing walls with my new slogan: 'Bouldering. Because who needs fingertips?'


A life of crime is beckoning...

The climbing is right down on the beach, and partly covered at high tide. Quick lunch of bread and cheese with huge grey waves pounding spray against the granite. It was quiet. The rocks were full of tiny striped skinks basking beside smashed bottles. The tiniest dents in the rock are pasted over with minute spiders webs. I was paranoiacally careful to avoid these, partly from the point of ecological preservation, but mostly from Sylvester preservation. I don't care what species they were, I'm convinced virtually everything on this continent is going to have a go at killing me eventually... not least the locals when we retain the Ashes.

I won't be sorry to leave Cairns - there was a small gang of us here at Gilligans, but Resh has flown home, Sarah and Eliza have pushed on to New Zealand and Michael is two days ahead of me on the Greyhound heading south. Gilligans is a backpacker processing machine - whereas the place I've booked in Townsville seems ramshackle, disorganised and a lot more fun.

"How wonderful it is for children!"

This is the first time in two weeks I've had any time at all to write a goddamn' thing - the job is finally done, and good riddance. A typical day meant rising at 6am, a quick breakfast and shooting by 8, then filming throughout the day. We were often still on the go at 10pm. It's a horrible non-stop drib-drab way to film, and I'm exhausted. Still... it's done. The others have taken the kit and will soon be airborne. I shared a taxi from Cairns airport and in about an hour I'm booking into my hostel.

Cairns is hot, stinking hot, and this is just the end of winter. I still shudder thinking about the heat in London mid-July. This does not bode well for January. It all seemed pleasant enough to begin with - when we landed in Sydney International two weeks ago, it was dull-grey and overcast, spitting with rain. I felt quite at home. We sailed through customs, arrived at our hotel, unpacked the kit and the camera was rolling about two hours after we landed. We raced around Sydney far too quickly for me to take it all in, but it seems a fine city and I'm looking forward to returning. While in New South Wales we spent a couple of days in the Hunter Valley vinyards... took a sunset flight over the Blue Mountains but missed the sun... stayed in a wilderness lodge and failed miserably to catch yabbies... and everywhere the talk was of expense accounts, luxury spa treatments, dress codes for dinner... the horror... the horror. I would turn up at cocktail hour in my camo shorts, microphone slung over one shoulder and tripod on the other. The idea of paying through the nose to experience the bush, the wilderness - it was all a lie, a veneer, massively sanitised and utterly sterile. Kangaroos with a second-generation Pavlovian response to feeding time, and cockatoos that try to wrestle the bacon from your plate.

I sound ungrateful. Maybe I am. But it seemed sheer hypocrisy to film beautiful Queensland beaches and advocate swimming to families while standing yards from the sign warning of the recent spate of crocodile sightings. Gushing on about how "Wonderful it is for children!" but failing to mention the emergency bottles of vinegar kept on the beaches to neutralise jellyfish stings. It is a long ride from Cape Tribulation to the hospital, and all the longer when your legs are on fire.

OK, I am ungrateful. "Everything looks perfect from far away"... and things are feeling brighter already. It wasn't all bad. Out of business hours, talking to Australian (and more often foreign) waiters, travellers, drivers, barmaids, rangers: these people have the marrow. They have all the good stuff. The highlight while actually filming was taking the waterproof camera onto a catamaran to shoot a sailing lesson. Those things are fast. I was out on one hull, filming the presenter dangling from the trapeze, shroud in one hand and camera in the other. She hated it, and I remember feeling quite smug. A precious and precocious self-styled princess with a laugh like a chisel... engh-huh-huh. Engh-huh-huh. A ridiculous Aussie ocker accent that would probably have seen her lynched in certain parts of the Northern Territories. Engh-huh-huh.

I'm still not entirely convinced I'm here. It's a bit surreal. Aboriginal man with skate-wear and bicycle, weaving lazy loops and lines and figures-of-eight in a train station car park, hawking phlegm onto the road. Walking alone through Maitland on AFL final day, and the shop shutters close as I pass. Saturday, 3pm, and I feel like Clint Eastwood riding into an oppressed mining town. Crocodiles smiling crocodile smiles in the mangrove swamps. A distraction so the marsh flies can chew on my leg: this is an eco-system evolving. Spiders the size of walnuts. A cassowary chick - there are fewer cassowaries than Giant Pandas. More than 100 species of plant depend on cassowary digestion to germinate. But then the three-course dinners with expensive food I don't recognise and wine I am supposed to agree on. I fell asleep at dinner for the first four nights. And throughout it all, that laugh - engh-huh-huh. Fat tourists with fat ankles and knee socks, bodies like massive poached eggs.

I'll probably feel better in a few days when I've caught up on two weeks of sleep in six-person hostel dorms... Cairns seems good but I don't think I'll stay long. I'm going to head slowly South - hopefully find a ride-share somewhere. I still need to get my license back. I had my wallet stolen by some scheming junkie reprobate about five days before leaving. He picked a fight with me and his pal picked my pocket while I was distracted. Getting out of London felt unbelievably good.

No climbing yet. The rocks that I've seen look fine, but we've usually been going past them at 80 kmph on the way to interview some prick about his restaurant. I'm starting to get some spite back inside me, which is good. I have been sad and tired this year, but I can feel my bile building again. I've filled most of a notebook just since leaving London. I'm already sure I'm not going back to camera assisting. Every day I can put between me and that fawning subservience is a good day.

I'm going for a plate of noodles and a beer. After that, I have absolutely no idea what happens next.