Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Germans love bananas

Hi friends and family (not usually mutually exclusive), Jenni here. Or as they would say in Australia, "Howdy ya'll."

Just writing to share pictures and a few commentaries from a few weekends ago. While David was lamenting, "Why'd it have to be boats?," our friend Martin and I went canoeing up Katherine Gorge for 4 days, 3 nights. Martin is David's boss now and he's the guy who ate his shoe on the backpack trip. Yeah, Martin's a legend, one of those people who gets inordinately hyper from drinking too many (diet) cokes and always has something positive to say about... everything. Despite these obvious personality flaws we had a really good time.

Nietzsche came along too.

The funny thing about being invited to go "canoeing" was that I thought we'd spend the majority of time in the water, paddling the canoe upstream. Silly me. Apparently going canoeing means carrying the canoe across shallow sections of the river, trying to stand up on slippery rocks and not overturn the canoe with all our gear (Thanks, Mom for your sage advice on this one.). I soon gave up and let Martin do the pulling and pushing. Sometimes I helped by pointing out the way he should have gone.

The first day we canoed up to the 6th gorge and camped -- across the river was a croc sunning her-/him-/itself. It was a fresh water croc so no fear of it sneaking up to our site and eating Martin while he slept. The second day we canoed up to the 9th gorge where a massive pile of rocks blocked us from hauling the canoe any further. Undeterred, we moored or anchored our craft (whatever it is you do with a canoe) and climbed into the little explored 10th gorge. This gave us huge bragging rights with other hikers and canoers encountered on the way back.


"How far did you go," they'd ask.

"Oh," (dramatic pause) "to the 10th gorge," we'd respond.

"Ooooh, ahhh....,"




The final night we canoed back and camped at the 5th gorge. Up to this point we'd had the sites to ourselves, but the fifth was quite crowded. The final day we made it back to the start, stopping along the way to photograph Germans eating bananas.


On the way back Martin decided his shirt was sexist and it needed to be burned (see what spending the weekend with me can do to people?). We stopped at the closest bush fire and watched the shirt quickly go up in flames.

All in all it was great fun and I had heaps of bruises and scratches to prove I'd done something adventurous over the weekend. Wish David could have come along. He would have loved the 10th gorge (you know, very few people actually get to the 10th gorge).


Photos ensue...



"This guy's kind of nuts. Maybe I'm glad I'm not going."






"So, you have to be able to lift the canoe this high..."










He really should have gone the other way...















One of the containers we had to keep all our stuff in.














The view of the 9th gorge... From the 10th gorge.

















Pictures of my best side...
















Germans in their native habitat...















Shirt bad, fire good.

2 comments:

David J said...

Ooohh ahh the 10th! Congratulations! You've gone to a very special place and somewhere I'd love to spend much more time. But it it takes a certain amount of grit, determination, a canoe and more time than I can spare to get there.
Thanks for posting this great story, so the rest of us adventure loving freaks can drool. Sorry to see Martin's lovely T-shirt abused like that. One more casualty in the war for equality.

Raúl said...

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