The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

  I finished preparing my pack and looked it over. It didn’t appear too bulky. Travelling light, it’s the only way to go, as the old song said, a long time ago. It’s certainly the way I like travelling best. I picked up my water bottle, hefted it in my hand, then put it aside till later: fixing it onto my pack now would make the pack too big and unwieldy, and, especially, too conspicuous. The Number One Rule of Being A Bum is Do Not Attract Attention. So I put it aside till later.    I looked up to the dunes, stretching out black and mysterious in front of me. The track I was going to go down snaked out into the bushes and disappeared beneath the shadows of the overhanging trees.    From behind me came the distant sounds of glasses clinking, voices, laughter, and, especially, music. Live music. Someone singing to the accompaniment of a guitar. Intriguing and attractive. So, on the spur of the moment, I delayed my bush-plans for a bit and wandered off in the direction of the music,

You’d think it was a log floating around out there. Long, brown, a few knobbly bits on one end, and a more pointy bit at the other end.      We’d made the trip through the dunes, through the dry creekbed, around the spinifex and straggly creeping wattle, up the big sandhill and down the big drop. Sand burning hot on our feet, dancing the cockroach-on-a-hot-plate dance of the determined and pigheaded barefooter, who realised too late that there were some conditions that warranted footwear, and, more to the point, that midday sand of a temperature of approximately 1000 degrees was one of those.    At the high tide the surf was no good. But with the arrival of the dry season the winds had shifted to the east, blowing offshore, so we had the rare luxury of waiting for the tide in the middle of the day. Sure enough, with the dropping of the tide the lines of swell rolled up, and there, near the low lying rockshelf at the end of the beach, a perfect wave started breaking. So I stuck my b

Medewi, west Bali. Far from the insane crowds of Kuta and Uluwatu. The village of Medewi is all of 450 m across, as the crow flies, between two coastal rivers, dividing it from the village before and the village after.    The vibe is low-key. Off the congested road that connects Denpasar and east Bali to the west and, eventually, the ferry across to Java, there is just one little narrow street that slopes down to the beach. Along that, two board-hire places, a surf school, and a cafe, ominously called “The Bombora Cafe”. No prizes for guessing where the mob that set it up came from. “Bombora” is an Australian Aboriginal word that refers to a partially submerged rocky reef in the surf, not far from shore. Usually affectionately known as “the bombie”, they are found in their dozens between Eden in the south and Fingal Head in the north of NSW. It’s a home away from home, straightaway.    The beach is a shelf of dark grey-blackish sand that slopes down steeply to a veritable rock gard

Sometimes history can repeat itself, in a bizarre case of convergent evolution. On Friday night my partner Kiana had something to celebrate, so we went and had a few quiet drinks. A few quiet ones led to a few more that were far from quiet, and the next day I paddled out with a vicious hangover. No surprise there.    As it so happened the cyclone swell had come in, finally, and the entire beach was wrapped in walls of water standing up to double-overhead high. A powerful sweep was running north to south, and huge amounts of sand had been skulldragged away into The Big Void, never to be seen again. Everywhere the earth was showing its bare bones poking up from underneath the left-over sand: rocks, ridges, ledges, stones, pebbles, shale everywhere where once the golden sand invited people to lay down and chill out.    I paddled out into the surf and got smashed comprehensively around the brains. Mountains of water stood up in front of me and crashed down on my head. I took a solid pu

Long centuries ago, when no one knew where Australia was except the people who lived in it, hapless European would-be colonising world powers would stumble across it by accident. Tall ships would get blown off course, of course, mostly Portuguese and Dutch trading ships trying to find Indonesia and their arses in the bath tub, and they’d end up here.    The big winds would blow them hell west and crooked, till they landed on the coast, if they were lucky, or on rocks and reefs offshore if they weren’t. Those who managed to land in one piece took one look around, found nothing but sand, rocks and flies up their nose, pushed their boats back into the water as fast as they could, if they didn’t have holes in them, and bailed out again while they were still able to. No gold, no spices, nothing here worth killing and enslaving anyone over. Those who didn’t manage to land in one piece lived to bitterly regret it, but usually not for very long. They left a long trail of abandoned coins, rus

  I turn off the tarmac into the dirt road and push as hard as I can on my mountain bike. The wheels whizz and spin, slid and slide, skip and bounce, until, inevitably, they get stuck in an expanse of lush, thick red sand, with the consistency of talcum powder.    Bulldust.    I swear at length and with feeling, get off and push. I battle through the patch, get on the bike again on the other side, and carry on through the trees, into the bushland. I hide my bike behind a big old fat boab, and start running. It is early morning, the land lies steaming under a tropical sun, and wallabies scatter before me as I run, barefoot through the sand. Black hawks circle overhead, following me from a distance and keeping a moody eye on me, in case I should show the great good grace of rolling over and carking it on the track, and providing them with a nice, juicey, fresh breakfast.    It feels a bit like I might, today. I've left it later than I would have wanted to, and the sun is beatin