Spot X
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...