Overlander: there can only be one

It's all crazy. I was crying when I left Exmouth. The other passengers thankfully, studiously looked away. When we stop at Minilya roadhouse to switch busses at half-past one in the morning the air is cool for the first time in two months. I have never seen the Milky Way so bright. We have a replacement driver, a stand-in. He normally drives a school bus somewhere and the Greyhound is too much for him. His panic is tangible and by the time we reach the Overlander roadhouse he has ruined the gearbox utterly. We wait in pre-dawn light for the replacement from Shark Bay, nursing hot chocolate and bacon butties. Once the sun is up you can't walk outside, not even to look at the captive roos in the pen at the back of the building: the flies swarm upon you in incredible numbers. I'm looking at the map of Australia in the roadhouse. This part of the country is remote enough that the Overlander is actually listed, just like a village or town. They have nothing else to fill the expanse without putting in the petrol stations.

The replacement shows up a few hours later; a minibus chartered from some resort. It's a long ride down to Geraldton and the transfer onto a decent coach. I drift in and out of sleep until we get to Perth and my clearest memory is of a gigantic windfarm, sixty or seventy towers beating in unison against the offshore wind. Slint play 'Nosferatu Man'... "I saw the fortune-teller..."

Jem and Joan - once again - gave me bed and board for a couple of days. We got some mowing done in the orchard - the changes to their block are phenomenal. What was dusty and brown is now green and lush; where the bonfire sat hulking with decay is now a satisfying circle of ash.

The plane was delayed out of Perth but only by enough to kill the transfer time in Singapore. Jem and I had a beer in the lounge. I watched Apocalypto and drank beer. I pull a five millimetre spinifex splinter from the tip of my index finger and drink beer. The sunset, my christ, the sunset. Something small inside me breaks whenever I see these things; a band of red so dark, so deep, impossibly red, blood red, neon red, ferocious red, red forever... red forever, until it fades away and I drink beer. For a while I think I was the only passenger who noticed the lightning. For an hour we flew over, through, around a gigantic thunder storm. I was sitting next to a guy called Joel who plays in a band called the Howling Bells. He took some photos which he promised to email to me. The storm was colossal but silent through the plastic windows, vast strikes that shook the sky with light, the spill of jellyfish cities that crawl up through the cloud, the fug of white cloud that stops in a straight line... nine kilometres high and the cloud simply stops. The moon is a careless hanging crescent, it is spinning, the moon is spinning, the world is turning and I am not changing.

I slept most of the way. My earphones produced nothing but a dull tone from the in-flight movie system so I listened to the first three Mogwai records and slept. In the morning I wolfed down the pre-packaged sausage and scrambled eggs and watched the flightplan unfold for the last two hours. I love those things; watching them is a mix of Risk and Roald Dahl. Kiev - Kilimanjiro - Warsaw. Places I will probably never go to but enjoy all the more for not actually going... Algiers - Addis-Ababa - London.

Yeah, back to London. Back to the air thick with train fumes but it tastes clean to me. Back to the Underground, rude people, rushing people and checking constantly for my wallet. Internet cafes, job-hunting, exhaustion. Cold air, crisp air, not a mini-skirt in sight, bank notes bigger than before and those beautiful goddamn arches in Paddington station.

Roo bars

Time's up. I'm coming home. I leave Exmouth tonight on the twenty-hour Greyhound back to Perth, seats too small and kangaroo bars as thick as your arm. Come 100 kilometres an hour there isn't a roo in the world will bounce away from this collision. I've had enough. The heat, the flies, I can't think straight. I'm desperately aware that I'm off-track - the worst of which is that I still don't know which track is right.

I went climbing with Heiner in Cape Range yesterday; down five or ten kilometres of Shothole Canyon Road, clouds of red dust boiling up behind us. We were like kids in a candy store - the rock is everywhere, the lines glowing on every bluff and every boulder, the cracks, caves, natural bridges, stalatites, tumbled stones, slabs and overhangs. No amount of indoor climbing ever really readies you for the real deal. Most of the rock is rotten, loose but razor-sharp; erosion whittles down the sand and leaves the steel. We found some really good stuff - halfway up the Oh Yeah! crack, where a broken handhold spun me into the spinifex grass... I'm still picking the splinters from my hands. Another, fantastic slab climb of ten metres - the scariest top-out I've ever done at about grade 17, then hanging upside down on the natural window in my scummy sneakers. There is an unbelievable amount of virgin rock in Cape Range. The flies feasting on my blood, sticky and black around my skinned ankle. I also took a pebble to the face when another handhold came loose under the strain and catapulted into my chin... but if you're not bleeding, then you're not climbing. This slogan is going to rank alongside

BOULDERING: BECAUSE WHO NEEDS FINGERTIPS?

when I come to make a fortune selling t-shirts.

So what next? I'm going to fly home in a few days. I'll see Uncle Rich, Banks, Dancing Phil and maybe even that miserable hound Tim in London; then I suppose take the train north to Inverness to see Mum and Dad and the dog and the cats. I should really stop in Oxford, Chester, Stoke, Lancaster, Liverpool, Durham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Abernethy and Aberdeen on the way; so if anyone can work out how, let me know.

I have no plan other than climbing outdoors once a week. I need a job. Any ideas welcomed. That's it. I hope it's raining.

You unruly bastard

Here it is! Information on the unruly white-tailed spider, which is almost certainly the cause of my septic woes. The nurses were actually impressed today when they, too, failed to squeeze out the goo: "Normally something this size pops like Pompeii," says cheerful Lesley.

