The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

The fog drops down heavy and fat from the morning sky and settles like a blanket on the grey water of dawn, muffling all sound and squeezing unnecessary noises from the world. Contrary to all expectations there is not a breath of wind to be felt, heard or seen, and the mighty north wind that was meant to be still roaring after eight days straight is now conspicuously absent. In its wake however it has left us the swell that it has spent the last eight days whipping up, as it howled down from the mystic Far North possessed by its own insanity, whizzing, buzzing and whistling like a giant bullroarer, and with all its might pushed walls of water out in front of it. Like a metaphorical bulldozer scooping up bucketfulls of warm surface water, chasing it away in front of it, and making room in the upper layers of the ocean for the cold dark water from the deep down below to come welling up. It brings nutrients to the surface, plankton, algae, micro organisms, and injects life and vital...

For the past seven days I have not been able to see. Something got stuck in my left eye, some sort of dirt-piece, a bit of dust, or a grain of sand, or a smidgin of stray mitochondrial DNA, or, quite likely, a snippet of random toenail. Either way, the upshot of it was that by nighttime seven days ago my eye was bloodhot, swollen, almost squashed shut, and pissing forth liberally with fluid, presumably tear-water. I couldn’t open the eye, looking at any light source bigger than a lit match was excruciating and impossible, and I was in agony. It was like someone stabbing needles in it. So the day after it happened I spent the whole day inside the house, sitting in the dark,   wearing sunnies on my face and a towel over my head to block out the light. I pulled any and all blinds I could find, squeezed my eyes shut and whiled away seven hours straight playing music with my eyes closed. I played the bagpipes, the whistle, the banjo, the mandolin and the guitar, comprehensively pi...

We left Karratha in the north west of WA in the late afternoon, heading down to find wild surf out bush. Clouds of red dust billowed behind us all the way down three hours of dirt road, and slowly drifted past us as we pulled up underneath a scraggly old tree by the side of the road. Surrounded by spinifex and red dirt, the wind-bent and stunted old gum was representative of this part of the country: dry as a bone and wind-blown out, perched hard between the Great Sandy Desert and the crystal blue Indian Ocean. Plants struggle for a toehold on life between the encroaching sand of the desert and the salty, life-killing spray of the ocean. There are places, plenty of them, where the sand carpet of the desert stops right at the edge of the dunes leading down to the beach. Sand into more sand, with a side serving of salt. Just the way we like it. In other places the land rises up and towers precipitously above the water far below. We left our car behind in the care of the gnarly ol...

The sun rose majestically, if watery and shrouded by a thick curtain of vertical rain, and started its slow climb into the sky from behind the grey bulk of Mt Nevis. Halfway down the slopes of the mountain something stirred in the heather. Branches of bushes with purple flowers on them waved erratically to and fro in a large patch of something flat and square looking. There was a minor eruption of bits of flower and twigs, and, amidst generic swearing and grunting noises, a head stuck out from underneath a cover of heather. ‘Hrrrrmmpfff. Heurrgh. Pffrrt.’ The head spat out a mouthful of purple flowers. It landed in the face of a second head, freshly emerged from underneath the cover of vegetation. The second head swore with feeling. ‘Ah, fucking hell, Hamish, watch out!’ The first head, called Hamish, turned towards the second head. It picked a last bit of twig out from between its teeth and spat it out, in the other direction this time. ‘Spffrt. Sorry mate. Didn’...