The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

Way out far away in a distant corner of Siberia a young Australian traveller is lost. He was paddling his kayak down a remote white-water river, attempting a first descent, when he came a cropper, lost all his gear and his mates, and washed up many miles downstream without a clue where he was, wet, cold and freezing. Leaving the river bank behind he staggers into the endless boreal pine forest, covered in snow, expecting to die of hypothermia before too long. To his surprise he hasn’t gone very far before he stumbles upon a small group of felt yurts in a clearing in the forest. There’s thin wisps of smoke trickling out of the chimneys, and, with teeth chattering, knees knocking, bones rattling and mind rocking, he staggers into one of the yurts, crashing through a doorway and landing in a heap on the floor. The people inside jump up in surprise, shout out and swear at the sudden interruption and invasion of their home, then calm down and have a look at the young fella. They’...

We had come. We had seen. And we were entertaining definite views towards conquering. Ahead of us, stretching out to the north, lay the fabled unknown land of Eldorado. Long sweeping deserted beaches, interspersed with headlands jutting out into the mighty Indian Ocean, creating small sheltered bays with points where perfect waves peeled off down that salty line, not a drop of water out of place, clean walls of green glass. A tantalising prospect. And, the clinch, only accessible by foot. No roads, tracks or pathways. Like the mythical Lasseter’s Reef, a gigantic reef of gold-bearing rock, rumoured to be out in the western desert somewhere, between Kintore and Yuendumu. The madman Harold Lasseter famously set out into the wild blue yonder to try to rediscover it after he had allegedly stumbled across it several years earlier, hallucinating, and moving across country wildly erratically. Even more famously he never came back from the journey. It’s a matter of speculation whether...