Schmidt Rock

Drink-driving is a given in Exmouth. The town is small enough for everyone to know just about everyone else, and be invited to their barbeques; but large enough to warrant driving home rather than walking. It makes me nervous. Seatbelts are also largely ignored. The biggest threat is from the kamikaze kangaroos. Dani hit one on Tuesday – it bounced off into the bush, apparently unharmed, leaving $1000 of damage in the bonnet.

Inday has added ‘tiger shark’ to her list of numpty things to go swimming with. Apparently this one was the best part of three metres and thick as the proverbial shithouse. Imagine three Bondi Beach blondes having nothing better to do on an afternoon than swap their coffee break for snorkelling with killer sharks. Can you imagine that? I don’t have to. I was drinking tequila with them last week. “What about swimming with a great white?” says Mel. “Wouldn’t that be loads gnarly?”

A band called Double Entendre came to Exmouth last week. It was the musical event of the Cape Range calendar. They were pretty good, too, in a scraggy dub and roots sort of way. I would give anything to be there when they pull into some of the trucker’s stops as they tour on further to the north: the drummer and guitarists are all barefoot in vests and porkpie hats, and they haven’t shaved since they were seventeen. Guitarist A is a good foot taller than Guitarist B but they are otherwise identical. The double bassist is that girl who breaks her parents’ hearts by going to uni to study social work and coming back a dreadlocked dandelion vegan. There was a lot of alcohol and for the fourth or fifth time since I’ve been in Australia a strange girl stole my glasses.

I’ve been getting really homesick in the last week, and a few unusual days of rain and cloud has cheered me up greatly. I have come to realise that this is a country for holidays or travelling, but for habitation? Ridiculous. I miss the overcast days windy with scudding cloud, frost, snow, scarves, jackets, train journeys with rain-streaked windows and impossibly hot Virgin Rail coffee. Did you ever hear Ruaridh’s theory about Virgin Rail? The irony that a company called Virgin didn’t own a single train that wasn’t totally screwed… But to clarify things: yes, I will be coming home eventually, and no, I will not further besmirch the good name Sylvester with further immigration to the criminal continent, mentioning no names, Jeremy. Apparently in Borneo, the Orang-utans are known as Sylvesters. I think it means ‘man of the woods’ or similar in Greek and I recently found out that the family motto is ‘I do not degenerate’, which is disturbing in its clarity and bizarre in its outlook. Part of the crest is a crow shot through with an arrow.

For a while it was raining heavily this morning, but somewhere on the other side of the house the sun is coming up. Between the sunrise and the rain clouds there is, for barely a minute, a colour of gold and grey that I have never seen before. Gravity, the speed of light… everything is starting to slip away from me here. Maybe I shouldn’t have stayed – endless indecision, constant regret. I woke up at 7am two days ago and began editing. I went in to work for 11am, worked until 2.30, went home and picked up the edit again. I sat at the computer until half-1 in the morning. Fifteen hours of fighting the computer is unusual, but I never thought I’d be that person. I miss my family, I miss my friends, I miss the rain and the cold. I miss football on Saturday afternoons in the pub… even though I remember with lucidity walking around with caution, eyes fixed to the pavement, remind myself to look up once in a while, miserable bus journeys and the same loneliness… and it is late, now, and when I walk out to the car to collect forgotten things the moon writhes in thin cloud, gathering silhouettes in the palm trees that stalk the driveway. The lattice of childhood scars remembered in my tan and I miss my brother. Sunset horses sprinting indigo in the west. Idiot emu no more than prehistoric photo fodder. Flies, flies that flock to you, swarm on your shoulders, buzzbomb your ears. I inhaled one yesterday and yelled in disgust. They drive me crazy – when I walk in the bush between town and our house I am in state of constant cursing misery, flailing my hands over my shoulders and twisting as though this could somehow bring me peace. Misery.

It’s just a bad day. I try to go climbing every day or so at Heiner’s home-built wall. I insist on calling it Schmidt Rock, despite his grimaces. We spent most of an afternoon making new holds from the scraps of wood I found behind Paul’s shed. Circular saw, rotary tool, electric drill, cordless screwdriver, sandpaper, skinned knuckles. Schmidt Rock has gone eco-friendly: this was once a table leg, and now it is a desperate layback; fence posts become slopers, stripped-down drawers are three-finger pockets.

This is all good but there will be no climbing for me for a few days: I have finally fallen victim to some poisonous Australian invertebrate. It was bound to happen eventually, and frankly I’m amazed I had seven months of grace. I am currently sporting a sizeable abscess in my left arm brought on by a bacterial infection of an insect bite: prognosis of lethargy and drowsiness, which is pretty much the same as usual. Rachael sent me out of work yesterday afternoon to wait my turn in Exmouth hospital, two hours of correcting errant crosswords in trashy magazines like Girlfriend and trying not eavesdrop on the man recounting his dilemma to his newly-arrived wife… “So when I took off my underpants in the shower,” he confided in a booming voice, “there was blood everywhere. But that’s not unusual.”

When I finally saw Dr Ted Wai (possible Jedi?) he shook my hand and smiled pleasantly. Then he saw the rash. “Yes,” he said, “yes.”
“Yes?” I replied hopefully.
“Yes, yes.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
"Yes."
Silence. His phone starts to ring. It sounds like ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’. He glares at my arm. He gives me a prescription for some dynamite antibiotics and instructions to scrub the pus out in the shower.

On the way out the man with bleeding underpants is still going strong, though now he sounds a little sad. He has a large moustache. I realise from her look of stunned horror that this woman is not his wife, but an innocent with the simple misfortune to sit down next to him: “It was only when I was towelling myself – down there – that it really started gushing.”

PS. The new glasses have arrived, thanks mum. I'm looking at the world without accumulated diffusion for the first time in a year. It's very bright.